Stop Watching the Scoreboard
It is possible to measure your brand, but you have to stop obsessing over your Dashboard.
“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” – Albert Einstein
In A Game of Inches I wrote about how business people love measurable progress. You claw forward inch by inch, and it feels like winning. That’s why dashboards and performance marketing are so seductive – every click, every CAC update, another inch to claim.
But in that piece I also pointed out that brand isn’t that game of inches. It isn’t marketing woo woo. It’s real. And it does have metrics, but it doesn’t behave like the metrics everyone else worships.
Most people miss the real value of brand because they’re looking in the wrong place – and in the wrong timeframe. They stare at the inches on the field and forget what’s happening in the locker room, or off the field, or over the seasons. They obsess over the score on the board and miss the momentum that decides the game.
Sports Fans and Einstein: What they have in common
Anyone who’s watched enough sport knows you can’t understand the game by staring at the scoreboard.
In basketball, a dunk that lights up the crowd isn’t just two points. In football (aka Soccer) a sequence of passes can leave the opposition gasping before a goal is scored. In cricket a batsman who refuses to give away his wicket can break a bowling attack without really troubling the scoreboard.
None of it registers right away. Much of what’s going on can’t be counted. But everyone watching knows the balance has shifted.
And even the score at the final whistle doesn’t tell the whole story. That’s why champions aren’t crowned after a single match. It takes tournaments and seasons to prove who’s best. Sporting dynasties are built over years, through resilience and belief that compound into a dominant culture.
Brand works the same way.
Dashboards and scoreboards
Dashboards tell you what happened today. Useful, yes – but narrow.
Brand is everything else: momentum on the field, morale in the locker room, reputation built across a season. It’s the difference between scraping a win and building a dynasty.
The trouble is that tech has trained itself to worship the scoreboard. Dashboards give the comfort of real-time feedback. They look objective. But what’s easiest to measure gets overweighted. Companies end up managing to the score rather than playing the game. They can quote their CAC to the decimal but can’t explain why everyone remembers their competitor’s name.
Let’s Clear Something Up
That doesn’t mean brand can’t be measured. It just means Google Analytics isn’t going to cut it.
Some measures are direct:
NPS and CSAT – quick reads on whether customers would recommend you, or how they felt about their last interaction. Like asking the crowd if they’re enjoying the game.
Brand recall and awareness surveys – unprompted recognition. Do people know your name? Can they place it?
Sentiment analysis and social listening – noisy, but useful. A crude way of knowing whether you’re cheered or booed.
The stronger signals hide in behaviour:
Pricing power – if customers still pay when cheaper options exist, that’s brand equity.
Margin stability – resilient brands hold their margins even in downturns.
Retention and churn – loyalty in disguise. That’s brand at work.
Market share in a crisis – who people turn to when things get tough matters more than any survey.
Goodwill on acquisition – When a company is acquired for more than the sum of its parts, accountants call this “Goodwill”. Brand often plays a big part.
Valuation premiums – two companies, same fundamentals, different multiples. That’s brand.
These are the hidden scoreboard. They don’t flash in real time, but they decide who IPOs and who ends up listing their occupation as “Life Coach” on LinkedIn.
Case Studies
Caterpillar: Its machines sell at a premium to rivals like Komatsu or Volvo. Buyers aren’t just paying for horsepower. They’re paying for trust: the belief a Caterpillar will outlast, and for the service network that keeps it running in the harshest conditions. Even second-hand, Caterpillars hold value better than competitors. That trust shows up directly in valuation. Caterpillar currently trades at a P/E multiple of ~23.8× versus 11.7× for Komatsu – nearly double – because the market believes in its resilience.
Tesla: On paper, it should already have been overtaken. Chinese firms like BYD outsell it on volume. Others rival it on cost, range, and quality. If Tesla were just a car company, its valuation would look absurd. But Tesla isn’t really a car brand. It has positioned itself as a proxy for the future – autonomy, software, robotics, energy, AI. The cars are proof points, not the whole story. That’s why Tesla trades at multiples far above GM or Toyota and sells at a premium to other EVs. Investors aren’t buying factories; they’re buying the future itself. Tesla’s brand has become a futures contract on human progress.
Let’s Talk About Your CMO
In some corners of tech – consumer apps, e-commerce, enterprise SaaS – living and dying by the dashboard makes sense. When the business model is acquisition funnels and retention cohorts, your CMO needs to be a mechanic: tuning the engine, optimising conversion, squeezing CAC. Get it right and you scale. Get it wrong and you’re dead.
But that mindset doesn’t travel well. In Deeptech and Defence, success doesn’t hinge on how finely you calibrate Facebook spend or MQL scoring. We can’t use Shopify to sell quantum computers and cruise missiles (yet). So success hinges on whether you can carry a story big enough to move investors, governments, customers and markets to your side. In these categories, brand isn’t decoration. It’s differentiation.
And this is why you need a brand CMO, not just a channel optimiser. Measuring clicks and tweaking funnels is table stakes – part of the function, not the purpose. The real job is breadth: how brand shows up in your product, your pricing, your ability to hire, your standing with regulators, your reputation with allies (your reputation with adversaries). A great CMO connects the dots between the field, the scoreboard and the world beyond.
Because in the end, the inches win you games, but narrative builds dynasties.
The Final Whistle
The inches matter, like I wrote before. The scoreboards matter too. But champions aren’t crowned on inches alone. They’re decided by momentum on the field, belief in the locker room, performance across a season, and legends built across years.
In business, that’s brand.
Einstein described sport as “uninteresting,” so it’s unlikely he ever watched Joe DiMaggio or Lou Gehrig turn the Yankees into the defining dynasty of his era. Which is a shame. Because that Yankees aura – that brand – still counts today.