Brand Trackers Show the Drop-Off. This Score Explains It

Brands can measure more than they ever could. Awareness, consideration, usage, advocacy — all of it lives on a dashboard, refreshed weekly. Every one of those numbers shows where people fall out between the stages. The why is a different question, and the gap between the two is where a lot of marketing money quietly disappears.

Angus McCoubrey, chief strategy officer at Born and Raised — the advertising agency inside Philadelphia’s Brownstein Group — got tired of staring at it. A Philly native with nearly 20 years in strategy, including eight running the discipline at Red Tettemer O’Connell + Partners, he joined Born and Raised in February as its first CSO. By October he and research partner Inkblot Analytics had shipped the Unstoppable Quotient, or UQ: a single 0–100 score built from three things a brand either has or doesn’t. Empathy. Enrichment. Edge.

Then they pointed it at their own city and ranked Philadelphia’s 20 most unstoppable brands. Wawa came second. First place went to a fashion rental brand that three-quarters of its hometown has never heard of — a drop-off any tracker would flag, and one only the score can explain.

The tracker says where. UQ was built for why.

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UQ started, as useful things do, with frustration. Clients kept arriving with armfuls of signals and no way to rank them. “There was no sort of conductor to make sense of what to prioritize,” McCoubrey says — nothing to say which numbers were blocking a brand from being chosen, preferred or recommended. Sitting under that was the older fight between short-term sales and long-term equity, and nothing that spoke to both.

So the team built one metric that does. McCoubrey calls it, with a straight face that lasts about a second, “the one KPI to rule them all.” The three inputs are blunt by design. Edge: do you have a bold, distinctive perspective that’s yours alone? Empathy: are you a brand people trust, one that speaks to them as humans? Enrichment: does the brand add value to someone’s life?

Score well on all three and, by McCoubrey’s account, you’re likely the most preferred brand in your category — the one people are proud to represent to their friends and keep buying. Score badly on one and the funnel shows the drop-off. UQ reads the score behind it and says what to fix.

Sales this year become your benchmark next year

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The reason a CMO should care about any of this is the distinction between a brand that sells and a brand that lasts. McCoubrey doesn’t pretend they’re the same thing. “Commercial success is a fickle thing,” he says, “and sales this year become your benchmark next year.” Without a beloved, ownable idea at the center, a brand is exposed to the next hot product — and worse, has nothing to grow from. “You don’t have the permission from the consumer to bring your equity from one kind of product or category into another.”

His evidence comes from the aisle he knows best. Alcohol is, in his words, a pretty fickle category: by his reckoning Truly is off around 50% from its 2021 highs, and High Noon started to slide last year. Then there’s the drink that proves the point without trying. “Logan Paul’s Prime is almost a comical example of commercial success not predicting brand success.”

He finds the current Coca-Cola conversation instructive, too. A brand that spent generations building something people love can stand on that and declare itself “all about behavior now.” Fine — if the foundation is there and people know what you stand for. Most brands talking that way haven’t earned it yet.

“Sales being the be-all end-all is very short sighted, and maybe brand love being the be-all end-all is woo woo. But somewhere in between is where UQ lives.”Angus McCoubrey

That middle ground is deliberate. UQ doesn’t separate behavior from the emotional connection that drives it, or vice versa. The brands that last have set a clear expectation of what the product experience will be, delivered on it, and built a world around it that people want to share. Nuance like that gets lost in the reductive signals most marketing conversations run on.

The Surfside problem

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Run the scenario: high enrichment, low edge. McCoubrey’s example is Surfside, the iced-tea-and-vodka can that has been the regional hot seller of the moment. “It’s meeting a consumer need right now for alcohol that, frankly, doesn’t taste like alcohol,” he says. “It tastes like raspberry tea, or in the case of Superlight, it tastes like Gatorade. But what’s the point of you driving that innovation?”

The product delivers. The brand hasn’t said what it stands for, so there’s nothing to build durable stories on when tastes shift. “You’re not just about the product experience. You’re about what the product experience feels like.” Get that down and a brand can meet people in new places from a foundation, instead of chasing the next flavor.

The inverse case — plenty of edge, unclear value — reads the same way from the other side. A brand that’s interesting but not useful wins attention it can’t convert. Either way the score says which half of the sentence is missing.

Strategy moves upstream of the brief

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Here’s the part that changes an agency’s job description. McCoubrey argues that strategy “needs to maybe start a little upstream of just the marketing messages.” The best way to add value to a CMO is a strategy built to inform brand behavior: innovation, brand experience, retail, product. Those levers now matter more than “traditional above the line advertising, which as we know is probably getting weaker and more diluted as a tool in the arsenal by the day.”

UQ pulls strategic thinking up to that level because it reaches past what narrative storytelling can fix. It gets at what might be hiding under the product experience, or missing from the point of view a brand expresses at retail, on a website, on a menu, in an LTO. Born and Raised now runs it on every current client, which has changed how the briefs read before anyone gets to tactics.

What a CMO should ask before creative hits the table

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Asked what a marketer should demand from an agency before the first deck, McCoubrey’s answer is a durability test. Show that the strategy applies beyond marketing — that it can guide how the brand behaves and what it innovates next. Show that it “can contain multitudes of campaigns,” and that it can endure “not just for one year but two, three, four, five.” If a new competitor lands and disrupts everything, it should be big enough to adapt rather than collapse.

And one more. “It’s not just born from the current state of play with the brand and the category and the consumer. It’s built with bigger picture, longer term thinking in mind.” Tactics come fast enough on their own. The strategy is the part that has to last.

The dipstick is what will look outdated

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The benchmark data is young and will grow. What McCoubrey expects to age badly is the cadence — the quarterly, annual or per-campaign dipstick read. UQ already has an AI version that generates a real-time score from customized prompts across the major LLMs plus a scrape of everything public about a brand. “We have it right now operating at about a 0.76 confidence level to human respondents,” he says, and he expects that number to climb. The endpoint is always-on: a read on how strong the brand is at this exact moment.

On the obvious worry — model drift — he has two answers. The synthetic audiences are always trained on the latest real human consumer data, and the LLMs are themselves fed by what people are saying, writing and feeling about brands all the time. He admits the waters are murky. He’s also been surprised at how closely the AI reads track the human panels. The humans stay in the loop regardless. “Let’s not drift too far.”

If you can only fix one thing

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One sentence, one quarter, one E to repair. McCoubrey doesn’t hesitate. “If enrichment is broken, then the whole thing is broken. If your product sucks, no one’s rebuying and no one’s advocating for you.” Empathy gets you considered. Edge gets you recommended. Enrichment is the floor the other two stand on.

A footnote for the home crowd: the team ran UQ on Philadelphia’s sports franchises in April, and the Eagles scored highest. “If I ran it today, I can guarantee you they would be the lowest.” The Flyers, he reckons, would sit in the middle either way.

The dashboard will keep showing where people leave. The score is for reading why.