The Weight of the Door Handle: Why brand strategy and investment compounds, and how to measure what matters

I’m writing this from the new terminal at Milan Linate, a building that quietly announces Italy has remembered how to do infrastructure. The terrazzo floors have weight. The signage is restrained and confident. Someone has actually thought about the sightlines, the acoustics, the way afternoon light falls across the departure hall. And there, presiding over it all, a massive Armani logo. You know you’re in Italy. You know you’re in Milan. No explanation required, no tagline, no campaign, just the accumulated meaning of consistent choices, rendered in brushed steel above the concourse.

After years of Malpensa’s chaotic sprawl, Linate now feels like a deliberate act of civic pride, the kind of space that makes you want to fly somewhere, not simply endure the process of getting there.

This matters. It matters commercially. A well-designed terminal isn’t just pleasant, it’s a signal that someone is paying attention, that competence exists, that the details have been considered. And yet try explaining this to most finance directors, and you’ll be met with the same question, delivered with the same furrowed brow: “What’s the ROI?”

It’s a fair question. Rebranding costs money. But the framing reveals a particular poverty of imagination, the assumption that if you can’t render something in a spreadsheet, it isn’t real. Trust is real. The relief of not having to think too hard about a decision is real. The feeling you get when you step into a well-designed space, or open packaging that someone has actually considered, or deal with a company that appears to know what it’s doing, this is real, and it has economic consequences.

The trouble is that most of what passes for “brand measurement” measures the wrong things entirely.

The Problem With Loyalty

There’s a persistent myth in marketing that growth comes from making existing customers more loyal. It doesn’t. The research – there’s a lot of it – shows that brands grow primarily by reaching more people. Loyalty is largely a function of size. Bigger brands have slightly more loyal customers because they’re bigger, not the other way around.

This is inconvenient if you’ve built your agency around “deepening customer relationships” or if your measurement framework is based on retention metrics. But inconvenient findings are often the useful ones.

What actually drives growth is something researchers call “mental availability”, how easily your brand comes to mind when someone needs what you sell. Not vague awareness. Specific memory structures are linked to specific buying moments.

When a property developer in Munich needs a branding partner, whose name comes to mind? When someone’s looking for a restaurant to take clients in São Paulo, what comes to mind? When a family office in Singapore is choosing an architect, who do they think of first?

This is where brand investment pays off. Not in “engagement metrics” or “brand love scores” but in being the name that appears, unprompted, when the moment arrives.

What this means in practice:

Before investing in a brand, you need to understand which buying situations matter in your category and which your brand currently owns. This requires research, not assumptions. Commission a study that asks your target market, unprompted, which brands come to mind for specific scenarios: 

“You need to rebrand a hospitality property, who do you think of?” 

“You’re choosing a restaurant for an important client dinner, what names come to mind?” 

Map where you’re strong, where you’re weak, and where competitors have left gaps. This is your mental availability audit. Without it, you’re investing in the dark.

The Thirty-Six Month Problem

Here’s what makes CFOs uncomfortable: brand effects take years to manifest.

Run a campaign, and you’ll see an immediate response, traffic, clicks and enquiries. This is activation. It spikes and it decays. Brand effects are different. They build slowly, compound over time, and create a higher baseline from which everything else works more efficiently.

A business with strong mental availability gets more from every pound of marketing spend. That’s the mechanism. But it takes three to five years to see the full returns. Anyone promising meaningful brand ROI in twelve months either doesn’t understand how this works or is hoping you don’t.

Researchers at the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA), who have analysed more effectiveness data than anyone, found something rather elegant: brands that invest above their market share tend to grow; brands that invest below tend to shrink. For every ten percentage points of excess share of voice, you gain about half a point of market share per year. It’s not a dramatic quarter-to-quarter. But it compounds.

Most businesses ignore this because most businesses are run on quarterly horizons. This is their problem, not yours.

What this means in practice:

Calculate your current share of voice. Add up your marketing investment across all channels, paid, owned, and earned, and compare it to your competitors. If you are spending 5% of the category’s total marketing investment but hold 10% market share, you’re under-investing and should expect to lose share over time. If you’re spending 15% with 10% share, you’re building toward growth. 

This isn’t complicated arithmetic, but almost nobody does it. Once you know your position, you can have an honest conversation about investment levels and realistic timescales. Set expectations accordingly: measurable brand effects at 18 to 36 months, full compounding at 3 to 5 years. Build a measurement calendar that reflects this reality rather than quarterly dashboards that measure the wrong things.

