Systematic measurement of awareness and perception among people who don't know you yet. The trendline that connects marketing investment to real business outcomes.
The company had no systematic measurement of brand awareness among people who had never heard of them. An early attempt at this kind of tracker had failed under leadership scrutiny, making the audience for this one skeptical before it started.
Designed the brand health tracker from scratch: methodology, survey instrument, vendor selection, weighting schema, analysis framework, and reporting format. Built with a skeptical senior audience in mind at every step, with transparent documentation of limitations and pre-registered hypotheses.
Brand equity changes slowly, and a single point-in-time survey gives you a number with no context. A tracker gives you the trendline, which is what you need to connect marketing investment to awareness movement. I designed the methodology to be defensible: clear documentation of panel composition, transparent limitations, pre-registered hypotheses, and a framing that made a high unawareness figure legible rather than alarming to leadership.
Multiple waves completed, with scope expanding internationally. The tracker has become the primary instrument for measuring whether brand investment is moving the needle, and the foundation of the company's awareness argument to leadership.
Run a methodology orientation session with key skeptics before the first wave, not after they've already seen numbers they don't know how to interpret. Pre-answering the hard questions in a low-stakes setting would have changed the dynamic significantly.