There is a scene that repeats every year end. The budget meeting reaches the brand line and someone asks how much that gives back to the business. The answer comes in adjectives: it strengthens, it positions, it builds. Finance writes it down, smiles and cuts. Not out of malice. They cut what they cannot compare.
The problem is not the brand, it is the ruler
Media has a number for everything: impressions, clicks, conversions, cost per lead. Brand narrative, which is precisely what makes the click cheaper, usually lives in the land of "we feel it got better". And whatever lives on feeling does not win budget against whatever lives on a spreadsheet.
I spent years watching marketing teams lose that argument. The brand work showed up in the results, but had no ruler of its own. So I built one.
Three questions, one number
INK, the Narrative in KPI Index, measures what a brand builds before the click, across three dimensions:
Prior recognition. Out of every ten people who reach you, how many already knew who you were? People who arrive knowing you decide faster and haggle less.
Perceived coherence. Do the promise in the ad, the sales conversation and the product delivery tell the same story? Every contradiction creates friction, and friction is expensive.
Spontaneous permanence. If you switched off media today, what would be left in the market's memory tomorrow? A brand that only exists while it pays is not an asset, it is a rental.
The three scores become an index from 0 to 100. INK = (R + C + P) ÷ 3. Simple on purpose: a good ruler is one the board understands without a glossary.
The number becomes a diagnosis
The calculator gives you the stage of your narrative, from absent to full asset, plus two derived figures that change the conversation with finance.
Narrative CAC shows how much of your acquisition cost the narrative is already paying for. When the index goes up, the cost of convincing goes down, because part of the convincing happened before the ad.
Friction Cost estimates the budget spent patching holes in coherence: the media rework needed to compensate for a badly told story.
How to use it
The INK Calculator is open and free, maintained at Selo7, my agency. You answer for the three dimensions and come out with the index, the stage and the derived figures. It takes a few minutes.
My suggestion: calculate it, look at the dimension with the worst score, and turn that into the work of the quarter. Then recalculate. A brand becomes an asset when it enters the measurement routine, like any other indicator in the company.
And tell me: at your company, does the brand have a number or an adjective?