Brand measurement is one of those areas in branding that often feels both a little scary and overwhelming.
I’ve watched many people rewrite branding strategies, design cool visual identities, launch brand campaigns, and then rely solely on gut feeling to judge the success of their work.
Why? Most likely because it can feel complicated to choose the right branding metrics, and even harder to measure them consistently over the years. And brand measurement, let’s admit it, isn’t the most creative or fun part of the branding process.
But brand measurement doesn’t have to feel complicated or daunting. With the right approach, it can even become a simple and exciting part of your end-of-year analysis, where you can quickly see which parts of your brand you should protect, adjust, or double down on.
Over the years, I’ve learned to simplify brand measurement into four performance dimensions. Almost every meaningful brand KPI fits into one of them. If you track these four well, you’re already ahead of most brands.
Proven Systems for Business Owners, Marketers, and Agencies
→ Our mini-course helps you audit and refine an existing brand in 15 days, just 15 minutes a day.
→ The Ultimate Brand Building System is your step-by-step blueprint to building and scaling powerful brands from scratch.
Table of Contents
An Introduction to Brand Measurement [Video]
Before we start, if brand measurement is new to you, I invite you to watch this short introductory video. It’s an extract from our brand-building course and serves as an introduction to the final step: measuring and adjusting the brand strategy you’ve built.
It will give you helpful context before we dive into the four brand performance dimensions and explore how to use them in practice.
The Four Brand Performance Dimensions You Should Know
So, what exactly are brand performance dimensions? They are four main pillars under which you can classify most branding metrics (or KPIs). These are:
- Brand awareness (Is your brand known and recognized?)
- Brand image (How is your brand perceived by your audiences? How do they feel about it?)
- Brand preference (Why do people choose your brand over a competitor?)
- Brand loyalty (Are your customers, employees, and partners loyal to your brand?)
Together, these dimensions reflect the four most important aspects of brand market performance to measure.
Each dimension includes a wide range of key performance indicators (KPIs) that can help you assess it. The key is to understand these four dimensions and then select a few KPIs across them, based on your brand’s current context and challenges.
1. Brand awareness: Is your brand known and recognized?
This is the entry point. If people don’t know your brand, nothing else matters. Brand awareness tells you whether your brand is visible and top of mind in your market. By measuring it, you can get a better sense of how much effort should be put into building brand visibility.
There are many KPIs that can help measure brand awareness. Here are some examples:
- Top-of-mind awareness: which brands people mention first in your category
- Brand recall: whether people can name your brand without prompts
- Brand recognition: whether people recognize your name, logo, or symbols
Other brand awareness KPIs include brand familiarity, brand reach, and brand mentions.
2. Brand image: How is your brand perceived by your audiences? How do they feel about the brand?
Once people know you, the next question is what they think and feel about you.
Brand image is how an audience perceives and interprets signals coming from a brand across different touchpoints. It captures the actual perceptions, emotions, and meanings that your audience associates with your brand.
Typical KPIs for brand image include:
- Brand associations: for example, innovative, trustworthy, premium
- Brand sentiment: positive, neutral, or negative feelings toward the brand
Other brand image KPIs include perceived quality and overall brand perception.
3. Brand preference: Why do people choose your brand over a competitor?
Brand preference is technically where branding meets behavior. It shows whether your brand actually influences choice when alternatives are available.
Concrete KPIs in this dimension include:
- Brand consideration: whether your brand makes the shortlist
- Brand choice (sales): whether people actually purchase products or services from your brand
- Brand relevance: whether your brand meets the needs of its customers and other stakeholders
Other brand image KPIs include first-choice brand, willingness to pay a premium, and switching intent.
4. Brand loyalty: Are your customers, employees, and partners loyal to your brand?
Brand loyalty reflects the long-term health of the brand. Here, the focus is on building long-term relationships with the brand’s customers, employees, and even partners. Are they happy with what the brand has to offer? Will they keep your brand as a first choice in the long term?
Some ways to measure brand loyalty include:
- Brand attachment: the emotional connection people have with a brand
- Brand trust: the extent to which people feel the brand will deliver what they need
- Brand advocacy: when people recommend and promote the brand without an incentive
Other ways to measure brand loyalty include the likelihood to recommend the brand, repurchase intention, and employee engagement.
A Note On Brand Impact
In recent years, brand measurement has expanded beyond market performance alone. Today, many brands also measure their environmental and social impact.
While this framework focuses on how brands perform in their markets, we encourage brands to track a small set of impact metrics alongside the four performance dimensions. These may include more traditional CSR indicators such as carbon footprint, responsible sourcing, diversity metrics, or governance standards, depending on the organization’s priorities.
Brand impact does not replace the four dimensions, but it highly strengthens them. They work hand in hand. Sustainability and ethical practices shape brand image, influence brand preference, reinforce brand loyalty, and can even increase brand awareness when initiatives gain visibility.
In short, measure how your brand performs and also measure how it contributes to a better world. Over time, these two priorities become a powerful source of credibility and brand resilience.
What to Do After Understanding the Four Brand Dimensions
These four dimensions form the foundation for what should be measured in any brand strategy. Understanding them is the first step in the brand measurement process. From there, the steps are:
- Select KPIs across these dimensions.
- Choose a measurement method for each KPI.
- Establish a baseline for each KPI.
- Measure the KPIs consistently over time.
A common mistake many people make is tracking too many KPIs without a clear structure. In practice, a small, focused set (usually four to six KPIs mapped across the dimensions) is more than enough to guide strategic decisions. And if you later make a major change to your brand strategy, you can add a few specific KPIs to measure its impact.
If you’re looking for a KPI list with recommended measurement methods, and practical guidance on setting up a measurement system for your brand, we cover this step by step in the last chapter of our branding course, The Ultimate Brand Building System.
But the foundation is always the same: start with the four dimensions, choose a manageable number of KPIs within them, and measure them consistently over the years, with measurement methods tailored to your brand’s means and capabilities.
