The Numbers Behind Brand Investment: What the Research Actually Shows

Brand work tends to be discussed as an aesthetic decision. The research, when you take a sober look at it, is unambiguous: it is a commercial one. The challenge is that the numbers in this space are a minefield. Vendor research overstates outcomes. Industry surveys conflate correlation and causation. Statistics get repeated across marketing decks until nobody can find the original source. Below are the figures we have found genuinely defensible, with the caveats that stop them from being misused.

The short version

• The Design Council UK research over multiple cohorts has consistently shown that businesses investing in design outperform their indices by a meaningful margin (the latest figures put it at roughly 200% over a decade — a number that should be read as correlation, not pure causation).
• McKinsey’s Business Value of Design index (MBVDI) found that top-quartile design performers grew revenues at almost twice the industry average across multiple sectors.
• Lucidpress (now Marq) research is widely cited claiming 23% revenue lift from consistent brand presentation. The methodology is softer than the McKinsey work, but the directional signal is consistent with academic research on cognitive fluency.
• Edelman Trust research consistently shows trust is now a stronger purchase driver than price for the majority of consumers, especially in services and B2B.
• The point is not the specific percentages. It is that every credible body of research across the last fifteen years has reached the same direction: brands that are clearly positioned, consistently presented and design-led commercially outperform brands that are not.

The Design Council UK index

The Design Council UK has run a long-running study tracking design-intensive businesses against their respective indices. Across multiple cohorts and updates, the businesses that invested seriously in design outperformed the broader market on shareholder returns. The most recent published figures put the cumulative outperformance at the order of 200% over a decade.

How to read this honestly: the Design Council index is a correlation between “businesses that invest in design” and “businesses that grow.” Some of that overlap is causal (better design genuinely creates better commercial outcomes) and some of it is selection bias (better-run businesses tend to invest in design as one of the things they do well). Both are commercially relevant. Neither alone proves that any individual brand investment will return that multiple.

The McKinsey Business Value of Design index

McKinsey&Co’s 2018 Business Value of Design study tracked over 300 publicly listed companies across multiple sectors and built an index measuring how seriously each invested in design (leadership, talent, integration, user understanding). The top-quartile design performers in the index grew revenues and total returns to shareholders at roughly twice the industry-average rate across the five-year tracking period.

How to read this honestly: the McKinsey methodology is more rigorous than most vendor research, and the cross-sector consistency of the finding (consumer goods, banking, medical devices, retail) is the strongest signal. The takeaway for a leadership team is not the specific multiplier, but the fact that the gap exists at scale, persistently, across categories.

Brand consistency and revenue

The most-quoted figure in this space is the 23% revenue lift from consistent brand presentation, originally published by Lucidpress (now Marq). The figure circulates in marketing decks unchallenged, but the methodology is softer than McKinsey-grade research — it is a self-reported survey of marketers, not a controlled study.

The directional signal, however, is consistent with much harder academic work on cognitive fluency: audiences process consistent visual signals faster, recognise them earlier in the funnel, and trust them more readily. Whatever the precise multiplier, brand consistency compounds in ways that randomness does not. We have written separately about why visual consistency outperforms visual cleverness as a discipline.

Trust and price elasticity

Edelman’s Trust Barometer is the most-tracked global research on consumer trust. The 2025 update found that trust now ranks as a stronger purchase driver than price for the majority of consumers across most categories, with the gap widening in services and B2B. This is the empirical case for premium brand investment: the willingness to pay above the category default is anchored on trust, and trust is anchored on the cumulative impression a brand has made over time.

What this means for the kind of brand decisions we work on

Three things follow from the research, and they shape how we structure brand engagements:

• Brand investment is a multi-year discipline, not a one-time spend. The compounding evidence is consistently long-cycle. A single rebrand that doesn’t get supported by ongoing creative discipline does not unlock the outperformance the research describes. This is why the Brand Partnership tier of our offer matters.
• Strategy outperforms execution at the margin. The research consistently shows that design-led companies aren’t winning because their work is prettier — they are winning because the strategic decisions about who they serve and how they show up are clearer. This is why our engagements always start with Clarify before Create.
• Consistency creates compounding equity. The same disciplined visual and verbal system, applied for long enough, eventually does the recognition work that ad spend cannot. This is not a fast outcome — it is the cumulative effect.

Common questions

What is the realistic return on a brand investment?

It depends on the underlying business. For a brand investment to return its multiple, the strategic position has to be settled, the operating business has to back up the brand promise, and the investment has to be sustained over multiple years. Where those conditions hold, the research consistently supports a meaningful commercial premium. Where they don’t, the brand work alone won’t do the lifting.

How long until brand work shows up in the numbers?

Some signals appear quickly: pipeline conversion, premium pricing acceptance, sales-cycle length. Others appear over twelve to twenty-four months: recognition, trust, organic referral. The compounding effect on shareholder returns plays out over years.

How should we measure it?

Define two or three commercial outcomes that the brand investment is intended to move (pipeline, premium price tolerance, talent attraction, conversion at a defined funnel stage). Measure them six and twelve months in. Track them annually. Resist the temptation to measure brand by aesthetic preference; measure it by the outcome it was commissioned to move.

Working through the business case for a brand investment? Book a discovery session, or read about how we structure pricing.