Is brand health measurement a waste of media spend, or can it be the best money you ever spent?

Leigh Shaw
Nov 19
7 min read

Brand still matters. Immensely. But brand health - the discipline meant to protect and grow it - hasn’t kept pace with how people make decisions today. 

Too many businesses are still using models built for short-cycle FMCG categories, even though most industries now face longer, more complex, multi-stage journeys.

The result? Brand health feels disconnected from business performance, marketing gets sidelined, and the insights meant to drive growth often fall flat.

This piece lays out why Antenna believes that disconnect happens - and how a stage-specific, decision-focused approach can turn brand health into one of the most commercially powerful investments you make.

Our POV: I passionately believe brand health is still fundamental to success in any industry where you want people to choose you and am adamant it should be the best money you have ever spent. And if it isn’t – with all due respect, you are doing it wrong. But you are not alone… it’s time to level-up brand health to reflect the industry and time we live in.

We still love our brands, so why have we fallen out of love with brand health measurement?

Poor brand health, it really has taken a hammering in the past 10 years. The casualty of price wars (“no money for research, got to put it all in promotions”), a superficial understanding of How Brands Grow (‘only awareness matters, the rest is guff’), the meteoric growth of NPS and the novelty of low cost dashboards and always on tracking has pushed baby into a corner and brand health just doesn’t seem as “sexy” as it used to be back in the nineties.

But while “brand health” is twiddling her thumbs in the corner, brand itself is sexier than ever.

Brand names have never been worth more: Interbrand’s 2025 “Best Global Brands” report estimates that the world’s top 10 brands collectively hold over $1.8 trillion (yes trillion, not billions) in brand value – which is an increase in value of 320% since 2000. And that’s brand name, logo and reputation alone – not the products or the factories.
Consumer Trust has never mattered more: A Harris study found that 82% of shoppers want a brand’s values to align with their own and those brand values will impact their likelihood to remain with the brand. 
Brand has an immediate impact on short term cash: Harvard Business Review has published multiple analyses indicating that businesses with a strong brand and high customer satisfaction can charge a notable premium - often cited in the range of 10% to 25%, depending on the industry.

But if you still believe brand matters, then you can’t deny the health of your brand matters. But that doesn’t mean all the hammering the methodology has taken doesn’t have some grounding in reality. And if you are still doing brand health the same way you did 10 years ago, a brand funnel on one page, a set of beautifully calculated drivers on another and the killer insights that “I trust this brand” and “my friends and family recommend it” are what you need to own… then you probably are wasting your money, and not only on the brand health measurement.

After 25 years of running and using brand health agency and client side, across a massive range of industries, I see the same issues coming up over and over again:

a disconnect between business results and brand health results
a disconnect between marketing teams and the rest of the business on the importance of brand
marketing budgets being pillaged in favour of things that “we know grow the business”
the same generic insights or trends coming up every time, making brand health feel more like a tick and flick exercise than strategic insights

If you are also facing these issues… maybe it’s time to level up your brand health. To understand why so many businesses feel this disconnect, it helps to look at the foundations of how brand health was originally built.

The Traditional Trap: Why Most Brand Health Models Miss the Point

Like almost all consumer research methodologies, Brand Health was designed for FMCG. The marketing model is, or was, very clearly mass media, the purchase journey is short, brands are more similar than different, the only touchpoints are typically the advert, the packaging, maybe the website and the product. And the risk, for consumers, is low.

In that environment mental availability + delivering key category needs is really all you need. If you can differentiate on some performance drivers, then maybe you can also charge a premium. After that it’s all down to physical availability, if you are easy to buy you get bought, and if not, well the whole purchase cycle repeats itself in two to six weeks.

But step outside FMCG and we have a much longer and more considered purchase cycle, with multiple stages of consideration, engagement, decision making and then retention. Customers aren’t making one-off quick calls; they’re making a sequence of decisions where they continuously select and deselect brands at multiple points in the journey.

And as customers move through that journey, the drivers that matter shift dramatically. Early on, people are making broad assessments - salience, brand cues and reputation carry real weight because they help shortcut the first round of choices.

But once they progress further, those marketing-led drivers fade almost completely and the decision becomes far more practical: Does this brand meet my needs? Is the experience dependable? Is the value compelling?

