The board slide we stopped making.

§I The slide.

You have seen the slide. It has four charts on it, each representing a component of brand equity: awareness, consideration, preference, and advocacy. Each component has a trendline. The trendlines are, in most quarters, flat. The slide is used to prove that brand investment is working. It proves nothing of the kind. It is, in most consumer companies, the single least informative slide in the quarterly deck, and until 2023 we made it too.

We stopped making it for two reasons. First, each of the four components is lagged, expensively measured, and weakly correlated with anything that happens on the P&L inside the same twelve-month window. Second, the boards who read the slide had learned to treat it as a required ritual; they did not actually use it to make decisions. Both reasons are fatal to a slide's usefulness.

§II What we make instead.

The slide we now make has three numbers and no charts. One: category-relative unit velocity, at the door level, at the top five doors by brand importance. Two: repeat rate at 180 days, cohorted by quarter of acquisition. Three: unaided brand attribution in category, from the most recent panel. That is it.

Three numbers. Five to eight minutes of conversation. Each number is both leading and trailing in the right way. Category-relative velocity tells us whether the brand's argument survives contact with the shelf this quarter. Repeat rate tells us whether the product is earning occupancy. Unaided attribution tells us whether the brand is, in the shopper's head, still the answer to the question the product answers.

Boards initially hate the new slide, because it removes four familiar charts and replaces them with three numbers they have less tradition reading. Boards almost uniformly come around, within two quarters, because the three numbers admit of actual decisions and the four charts did not.

A board slide that never produces a decision is a board ritual, not a board slide. Most brand equity slides are board rituals. — Ned Halloran, commercial practice

§III Why boards resist.

Boards resist the change for three reasons, each of which is worth engaging rather than overruling. The first: the four-chart slide has become the shorthand for the brand conversation in the boardroom. Removing it feels like removing brand governance. The second: the four charts are cheaper to produce than any of the three numbers, because the four charts come from a tracker. The three numbers require work. The third: the four charts never embarrass anyone, because they are always within tolerance. The three numbers will, eventually, embarrass someone. Boards, professionally, prefer the former.

The counter-argument to all three is the same: the four charts were not producing decisions. The three numbers do. A board that resists the replacement on the grounds of tradition, cost, or discomfort is resisting usefulness. The resistance usually softens the first quarter a specific decision gets made because of the three numbers — a door exit, a product retirement, a pricing move.

§IV How to make the switch.

We suggest to clients that they run both slides for two quarters. Keep the four charts. Add the three numbers. Let the board discover, in real time, that the conversation keeps happening off the three numbers and never off the four charts. After two quarters, remove the four charts with a short commentary: this quarter we are retiring the equity tracker slide, because it has not produced a decision in eight quarters.

The board that retires the slide quietly is the board that has grown up about brand measurement. The three numbers, in combination with the broader strategy narrative, are sufficient. Everything else is tracker noise and should be paid for only if it is directly useful to a specific decision.

This is, in the end, a discipline about what belongs in a board pack at all. A board pack is not an accountability document. It is a decision document. If a slide does not produce decisions, it does not belong in the pack. Most quarterly brand-equity tracker slides do not belong in the pack. Remove them.