Converting Brand Awareness to Dollar Signs

…or as I like to call it, translating marketing catch phrases to finance’s bottom line.

Brand awareness is a great metric for understanding how visible your business is to a group of consumers. Marketing teams everywhere know that increased brand awareness leads to increased sales. But how do you measure that when you can’t track link clicks, engagement, and other digital sales formats?

Especially in the beer industry, it’s difficult to track when consumers walk out of an event and scatter across hundreds of independent package stores that don’t report consumer purchasing data back to suppliers.

In order to estimate the effect of an increase in brand awareness at an event*, I worked forward from brand awareness data to estimate the number of cases of beer over the remainder of a year we would sell to people who interacted with our brand for the first time at an event.

*A word of caution. Brand awareness dat is geographically bound. This math for one city area doesn’t translate to another state, or even another city within that state.

Lets start with the numbers:

Note: these are not numbers from any company I have worked for, they are estimations for demonstration purposes.

35% of consumers are aware of our brand, 20% of all consumers would consider our brand, and 15% of consumers regularly drink our beer (with regularly drink defined as purchasing once per month minimum).

The conversion rate of brand aware consumers to regular drinkers is 43%.

If an event has an attendance of 10,000 people, we can assume 35% are aware of the brand

Knowing you’ve converted 2,795 people to being regular drinkers of a brand sounds pretty great, but what’s really important is the bottom line.

Based on the principle of ROI analysis from the ROI institute, one should underestimate benefits and over estimate costs. This manages expectations and presents the most conservative pre-analysis. It also means that when costs come in under and benefits come in over estimate, everyone is even happier!

For that reason, I estimate that regular drinkers are buying the smallest amount of beer (a pint) only one time per month. In beer we measure sales in cases. a 1/2bbl keg is 13.78 case equivalents.

If the event is in January, then those 2,795 that would not have interacted with the brand without the involvement in the event would purchase 30,745 pints over the year, and with 124 pints in a keg, that’s about 248 kegs or 3,417 cases. Know your profit per case? You can do that math!

Are these numbers perfect? Not entirely. The assumption that people wouldn’t encounter the brand without the event shouldn’t be ignored. However, this calculation helps translate “marketing speak” to the language of numbers and dollars and cents.