Impressions Don't Build Brands: The Case for Measuring Advocacy

An eight-foot banner hung directly over a focus group of college students at the University of Miami — and none of them could recall seeing it. That moment, recounted by a brand strategist who at the time served as managing director of consumer insights for Teach For America, frames a provocative claim now circulating among marketers: awareness alone no longer builds a brand, and companies that measure only reach are measuring the wrong thing.

The argument comes from a contributor essay published by Entrepreneur, written by a strategist who has spent a career in brand strategy and consumer insights. The central thesis is blunt. "What does that brand mean to them, and does that meaning influence what they do?" the author writes, describing the question that has guided their professional life. Recognition, in this framing, is a stop along the way — not a destination.

What went wrong on that campus?

The Miami anecdote is worth examining closely, because it carries the essay's evidentiary weight. The author ran a focus group in a noisy campus food court. Behind the students hung an eight-foot Teach For America banner — active marketing the team was not allowed to remove. Asked whether they had seen the organization's messaging on campus, the students said they had not.

The banner was, as the author puts it, practically hanging over their heads. Walking campus afterward, the author watched students moving between buildings with headphones in and eyes on their phones. Posters and banners were everywhere. Physically, the messages were impossible to miss. Experientially, they might as well not have existed.

The takeaway: with a generation surrounded by more messages, more screens and more competition for attention, simply being seen is no longer enough. The bar was rising — not just to capture attention, but to trigger an emotional response and make a brand matter.

From apathy to advocacy

The author's framework proposes four stages of customer movement:

• Apathy — people feel little toward the brand.
• Awareness — they recognize it.
• Alignment — they see a connection between the brand and who they are.
• Advocacy — they voluntarily recommend, share or defend it.

That last stage changes the core marketing question. Instead of asking "How many people saw us?" the author began asking, "What happened after they saw us?" A click and a conviction, the essay notes, are very different things.

The butterfly campaign

One campaign the author cites as proof: Nationwide Children's Hospital approached the author's agency for help with annual giving after healthcare donations slowed, following the extraordinary support hospitals received during the pandemic.

The agency built the campaign around the butterfly in the hospital's logo, a symbol of hope. During the holidays, illuminated butterflies were placed on the hospital lawn. When someone donated five dollars, the butterflies lit up — an experience children inside the hospital could see from their rooms, and donors could watch as well. Video, social content and local media connected that physical moment to the larger story of hope.

The donation mattered, but the experience surrounding it mattered too, the author argues. Active participation made donors feel personally connected to the hospital. Those who watched the content online reported a new connection as well. The caveat: this is one campaign, described by the agency that built it, with no disclosed donation figures attached.

How to measure movement

The essay pushes measurement beyond reach. Reach tells marketers whether people encountered the brand; what matters next is whether that exposure builds belief. The author recommends tracking behaviors requiring progressively more commitment:

• Someone seeing a post requires almost nothing.
• Reading to the bottom of a page requires more.
• Returning to the site, subscribing, providing preferences, buying again, writing a detailed review or recommending publicly requires progressively greater investment.

The author also urges adding attitude to behavior: reading reviews and open-ended survey responses, and listening for phrases indicating identification and trust — customers describing the brand as reflecting their values or understanding people like them. The author's "Emotional Movement Index," detailed in a book, combines action and attitude signals.

A simple quarterly scorecard follows four questions: Are more people taking voluntary actions? Are existing customers returning? Are customers expressing trust or shared values? Are people recommending us without being prompted? The trend, the author says, matters more than a perfect score.

Deposits, withdrawals and lost golf clubs

The author models brand experience as an emotional account: deposits from helpful service, consistent behavior and thoughtful interactions; withdrawals from friction, broken promises and irrelevant communication. The essay's sharpest evidence is personal — a much-anticipated 20th-anniversary trip to Scotland with the author's wife collapsed after mechanical problems, poor communication, rerouting mistakes and lost golf clubs. The airline talked publicly about doing the right thing, the author writes, yet the experience told a very different story. The author has since shared that experience with hundreds of people. "That is advocacy working in reverse."

The practical prescriptions are modest. This week, the author says, map five customer touchpoints — discovery, purchase, onboarding, service and follow-up — write down the promise each makes and the experience customers actually receive, and fix the largest gap first. Small changes accumulate, because customers experience brands through moments rather than strategy presentations.

The essay closes where it began: the strongest growth signal may never appear on an impressions dashboard. It is the customer who tells a colleague about you, writes the review you never requested, returns when a cheaper alternative exists, or speaks for your company when nobody from the company is in the room. Visibility can introduce a brand, the author concludes; belief gives people a reason to carry it forward.