The Challenge
A UK challenger bank that had run a quarterly brand tracker for several years, lacked a clear commercial link between brand scores and business outcomes, leaving the financial value of shifting brand perceptions completely unquantified.
Although the bank’s marketing mix model was mature and stable with a slowly growing baseline and steady short-term media effects, it could not isolate which specific brand attributes drove that baseline expansion.
The brief was to establish which of the tracked brand measures genuinely contributed to long term growth, allowing the marketing team to refocus brand-led communications around the metrics that delivered real economic value.
The Solution
To evaluate the bank’s brand equity, the analysis linked historical advertising and evolving brand signals directly to the stable MMM baseline, isolating the drivers of long-term business growth.
Trust and ease of managing money carried most of the measurable influence, both by strengthening the base directly and by lifting consideration among prospective customers. Other dimensions, including advertising recall and perceived innovation, showed no detectable contribution over the period measured.
These findings allowed the marketing team to prioritise specific brand attributes to prioritise in their communications, backed by quantified commercial impact.
The Impact
Brand-led communications were redirected towards the signals driving long-term value, replacing creative guidelines that had previously lacked a specific focus. The following year’s brand campaign was planned, briefed, and evaluated against trust and ease of managing money, transforming the tracker into a reliable leading indicator of commercial performance.
Expressing the long-term brand effect as a multiplier on short-term ROAS changed budget deployment, giving brand media a quantified position in planning alongside performance channels rather than a line item justified on faith.
This evaluation framework now refreshes annually alongside the MMM to ensure messaging priorities remain aligned with evolving market dynamics.
Key Takeaways
- The Commercial Link – Connecting tracked brand attributes to the MMM baseline gave each perception score a measurable relationship with business outcomes.
- Attributes That Drive the Base - Trust and ease of managing money proved to be the core commercial workhorses, while advertising recall and perceived innovation moved without influencing the baseline.
- Refocused Communications – Creative briefs and campaign evaluations now centre on the specific signals proven to build long-term value.
- Long-Term Effects in Planning – Translating long-term effects into a ROAS multiplier gave brand budgets an objective, data-driven seat in media planning.
Tools and Techniques
- Brand equity evaluation
- Structural Equation Modelling – analysing directional paths on the isolated MMM baseline
- Granger causality testing – validating predictive lead-lag relationship between brand metrics and sales baselines
- Data Integration – combining disparate brand tracker data and historical advertising spend timelines
- R – data handling and time-series statistical modelling
- Tableau - reporting
Related services
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