Nick Cooper, Global Vice President of Strategy & Innovation at Landor and WPP Branding & Design, explains how to put a dollar figure on an intangible, and why measuring only the funnel slowly wears a business down.
Put two identical burger bars side by side. Same square footage, same menu, same prices, same furniture, same music. One is called McDonald’s. The other is called Nick Cooper Burgers. Which one sells more? Everybody knows the answer, and that answer is the whole case for measuring brand as a financial asset.
I wasn’t on this one, but our CTO “DW” (David Wellborn) filled in for me alongside Jessie Lizak, and they talked with Nick Cooper, who leads brand performance at Landor and now across WPP’s branding and design group. Nick joined Landor 11 years ago to set up the brand performance practice. The goal was to measure brand more rigorously and, in his words, to connect brand with money. He studied history at Cambridge, plays jazz, and says about half his team is musically trained. That last part didn’t surprise DW at all. Musicians are pattern matchers, and so are good data people.
Here’s what stood out.
What is the difference between brand measurement and performance measurement?
Nick doesn’t dismiss funnel metrics. Awareness, consideration, and conversion matter. His problem is that they’re the only things most companies measure, simply because they’re easy to measure, measured constantly, and understood by finance teams.
“If that’s all you do and you don’t feed the brand, you will end up turning the handle faster and faster and faster to less and less effect.”
— Nick Cooper, EVP of Brand Performance, Landor
He pointed to ASOS, whose marketing director said publicly a few years ago that the company had leaned so hard into performance marketing that it neglected the brand, and performance suffered for it.
Brand measurement is harder. A brand only exists in the minds of customers, so you have to go ask them, which takes time and money. AI and LLMs offer some shortcuts now, but you still have to go out of your way. Nick also says many so-called brand health trackers don’t measure brand equity at all. They’re just more funnel measurement with a different label.
Then he went after a myth I hear all the time: that performance marketing drives results now, while brand takes years to pay off.
“An established brand is having an impact today.”
— Nick Cooper, EVP of Brand Performance, Landor
Get the balance right between brand building and performance, he says, and you have something that is “quite frankly dynamite.”
How do you put a dollar value on an intangible brand?
DW asked the engineer’s question. If brand is an idea, a feeling, an emotion, how do you quantify it?
Nick’s answer starts with WPP’s BAV (Brand Asset Valuator), a brand equity measurement system that has been running for more than 30 years. It identifies how much of a customer’s purchase decision is driven by brand, as opposed to price, range, or distribution. That gives you a validated, benchmarked number you can compare across categories, sectors, and countries. Landor then feeds it into a model that produces what they call brand driven revenue: the incremental revenue that exists only because of the brand.
“Brand is in a sense putting incremental dollars into your bank account every day.”
— Nick Cooper, EVP of Brand Performance, Landor
His rough examples help. For Coca-Cola, about 70% of sales come from bottling, distribution, and fridges in every store. About 30% comes from the name on the can. For luxury handbags, the brand share rises to 70% or 80%. For a lump of coal, it’s maybe 2%.
He contrasts this with traditional brand valuation, which is rigorous but hard to use for anything unless you’re selling the company. Brand driven revenue turns the question into something an operator can act on.
Can you test brand decisions before you make them?
Yes, and this was my favorite part. Most people think of A/B testing as two Facebook ads running against each other. Nick does the same thing at a strategic level. Landor builds a few possible future brand positionings, tests them quantitatively with customers through online surveys, and then builds a five year financial model for each one. It’s multi-year because brand equity moves slowly.
The fun part: before the results come back, they ask clients which positioning will win. The clients are often wrong.
“If nine of them have a five-year financial model and the brand business case is I just think the red one’s nice, which one do you think is not going to make the list?”
— Nick Cooper, EVP of Brand Performance, Landor
That is the real point. A CFO looking at ten business cases can only approve five. Brand only competes for that money if it shows up with numbers like everything else.
Does data make creative work better or worse?
Nick says strategists bought in quickly and creatives took longer. But he has seen that clients make bolder creative choices when they have data behind them, because the data protects them if something goes wrong. Without it, they play it safe.
He remembered a creative director who told him they’d worked for 25 years and never had their work measured. Nick told them, well, you’re having it measured now.
“Data is not the enemy of creativity, it’s actually its best friend.”
— Nick Cooper, EVP of Brand Performance, Landor
This matters more now because classic CPG brand builders are only around 15% to 20% of the market. Most companies coming to Landor have little experience with brand and need data to convince people outside marketing.
He also covered global differences. Many Asian audiences score generously, so a scale of one to ten effectively starts at seven and a half. Brits mark things down. Americans land in between. Japanese clients tend to think in decades and rarely acquire other companies, so the advice that works for them is different from what works for an American company.
How do you find persuadable audiences through data enrichment?
Nick’s view is that one lens is rarely enough. Demographics, attitudes, usage, and what Landor calls emotional demand spaces each show you something different. Data enrichment lets you look through several at once.
His example was a transportation and logistics client who said nobody could tell them apart from their competitors. Their customer satisfaction data agreed, because everyone scored well on on-time delivery and trust. Once Landor looked through a brand equity lens, the client and its competitors looked completely different. That’s how you find parts of the market you can actually move.
LLMs are adding a new lens too. Clients now want both the consumer view of their brand and the LLM view, and the LLM view is often worse. That’s the new SEO problem.
The bigger picture
DW summed it up well: this is short-term versus long-term thinking, and you need both. He also pointed out that we made a brand decision at BDEX years ago when we chose data quality over volume, even if it meant losing business. We’ve never tried to quantify what that decision is worth. After this conversation, I’d like to.
What I take from Nick is that brand isn’t a soft topic. It’s revenue you’d lose without it, and it can be measured, modeled, and tested like any other investment. The companies that do this get to make bolder bets with more confidence. The ones that only measure the funnel keep turning the handle faster for less return.
Connect with Nick: Find Nick Cooper on LinkedIn and learn more about Landor at landor.com.
Work with BDEX: Want identity data built on quality, not volume? Visit bdex.com and click “Talk to an Expert.”
Watch the episode: Why Better Data Changes Marketing Performance
This article was adapted from an episode of Deconstructing Data, BDEX’s weekly podcast on data-driven marketing. Tune in live every Thursday at 4:15 PM Eastern on LinkedIn.
About BDEX: For companies that need clean identity data to power their products, BDEX offers unmatched quality and execution. Visit bdex.com and click “Talk to an Expert” to get started.
