Tracksuit's $25 Million Raise Shows How Brand Metrics Drive Growth

Forbes

4 days ago

Brands are the moat.
getty
Where product-led growth was the growth hacker's mantra of the 2010s, brand-led growth is the moat for the 2020s. Yet most dashboards still focus only on the bottom of the funnel, measuring the five percent of buyers ready to purchase now and ignoring the 95 percent of the market who are ripe for conversion tomorrow.
The underutilized state of brand measurement is not because companies don't understand how important brands are in today's economy. On the contrary, Nielsen's surveys have for years shown that the vast majority of marketers agree that brand awareness is the single most important metric in judging marketing success. Marq's State of Brand Consistency reports offer a validating corollary, noting how brand consistency across channels can lift revenue by almost a third.
Instead of ignorance, the issue is rooted in uncertainty.
'Half my advertising spend is wasted; the trouble is, I don't know which half.' The line, usually credited to U.S. department-store pioneer John Wanamaker, resonates particularly strongly when it comes to brand building, not least because of how most executives can quote their CAC to the cent yet are forced to a shrug when asked what moved the needle on brand love.
Given the obvious demand for better brand metrics, it's no surprise to see startups and established companies alike venture deeper into the field. One sign of this transformation is Tracksuit's recent $25 million Series B that puts brand measurement front and center.
'Our goal is to create a common language that helps marketers, boards and agencies all understand how their initiatives are performing and contributing to business growth,' said Matt Herbert, Co-Founder of Tracksuit.
Zoom out and you'll see the latest funding is part of a broader shift. We are entering an era where brand will no longer be judged by feel or familiarity alone, but by data. Just as HR evolved from gut instinct to people analytics, branding is now heading into its own enlightenment. What follows may well redefine what it means to grow, because if you can measure what people remember, you can shape what they choose.
From the Edelman Trust Barometer which is now in its 25th year of tallying public confidence to real-time platforms like Morning Consult, which polls more than 2,000 brands across 40-plus markets, the ecosystem of measurement providers has long been at work to close marketing's most expensive blind spot: knowing whether brand spend actually compounds.
The most prominent trend at play today is the adoption of a data-first mindset. Where CROs have Salesforce and CFOs have Datarails, venture capitalists such as VMG Partners are betting on CMOs soon finding brand measurement companies like Tracksuit equally indispensable.
'We see brand performance management as the next must-have system of record for consumer-facing businesses,' Sam Shapiro, Partner at VMG Partners, begins.
'Brand is a company's most important asset, and there's no excuse for not quantifying it accordingly,' Shapiro continues, reflecting VMG's bullish thesis on the market research services industry which it expects to grow in importance in the coming years.
With a portfolio ranging from KIND Snacks to Spindrift, VMG has long backed companies build around brand equity, and the technology companies that support them.Overall, the VC industry is making increasingly bold bets on consumer-facing startups as exemplified by Kirsten Green who recently made Forbes' 2025 Midas List, reflecting a broader shift towards what BCG sees as the consumer's growing appetite for brands tailored to their lifestyle.
As the money is beginning to pour in, measurement startups are racing to meet the moment.
'Marketing measurement was broken for too long, as most modern tools don't offer a full picture, leaving them without the holistic view they need to understand their brand's true impact and position in the market,' Herbert says.
'The VC interest in our industry is coinciding with a new reality on the client side where not having metrics on how your brand is doing is no longer acceptable. This is where companies like ours are finding our opportunity to strike, as we're meeting a growing demand from brands for the insights they need to make better business decisions,' Herbert continues.
The commercial traction seems to validate Herbert's argument, with Tracksuit claiming 1,000 paying customers and 240 percent YoY U.S. growth, serving names from Steve Madden to Opendoor. Moreover, the round's oversubscription signals how institutional investors are ready to underwrite a new category altogether: brand performance management.
At its core, the resurgence of brand measurement is a response to structural shifts in how growth is built and defended. As product features become easier to copy thanks to AI and the Tiktok economy makes attention spans shorter, the strength and clarity of a brand increasingly decide who wins.
Matthew Kerbel, Global Brand Strategy Director of Turo, the car-sharing marketplace, puts it plainly: 'We believe the idea that brand isn't measurable is a myth. Connecting brand efforts to business results and speaking the language of company leadership has become imperative, and requires a clear understanding of how our brand resonates with consumers.'
Caleb Pearson, VP of Media and Digital at McDonald's, agrees. ' If you're just using data for marketing, you're leaving a lot of growth on the table. Companies should be using customer data throughout the whole customer experience, with brand awareness and consideration being a key component thereof.'
What we're witnessing now is the early-stage statistification of the brand.
Just as HR teams once moved from gut-based hiring to competency frameworks, pulse surveys, and predictive analytics, brand is now undergoing its own transformation from instinct and intuition to repeatable, comparative metrics.
'Brand marketing has traditionally been out of reach, especially for mid-market companies, because of the cost and complexity, making it difficult for them to know where to focus and prove the ROI,' Herbert noted.
Daily polling and real-time dashboards are essentially doing for brand what SAP and Workday did for people operations: turning the invisible into numbers you can act on.
In many ways this is only the beginning, given how statistification tends to lead to scientification.
As the industry continues to collect more consistent, high-quality longitudinal data, we'll begin to see patterns of observations from what kinds of campaigns build salience faster, how emotional affinity affects pricing power, to why certain brand archetypes outperform in specific markets.
This new generation of insight will help generate testable theories about how brands behave over time, under pressure, across categories. In short, we'll start to understand brand performance with the same rigour and predictive power that finance teams bring to cash flow and margin.
For business leaders, this data-driven shift demands a mindset change. The first shift is acknowledging that brands are no longer soft assets. Instead, they're performance engines for which we finally have dashboards.
Here's how to start using it.
Making the shift to a brand performance mindset doesn't require a complete overhaul, what you need is a clearer lens and a willingness to look.
The place to start is a brand audit. Map your awareness, consideration, and perception levels compared to your competitive set. Where are you losing memory share? Where are you punching above your weight?
Next, set internal goals and metrics that bring brand performance into the boardroom. Treat salience, sentiment, and top-of-funnel engagement like you would retention or CAC, key business levers that deserve quarterly tracking and cross-functional accountability.
Finally, invest in measurement with the same seriousness as media spend. Great brand activity without measurement is a loud party with no guest list, you won't know who showed up, what they remember, or if they'll come back.
Herbert emphasizes, 'It's not just about tracking individual campaigns, but always measuring brand health to understand how every activity contributes to long-term growth.'
And remember, thanks to AI all of the features your engineers are proud of can be cloned, and consumer attention is more fleeting than ever. What sticks is the brand, and it's your job to prove it.