BRAND MOMENTUM

Lewis, the CEO and founder of international research agency Vision One, presents a look at corporate success through the lens of branding.

In this business book, the author takes readers through a metric called the Brand Velocity Score, arguing that it’s a key indicator that should be of interest to all growth-minded executives. Lewis applies Newtonian physics to the realm of marketing, defining the momentum of a brand as its velocity multiplied by its mass, or size. His book opens with an overview of what brand momentum is, and explains that, to a consumer, a brand is fundamentally a mental model that synthesizes imagery, emotions, and experiences. It then moves to addressing growth as a driver of business health, highlighting metrics that the author asserts should be part of any assessment of a brand’s success. In the book’s third section, Lewis gets into the details of how the Brand Velocity Score is calculated—by asking consumers whether they think a brand is growing, shrinking, or staying the same—and how marketers should understand public perception of their brands. The final section guides readers through establishing a growth strategy that relies on brand momentum to ensure corporate longevity and success.

Lewis offers a combination of cheerleading and persuasion as he advocates for his primary concept while patiently explaining it to readers. The book presents an enthusiastic argument in favor of a metric that’s simultaneously concrete and nebulous—a dichotomy that Lewis explains is deliberate. Respondents bring their perceptions of the brand and their own definitions of “growing,” so the answer to whether a brand is growing is completely subjective. However, Lewis contends that by surveying a large enough population—due to the "wisdom of crowds" effect—responses will cluster around an objectively correct assessment of the brand’s health. The book makes a strong case for the validity of the Brand Velocity Score, citing examples of how the metric has paralleled and even predicted the success of some companies. Still, it doesn’t grapple enough with the concept of success as a self-fulfilling prophecy: “If we believe a brand is successful, popular or growing, we will eventually succumb to these beliefs... perception of momentum can be enough to fuel our behaviours,” Lewis writes, contending that a belief in success creates actual success without interrogating the concept further. Although the book trumpets the value of Brand Velocity Score data, it can be vague when it comes to other sources of quantitative information. (“One stat I saw estimated that 25 percent of businesses have yet to experience growth in the past decade.”) Lewis is an enthusiastic writer who shows that he’s fully convinced of the value of brand momentum as an indication of corporate health, and he does an excellent job of explaining the concept and how one may apply as a tool. However, his emphasis on perception-as-reality may leave skeptical readers wondering about its real-world validity.

An earnest but uneven book that energetically offers a new angle on what it means to succeed as a brand.