Marketing measurement by brand lifecycle means the metric changes as a brand matures, since ROAS and iROAS start identical. This matters because once a brand builds a loyal base, not every sale is incremental, and metrics diverge sharply. Without adjusting for lifecycle stage, marketers misjudge performance against benchmarks built on a different maturity mix. This video explains how to calibrate measurement using ROAS, iROAS, and mROAS by brand stage.
Why Marketing Measurement by Brand Lifecycle Beats a One-Size-Fits-All Metric
Marketing measurement by brand lifecycle beats a one-size-fits-all metric, because ROAS and incremental ROAS mean almost the same thing for a brand-new company and something very different for an established one. In this video, Jon Lorenzini, Chief Marketing Science Officer at LiftLab, pushes back on the measurement absolutists who insist there’s only one correct way to measure every brand. For a brand nobody has heard of yet, every sale is essentially incremental, so ROAS and incremental ROAS are nearly interchangeable. As a brand builds a baseline and grows, those two numbers start to diverge, which is why Lorenzini recommends incremental ROAS over plain ROAS, and marginal ROAS over incremental ROAS, as a brand matures.
Brand size also determines what kind of testing is even reliable. A marketing mix model needs enough revenue and market penetration behind it to produce a trustworthy result, which is part of why newer, smaller brands often show stronger marginal and incremental ROAS: they haven’t yet exhausted the easy, already-in-market buyers. Lorenzini describes brand awareness as a bell curve that flattens over time into two poles, people who will never buy and loyalists who already do, which makes it progressively harder for advertising alone to shift behavior. That’s also why he’s skeptical of industry benchmarks: the whole point of a brand is to differentiate itself from the category average, so calibrating performance against a brand’s own lifecycle stage matters more than comparing it to an external benchmark.
In this video, you’ll learn:
Why measurement strategy should evolve as your brand matures
The difference between ROAS, iROAS, and mROAS in practice
How brand size and market penetration impact testing robustness
The effect of market awareness on advertising incrementality
Why industry benchmarks can be misleading for individual brands
TIME STAMPFull Video Transcript: Marketing Measurement by Brand Lifecycle Explained
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In this video, LiftLab’s Jon Lorenzini explains why the right measurement approach, ROAS, incremental ROAS, or marginal ROAS, depends entirely on where a brand sits in its lifecycle.
[0:00 – 0:44] The Challenge of Measurement Absolutism
I think one of the challenges when it comes to measurement as a whole is which tactic, which measurement, should I use, should I not use. I think a lot of people in the industry are absolutists. They go, this is the only way to measure, this is how you should do it, this is how you shouldn’t do this. On one of our Curve Your Enthusiasm episodes, Moiss had a really interesting comment. She mentioned how for different markets there’s different levels of sophistication, and as the brand grows, she changes those measurement types. I think making sense of this wraps in a bunch of different concepts of where you are at in the market, where is your brand and its life cycle, and what is the appropriate form of measurement that you should be looking at or focusing on.
[0:45 – 1:12] Brand Lifecycle and Metric Divergence
For instance, if you’re a brand new brand and no one has ever heard of you, your ROAS, your iROAS are basically the same value. What I mean by that is, if no one’s heard of you, then every sale is incremental. It’s only until you start building a baseline and you start growing as a brand do those start to diverge, and those diverge drastically over time, which is why I always recommend iROAS over ROAS, and mROAS over iROAS.
[1:13 – 1:38] The Practicality of Testing and Scale
Now with that, though, making sense of it with your brand size and scale is how robust can you test. If you’re doing something like marketing mix models and you have a very small amount of revenue, that’s very hard to do. If you’re trying to do experiments with a very low level of spend, or a very low amount of penetration in the markets, that’s a very tenuous sort of data set to be working with to draw those conclusions from.
[1:39 – 2:02] New Brands vs. Low-Hanging Fruit
When it comes to the crazy world of measurement, it really depends on where you are. What you see is newer brands have greater marginal ROAS, better iROAS, because they’re early and they haven’t caught those low-hanging fruit, people who are ready to purchase anyways, and they go, “Oh, I just want this alternative, I see your ad, it resonates with me, I’m going to buy.”
[2:03 – 3:06] The Bell Curve of Market Awareness
As your brand grows, it’s kind of like there’s a bell curve, where in the middle is people completely unaware of you. On one side is the people who will never buy, you aren’t interested, aren’t in market, and never will be. And then on the other side is the loyalists, they love you, they purchase you all the time, this is exactly what they want, dead-center bullseye type of client. When a brand starts, it goes like this where it’s all unknown and in the middle, but as the brand grows, people pick a side, either you’re Coke or Pepsi or you’re no soda at all, and you end up on those sides. With that, you get lower marginal ROAS, you get lower incrementality, because people already know who you are, unless you’re coming out with a new product line or doing something completely different. That U-shape makes it very hard to get the metrics for advertising, because the best advertising is experiencing your product, and if everyone has experienced your product, an ad is not going to shift their behavior that drastically, as opposed to “I saw it and I loved it,” “I saw it and I hated it,” or “I experienced it and I felt this way about it.”
[3:07 – 4:17] Calibrating Performance and Rejecting Benchmarks
When it comes to which measurement and where you are in that cycle, it’s extremely important, and calibrating what is considered good and what is considered bad. As they work from the ROAS, iROAS, mROAS chain with marketers, I’m also looking at, are they a new brand, emerging brand, leading brand, or like the champion legacy brand. That kind of information allows me to calibrate to say, “Hey, is this a good return on investment, is this impressive, is this something that’s off of a big base?” A 1% lift off of a big base is huge relative to a 5% lift off of a very small base. These are the kind of computations, imputations, that you look at when you’re comparing performance of brands, either brand to brand or not. This is sort of why I’m not a huge fan of benchmarks, because even in an industry, the industry benchmarks are very different than the brands within it, and that’s the point, you want to differentiate. So benchmarking is tough, and saying which one is the right tool for the right job is highly dependent on which market and where you are in that market to give you the right answer for those questions.
Key Lessons: Calibrating Marketing Measurement to Brand Lifecycle Stage
Measurement evolution: Strategies should adapt as brands move from new, low-awareness states to established positions in competitive markets.
Metric divergence: ROAS and iROAS metrics typically converge for new brands but separate significantly as a brand builds a loyal, established base.
Scale considerations: Marketing mix models and complex experiments require sufficient revenue and market penetration to provide reliable, actionable data.
Awareness dynamics: As brands grow, consumers form fixed opinions, making it harder for advertising to shift behavior compared to early-stage growth.
Benchmark caution: Industry benchmarks often fail to account for unique brand positioning, making internal performance calibration more valuable than external comparisons.