Before Measuring Anything

The mistake most companies make is starting with metrics when they should start with strategy.

Measuring brand ROI without knowing whether you have the right strategy is like obsessing over fuel efficiency while driving in the wrong direction. You can be extremely efficient at going nowhere.

Before discussing measurement, you need clarity on harder questions. Who are you actually for? Not demographics, real segments with meaningfully different needs. What’s your competitive frame? What must you deliver just to be considered credible? And what do you do differently that actually matters?

This is positioning. Get it wrong, and no amount of beautiful identity work will save you. Get it right, and you have something that compounds.

I’m continually struck by how many businesses skip this work. They commission an identity refresh when what they need is a fundamental rethink of who they are for, and what they are offering. The result is a nicer-looking version of the same confusion.

What this means in practice:

Before any brand investment, complete a positioning diagnostic. This requires three pieces of work:

First, competitive frame analysis. List every alternative your customers might consider, not just direct competitors, but adjacent options too. A boutique hotel competes not just with other boutiques but with Airbnb, staying with friends, or not travelling at all. Understand who you’re really up against.

Second, points of parity audit. What must you deliver just to be considered? These are table stakes. For a branding agency, it might be: portfolio of relevant work, professional credentials, and responsive communication. If you’re missing any of these, fix them before investing in differentiation.

Third, points of difference identification. What do you do that competitors don’t, that customers actually value? This is harder than it sounds. Most businesses claim differences that are either not true, not unique, or not valued. Pressure-test your claimed differences through customer research. If customers can’t articulate why you’re different, you’re not.

Only when you can clearly state your competitive frame, your points of parity, and your genuine points of difference should you invest in brand execution. Otherwise, you’re dressing up strategic confusion in nicer clothes.

What’s Worth Tracking

If you have done the strategic work, measurement becomes more straightforward. You are tracking whether the strategy is working, not generating dashboards for their own sake.

Spontaneous awareness is the metric that matters. What percentage of your target market mentions you, unprompted, when asked about your category? Not aided awareness, that’s too easy and tells you nothing useful. Track it over years, not months.

Category entry points tell you where you’re winning. When people think about specific buying situations, “I need a brand agency for a hospitality project”, “I need a restaurant for a celebration”, does your name come up? This requires proper research, not Google Analytics.

Distinctive asset recognition reveals whether your visual and verbal identity is actually registering. Can people identify you from your colours, your typography, your tone of voice, without seeing your name? This takes years to build, which is why changing your brand elements frequently is so destructive.

Penetration is the growth indicator. Are you reaching new people, or just extracting more from existing customers? The former is brand health; the latter is operational efficiency. Both matter, but they’re different things.

Share of voice tells you whether you’re investing enough to grow. If you’re spending below your market share, expect to shrink. If above, expect to grow. It’s not complicated, but it requires honesty about where you actually stand.

What this means in practice:

Build a brand measurement framework with three tiers:

Annual strategic metrics (commission research yearly): Spontaneous awareness among the target market. Category entry point ownership. Distinctive asset recognition. Competitive perception.

Quarterly tracking metrics (monitor internally): Share of voice across channels. New customer acquisition vs. existing customer revenue. Win rates on competitive pitches. Customer acquisition cost trends.

Ongoing operational metrics (track continuously): Referral sources and patterns. Search visibility for category terms. Response times and conversion rates. Brand consistency audits across touchpoints.

The annual metrics tell you if the strategy is working. The quarterly metrics tell you if you are investing appropriately. Operational metrics indicate whether execution is consistent. Most businesses track only the operational level and wonder why they can’t see the bigger picture.

What Gets Measured Badly

Most brand measurements are worse than useless.

Branded search is the classic trap. Agencies love it because it tends to go up after campaigns, and it is easy to track. But a post-campaign spike in branded search is an activation effect, not brand health. Someone saw your campaign; they searched your name. That’s a response, not a memory. Branded search only becomes meaningful when you’re tracking structural levels over multi-year periods.

Loyalty metrics don’t measure what they’re supposed to. Retention, repeat purchase, and net promoter scores are influenced by product quality and pricing as much as by brand. Improve your service, and these metrics improve regardless of brand investment.

The premium pricing myth deserves particular scepticism. Agencies routinely claim that strong brands command 10 to 20% price premiums. The evidence for this is thin. True premiums, where customers pay more for functionally equivalent offerings, are rare.

There is, however, one exception worth noting. In premium categories, luxury, professional services, anything where quality is hard to assess directly, price itself is a signal. Low price doesn’t communicate “good value”; it communicates “something’s wrong.” I’ve watched agencies destroy themselves by competing on price, not realising they were systematically signalling that they weren’t worth hiring.

