Branding deep dive

The stages are mental states, and each maps to a real-world signal you can actually measure - which is what stops brand from being hand-waving.

• Reached - the population your media and presence physically touched. Impressions, distribution, footfall.
• Aware - they know you exist. Aided and unaided awareness surveys, search interest.
• Consider - you make their shortlist. Consideration surveys, add-to-comparison, category search including your name.
• Prefer - you are their first choice. Preference surveys, branded-search share, direct traffic.
• Intent - they mean to buy. Cart adds, demo requests, quote requests, wishlist saves.
• Buy - they purchase because of the brand, not a discount. Branded-organic conversions, direct sales.

Every stage is a conditional rate - the fraction who consider you given they are aware, the fraction who prefer you given they consider you. Multiply the conditional rates and you get the share of the reached population that survives to purchase. Soft inputs, hard arithmetic. The pass-through rule from b2 holds exactly: preference falls 20%, brand-driven revenue falls 20%, no matter how strong awareness is.

• Conditional rates multiply - each is a "given the last stage" probability.
• The weakest stage caps the funnel - a great awareness number cannot rescue a broken consideration rate.
• Soft does not mean unmeasurable - it means each stage needs a named proxy signal, not a survey alone.

Search captures demand as it forms - the moment someone thinks of your category and types your name is upstream of the moment they buy. A survey asks people to recall a mental state after the fact; search records it in the act. And because search is a share (your volume divided by the whole category), it self-corrects for seasonality and market growth - a rising tide lifts everyone, but your share only moves when your relative brand strength moves.

• Vanity reach - buying enormous cheap impressions to make Reached and Aware soar, while consideration and preference flatline. A big top with no middle.
• Awareness without consideration - being known but never shortlisted. The stage-to-stage rate from Aware to Consider quietly collapses and the top-line looks fine because awareness carries it.
• The long-lag Goodhart trap - because sales lag brand by months, a team can hit its brand target this quarter with tactics that never convert, and the bill only arrives later. When a proxy becomes the target, it stops being a good proxy.

In the tree above, raise Awareness from 40% to 55% and drop Consideration from 25% to 15%. Watch brand revenue. Even though more people now know you, fewer shortlist you, and because the stages multiply, the funnel shrinks. This is the "reached but not converting" brand: loud, familiar, and losing - the exact shape vanity spend produces.

Share of Search is your search volume as a fraction of the whole category. You cannot divide inside the tree, so model the category as an additive tree - total category search is the sum of every brand's searches, and yours is one leaf. Read your share by eye: your leaf over the total. Edit your leaf up and watch your slice of the category grow.

{
  "root": {
    "label": "Category searches / mo", "op": "+",
    "children": [
      { "label": "Your brand",     "value": 90000,  "unit": "searches" },
      { "label": "Competitor A",   "value": 140000, "unit": "searches" },
      { "label": "Competitor B",   "value": 110000, "unit": "searches" },
      { "label": "Long-tail rest", "value": 60000,  "unit": "searches" }
    ]
  }
}

At baseline your share is 90,000 / 400,000 = about 23%. Push your leaf to 130,000 and your share crosses 30% - the signal that tends to precede a market-share gain months later.

Write a paragraph explaining why a rise in Share of Search tends to precede a rise in market share, rather than just reflecting it. Ground your answer in the funnel: search is an upstream mental act - it captures demand at the moment it forms, before it converts into a purchase weeks or months later. Because it is measured as a share of the whole category, it strips out seasonality and market growth, isolating the change in your relative brand strength. That relative strength is what eventually shows up as share of wallet - so watching search share is watching the funnel fill before the sales register rings.