Brand Measurement

What It Is

The set of instruments for valuing brand and demand-creation — work that is invisible to last-click because it operates in the dark funnel. Since marketing-attribution structurally under-credits it, you measure two other ways:

  • Share of search (Les Binet): your brand's share of category search volume. Binet's finding: Excess Share of Search (ESOS) correlates with, and leads, changes in market share — a cheap, public, leading indicator of brand strength.
  • Incrementality / brand lift: the causal answer. Brand's effect is invisible to last-click but visible to a holdout — geo-experiments and incrementality-testing put a real iROAS on brand and creation spend.

The Synthesis

The thing attribution can't see, incrementality can. This is what makes funding demand creation defensible: you don't get a clean last-click number (wrong instrument), but you get a leading indicator (share of search) and a causal one (incrementality), plus crude self-reported attribution where tracking fails.

How It Applies to Marketing Factory

Brand measurement is what lets the factory fund demand-creation rationally rather than on faith — track share of search continuously as an early signal, and run periodic incrementality-testing to value brand spend against capture spend on the same causal scale. Share-of-search tracking is fully agent-ownable; benchmark its movement with a marketing-benchmark-prior. It resolves the KB's tension between "fund the unmeasurable brand" and "measure everything."

Referenced from: demand-creation-and-brand