In these categories, the question isn’t whether the brand enables premium pricing. It’s whether your price is high enough to signal the positioning you’re aiming for.

What this means in practice:

Audit your current measurement framework against this list. For each metric you’re tracking, ask: Does this measure brand health, or operational performance? Is this an activation effect (short-term response) or a brand effect (long-term memory structure)?

If your dashboard is dominated by branded search spikes, social engagement, website traffic, and NPS scores, you’re measuring the wrong things. These tell you whether your recent activity generated a response, not whether you’re building durable mental availability.

Replace vanity metrics with meaningful ones. Stop tracking post-campaign branded search and start tracking year-on-year structural levels. Stop celebrating social engagement and start measuring spontaneous awareness. Stop surveying existing customers about satisfaction and start researching the target market perception.

And if you’re in a premium category, conduct a pricing perception audit. Ask your target market what they’d expect to pay for your service category. If your actual prices are significantly below their expectation, you may be actively undermining your positioning.

The Unmeasurable Things That Matter

What measurement enthusiasts often fail to see is how brands operate in ways we’re  hardly conscious of.

You don’t think “I trust this company more”. You just feel slightly less anxious about the decision. That feeling doesn’t register in surveys because you’re not aware it’s happening. Yet it determines outcomes.

Consider the psychology of hiring decisions. When someone commissions an agency or selects a professional services firm, they’re not just buying an outcome. They’re buying career insurance. If they choose a recognised firm and things go wrong, nobody questions their judgment. If they choose an unknown and things go wrong, their competence is on trial.

This signalling value is economically real. It doesn’t appear in any ROI model.

There is a deeper paradox here. The things that make brands valuable – trust, meaning, the accumulated sense that a company knows what it’s doing – are valuable precisely because they resist easy measurement. The moment you can perfectly quantify something, it’s probably not what’s actually driving decisions.

We measure what’s measurable and then pretend it’s what matters. The clicks are easy to count. The subtle reassurance of dealing with a company that appears to have its act together is not.

What this means in practice:

Accept that your measurement framework will never capture everything. Then design research to surface the immeasurable.

Conduct qualitative depth interviews with recent customers, not satisfaction surveys, but exploratory conversations. Ask: Walk me through how you made this decision. What were you worried about? What made you feel more or less confident? What would have happened if this had gone wrong? Listen for the emotional undercurrents: anxiety, reassurance, risk, cover. These won’t appear in your metrics, but they’re driving decisions.

Interview lost prospects. What did they choose instead, and why? Often the answer isn’t about capability or price; it’s about confidence. They went with someone who felt safer.

Finally, talk to the people who recommended you, or didn’t. Referrals are the ultimate brand metric, yet most businesses don’t systematically understand why they happen. What made someone confident enough to stake their reputation on recommending you?

This research won’t give you a number. It will give you something more valuable. It will give insight into how decisions actually get made, which you can then use to inform strategy.

The Compounding of Small Choices

Walk through any well-run hotel – Aman Tokyo, The Connaught London, Bulgari Hotel Milan – and what strikes you is not any single dramatic gesture but the accumulation of small decisions made correctly.

The weight of the door handle. The temperature of the room when you arrive. The fact that someone has considered the lighting at different times of day. The typography on the room service menu. The quality of the hangers in the closet.

No single element justifies the rate. But the accumulation creates something that does.

Brand works the same way. It’s not the logo. It’s not the website. It’s not the campaign. It’s the accumulation of choices across every touchpoint, and the consistency of intent behind them.

This is why brand effects take years to manifest. You are not building awareness; you are building an accumulated impression. And impressions, like compound interest, take time.

What this means in practice:

Conduct a touchpoint audit. Map every moment where someone encounters your brand, from the first Google search to the final invoice. For each touchpoint, ask: Does this feel considered? Does it reflect our positioning? Does it match the standard of our best work?

Most businesses have a handful of polished touchpoints (the website, the pitch deck) surrounded by neglected ones (the email signature, the invoice template, the hold music, the way the phone is answered). The neglected touchpoints often matter more because they’re unexpected. Anyone can make a website look good. The invoice is where you reveal whether you actually care.

Create a “details register”, a checklist of small choices that compound. What does your voicemail message say? What’s the quality of the paper your contracts are printed on? How quickly do you respond to enquiries, and with what tone? What does your physical space feel like if clients visit? What do your email templates look like?

