Michael Kaminsky explains why brand awareness is nearly impossible to measure with current tools like Geolift, which work better for short-term sales. Companies assume awareness drives future sales, but can't prove the link. Fast-growing firms especially struggle because they lack the stable period needed to connect brand metrics to actual revenue.
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I at least believe that there's like a certain class of marketing impacts or marketing effects that are very difficult or probably impossible to measure with the tools that we have available to us, especially something like Geolift, right? And those sorts of effects are often very long-term, potentially brand awareness type effects. How do you think about either measuring those or thinking about them or like building that into the marketing strategy? Where you want to be rigorous, but also sort of have to acknowledge that there's some things that are very difficult or impossible to measure, at least not very precisely.
Yeah, I don't think it's a hot take to say that brand impact and brand awareness are just difficult metrics to measure and to tie back to transactional metrics. I think to some degree that is a strategic decision. When we say we want to drive awareness, we have a belief that the awareness is going to pay back in a way that's not really measurable today because this is a future state that we're talking about. And so that's a strategic decision now. It's not outside of the realms of possibility to tie brand metrics back to transactional metrics and to build that full circle of I spend this much, I drive this much awareness, and then it does this much in the future. But I do think you need to have been in a steady state for quite a long time to get there. And you also need to have seen movement in brand awareness. For most companies, I think outside of the realms of realistic measurability in a short period of time. I do think it's possible. And I think for those companies where it's outside because the company is growing very quickly or because the company looks very different now to how it looked 2 years ago, in terms of the way it operates. I think you do have to push that into a more strategic world where you say, well, this is the assumption that we're going to make, and are we all comfortable with it?