Traditional brand health tries to flatten that entire multi-stage journey into a single snapshot - like using one X-ray image to diagnose an entire body. You can see something, but not the thing that actually matters in the moment the decision happens. The traditional brand health studies rely on driver models that consolidate metrics from across the short journey typical of FMCG. By averaging these distinct phases - awareness, consideration, trial and loyalty into a single set of “choice drivers,” they end up overemphasising drivers that appear consistently across the journey, even if they’re not the ones actually moving customers forward at each stage. And in doing so, they completely blur what matters most right now.

Rethinking the Funnel:

The Tune-In / Lock-In™ Framework

To solve these analytical shortcomings, we developed the Tune-In / Lock-In™

framework based on 25 years of running – and more importantly using – brand health studies to grow business across FMCG, retail, construction, finance, telco and healthcare. This model isolates the mechanisms of consumer decision-making across the two critical stages of the customer journey and expands the traditional list of brand drivers to include highly actionable and stage specific drivers:

Tune-In™: The drivers of salience and serious consideration primarily marketing- or reputation-based — guiding businesses on how to better harness traditional media, digital channels, retail and current customers to drive new customers.

Lock-In™: Converting that consideration into purchase and loyalty: primarily customer experience, offering or value based, helping to guide businesses on how to make their offer, or experience, more compelling

By modelling these stages independently and understanding how your brand is perceived by customers at that stage our approach avoids "one-size-fits-all" insights and instead delivers genuinely actionable, empirical findings. This segmentation highlights that the factors prompting a consumer to notice and engage with a brand are demonstrably different to those that drive repeated choice and advocacy.

The end result is a roadmap for how to harness your strengths, and address weaknesses to ensure customers travel through their journey to your brand without friction or diversion.

Empirical Observation:

Across the hundreds of brand health studies we’ve run, we see the same macro trend: only around 12% of the drivers that matter at the Tune-In stage still matter at the Lock-In stage.

Put simply, almost nine out of ten drivers are stage-specific - which is exactly why averaging everything together hides what actually moves customers forward.

Case Study 1:

A major home builder in VIC with a strong reputation but a softening pipeline was struggling to generate enough new leads to hit its business plan. Our analysis helped them recognise and address the gap in new developments to grow new leads and achieve their business goal

Brand Problem: the brand was delivering above average conversion to purchase after a sales call but were struggling to convert awareness into that first call

Model Problem: the traditional brand health models showed all 5 major levers were of close to equal importance and did not identify what the issue was

Tune In/ Lock In: by isolating the different stages of the journey it became clear that really only the marketing drivers mattered at the start of the journey, specifically one driver alone was >40% of the decision. But once consideration was achieved marketing added no further value and the decision became all about CX and Value.

As the brand was particularly weak on the one marketing driver that contributed 40% of consideration, but exceptional on CX, the brand could not book that first sales call often enough but was converting when they happened. By focusing on this driver alone there was potential to grow sales by 50%

Case Study 2:

An aged care provider in Sydney with significant numbers of visitors at open days and excellent feedback from prospective clients was failing to convert these prospective clients into move-ins. Our analysis helped them identify that post-open days the most important people to provide an exceptional client experience to be the families of loved ones, a segment the provider had failed to engage

Brand Problem: the provider had an outstanding reputation, particularly amongst prospective clients. Open Days were well marketed and attended, and feedback afterwards from prospective clients suggested enrolment would be nearly twice what eventuated.

Model Problem: the traditional brand health model suggested continuing to do the same activities again next year, but the business knew “same plan, same results”

Tune In/ Lock In: we isolated the different stages of the journey to focus on what mattered post open day, and we broadened the CX drivers to explore different factors of CX. We learned that whilst prospective clients did have great feedback, their families’ feedback was not as glowing and mattered almost 50% more than the prospective client in making the final decision. The provider pivoted to also understanding and responding to the needs of family members and saw conversion return to expectations

It's time to make brand health work harder for you and your business

When brands isolate the stages of the funnel or journey where the most important decisions are made and understand the specific drivers at that stage it becomes significantly clearer how and when to invest to grow the business - immediately.

Our constant curiosity to directly link customer research with tangible business outcomes has led to a data-led, actionable framework that you can bet your marketing $$ against.

If you are still managing your brand with one-size-fits-all insights, it is time to reconsider. Stage-specific intelligence does not just clarify what matters; it transforms how brands perform and where they win.

Are your brand strategies truly tuned in and locked in, or are you still relying on averages that blur the critical signals for growth?

Connect with Antenna Insights to turn your brand health reports into clear, stage-wise action and unlock your brand's performance across the whole funnel.