Beyond Gut Feel: Why Brand Measurement Matters

Ask ten partners what the market thinks of their firm and you’ll get ten confident answers – all different. Without data, brand perception is a hall of mirrors: distorted, flattering, and unreliable.

Yet brand isn’t a mystical force that can’t be quantified. Outside professional services, brand equity is recognised as a measurable commercial asset that’s a key item on the balance sheet. There’s evidence that there is movement in that direction – there’s an interesting example in legal to discuss – and it’s our conviction that firms investing in and tracking brand performance are quietly pulling ahead.

The comforting myth of intuition

It’s not surprising that professionals think they know their market. After all, they spend their lives dealing with clients. But that’s exactly the problem. What they hear is selective, and clients rarely tell you the unvarnished truth to your face when their business success depends on you for a crucial service – why damage a relationship with unsolicited criticism?!

So firms build entire strategies on fragments of feedback and internal folklore. One partner insists clients love the firm’s personal touch; another believes it’s a particular sector focus; marketing claims it’s the thought leadership. Meanwhile, data from brand tracking – not just from clients but past and future potential buyers tells a very different story – where it’s been collected, that is.

From guesswork to research discipline

Unlike with client listening, brand measurement is not about asking clients how much they like you and might recommend you. Instead it targets a broader market audience and starts with understanding mental availability – how easily your firm comes to mind, what it stands for, and whether people might actually choose it in a buying scenario. That means tracking at least three things: awareness, consideration, and preference. Together, they reveal your place in the market’s memory and decision process.

In legal, Chorus Insight’s brand tracker, BrandCadence™, is bringing rare objectivity to an industry that thrives on opinion. It benchmarks top firms across awareness and perception, drawing on the views of senior corporate buyers.

Some of the questions we ask are deceptively simple:

• When thinking of suppliers of legal services, which firm names come to mind?

• Have you heard of the following law firms?

Then these are followed by prompts for whether they would consider instructing particular firms, which they’d prefer to work with given the choice, which they’ve instructed in the past and which they currently instruct and why.

The result? A clear, quantifiable picture of who’s winning mindshare along with the rationale for their decisions.

And the data often punctures comfortable myths. Firms that assume they’re household names discover they’re barely on the radar. Where we delve into topics that matter most to buyers, others learn, for example, that their reputation for “innovation” exists only in their marketing copy.

This is the point: measurement tells you what’s real, not just what’s reassuring.

Playing the long game

One firm where we’re fascinated to see progress in brand awareness is Hill Dickinson. The firm made headlines striking a deal for the naming rights to Everton FC’s new stadium. Some ridiculed the rumoured £6m+ annual investment but we’ve added the firm to our tracker purely out of curiosity to see whether the firm’s name will rise up the recall rankings.

As yet there’s not been a spike in unprompted recall but we think that the investment will likely pay off in the long run – admittedly we’re biased: we’re brand believers.

Being easy to recall and commonly known to key decision makers is crucial. When it comes to procurement, top-of-mind firms – those first to be remembered – have a huge advantage; places are limited on any tender list and so you have to be front of mind to get invited. Meanwhile, the bigger the purchase decision, the more important it is that a supplier should be known and trusted by multiple key stakeholders across the decision-making unit.

A dashboard won’t save you

Of course, there is a risk of swinging too far toward the numbers and collecting metrics for the sake of it. Brand tracking should not be a dashboard hobby, but rather a management discipline. The goal is not to count impressions or likes but to establish whether the market truly knows you, remembers you, and prefers you. AND link that back to revenue.

Revenue attribution is notoriously difficult to evidence but track on a continuous basis alongside brand building efforts and the correlation trends become plain to see. You’ll know which campaigns reached which target audiences, which investments failed to register, and whether your brand is growing or fading.

Clarity is a competitive weapon

Measuring awareness is the starting point in brand understanding: it tells you whether your firm even exists in the market’s mind. But it doesn’t tell you what buyers associate you with.

The real power of brand tracking comes when awareness data is layered with insight into associations: perceived technical capabilities but also the words, emotions, and expectations that your name triggers. That’s where we see the difference between being known generally and being known for something worth paying a premium for.

In the next article in this series on we’ll delver into Measuring Brand Associations.