Then, systematically raise the standard. Not all at once, that’s expensive and overwhelming, but consistently, quarter by quarter. The goal isn’t perfection; it is accumulated evidence that someone is paying attention.

What Makes It Pay Off

Strategy precedes execution: If you don’t know who you are for and what you do differently, no amount of identity work will help.

Reach requires investment: You cannot build mental availability without getting in front of potential buyers. Budget accordingly, and understand this is a multi-year commitment.

Consistency compounds: Your distinctive assets take years to become recognisable. Changing them because someone in the organisation is “bored with the brand” destroys accumulated value.

The whole organisation must commit. Brand is not a marketing department project. It’s a coordination device that aligns behaviour across the entire business. If only marketing believes in the brand, execution will be inconsistent, and returns will be diluted.

Patience is non-negotiable. Brand investment pays off over three to five years. If your planning horizon is shorter than this, you’re not building a brand; you’re running campaigns.

What this means in practice:

Build a brand governance system that protects long-term investment from short-term pressure.

Strategic lock-in: Once positioning is established, commit to it for at least three years. Write this into your planning documents. Resist the temptation to “refresh” positioning when you get bored or when a new marketing director arrives with new ideas.

Asset protection: Document your distinctive assets – visual and verbal – and establish clear guidelines for their use. More importantly, establish what you won’t change. The most valuable brands are often the most boringly consistent.

Investment commitment: Set marketing budgets based on share-of-voice targets, not arbitrary revenue percentages. If you need a 15% share of voice to grow and that requires £X investment, then that’s the budget, not whatever is left after other expenses.

Organisational alignment: Brand isn’t marketing’s job; it’s everyone’s. Run internal sessions that help the whole team understand the positioning and how it should inform their decisions. Give people permission to make choices that align with the brand, even if they aren’t explicitly covered in the guidelines.

Review cadence: Conduct quarterly reviews that look at leading indicators (awareness, share of voice, touchpoint consistency) and annual reviews that assess strategic progress (positioning perception, category entry point ownership). Resist the urge to judge brand investment by monthly sales figures.

The Honest Answer

When the CFO asks, “What’s the ROI on branding?” they’re asking a reasonable question.

But the most honest answer is probably this: we can provide directional evidence, track leading indicators, measure what’s measurable. If you need a spreadsheet to prove that customers choosing you more easily is valuable, the problem is deeper than measurement methodology.

Some things are valuable precisely because they cannot be easily quantified. The feeling of walking into a space where every detail has been considered. The trust built when a company consistently makes smart choices. The relief of not having to research every purchase because you already know who does it well.

These aren’t soft benefits. They’re commercial advantages – just not the kind that fit neatly on a quarterly earnings call.

What this means in practice:

When presenting brand investment to financial stakeholders, don’t oversell precision. Instead, present a layered case:

The evidence base: “Research across thousands of brands shows that investment above market share correlates with growth; investment below correlates with decline. This relationship is consistent across categories and geographies.”

The leading indicators: “We’ll track spontaneous awareness, category entry point ownership, and distinctive asset recognition annually. We’ll monitor share of voice and competitive win rates quarterly. We expect to see meaningful movement in these indicators at 18 to 36 months.”

The commercial outcomes: “At 3 to 5 years, we expect these leading indicators to manifest in commercial performance: improved win rates, reduced acquisition costs, stronger pricing confidence. We’ll track these outcomes against the baseline.”

The honest caveat: “Perfect attribution is impossible. Brand effects compound over the years and overlap with other activities. We can provide directional evidence, not accounting-grade precision. But directional evidence, tracked consistently over time, is sufficient to assess whether investment is working.”

This positions you as rigorous without promising false precision. Most CFOs respect intellectual honesty more than confident bullshit.

The question isn’t whether brand ROI is real. It is. The question is whether you’re willing to invest on the timescales that allow it to compound, with the strategic clarity that makes it likely, and with the intellectual honesty to accept that not everything valuable can be reduced to a metric.

Some things you simply have to see. Airlines with confident signage and well-trained staff tend to achieve better yields. Retailers with considered packaging and thoughtfully designed stores enjoy stronger margins. Professional services firms that look like they know what they’re doing often command higher fees.

The correlation is not coincidental. Brands that invest in getting things right are often the ones that can afford to – and those that can afford to are usually the ones that started investing early.

It compounds.

The author is the co-founder of Spinach, a London-based branding consultancy working with clients across wine, spirits, hospitality, property, and luxury. Previously: too many airports, not enough sleep, an enduring belief that details matter.