Measure What Matters: Why Brands Are Built Where the Numbers Can't Reach
From The MAFFEO DRINKS Podcast: the on-trade earns a brand its meaning, but that impact resists measurement, so budgets drift to the off-trade where the data is clean. The brands that last measure what matters instead of counting what is easy.
The parts of a brand that actually last are the parts you cannot put a number on. So the industry spends its money on the parts it can.
Meaning, relevance, the reason a bartender reaches for your bottle without being asked. None of it lands cleanly in a report. Sellout from a supermarket does.
So the budget follows the data instead of the impact. The off-trade hands you scale and a clean number. The on-trade hands you meaning and almost nothing you can .
Guess which one wins the meeting.
Claire Warner has spent twenty-five years in this business, most of them in advocacy. She ran advocacy and World Class at Diageo, worked on Belvedere when it was still a new brand, and has spent the last decade circling one question the trade keeps dodging: how do you measure what advocacy actually does. She has just launched the Good Measure Guild to answer it.
She puts the problem in one line.
What advocacy does very well is it builds relationships and it builds meaning and it builds relevance for brands. And those things are very, very difficult to measure.
Most brands answer that by measuring the easy thing and quietly defunding the hard one. That is where the brand starts to disappear.
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