The 71% opportunity
Paid media is a powerful amplifier, building 28% of brand equity. The bigger opportunity is to connect it to the experiences you own and the experiences you earn - the moments people encounter, talk about and share, which together build the remaining 71%.
This raises an uncomfortable question for any Chief Marketing or Experience Officer: is your investment reflecting where your brand is actually being built?
The commercial stakes are clear. Brands that improve their customer experience are 2.5x more likely to significantly grow market share. And Difference, a powerful driver of share growth, is shaped predominantly by what a brand does rather than what it says. 62% of what makes a brand different comes from distinctiveness, experience and product factors. Communication contributes a further 20%, working hardest when it amplifies the experiences and product strengths people notice, remember and share.
AI has raised the stakes further. Assistants now draw heavily on experience data - reviews, forums, social, earned media - when they surface and recommend brands. Every interaction has become a signal shaping how your brand is understood by people who have never met it.
Why the answer has been out of reach
The barrier has never been a lack of data. It's that brand and experience have been measured separately, by different teams, against different metrics, leaving the most valuable question unanswered: which experiences actually grow the brand?
So, the decisions that matter get lost at the intersection of marketing and customer experience. Which touchpoints deserve more investment. Where the winnable competitive space is. Whether a weak result is a perception problem or a delivery problem. Each of those answers moves millions in budget and until now, none of them could be evidenced.
What Kantar Experience Impact gives you
A single evidence base that shows which experiences, journeys and touchpoints drive brand growth and what to do about them.
Invest where it matters. Pinpoint the moments and experiences that genuinely build your brand, so budget follows impact rather than habit. In one case, a brand's website drove more brand impact than all its paid media combined, at a fraction of the cost. On a media plan, that touchpoint reads as overhead. Connected to brand, it's the highest-return line on the sheet.
Close the say-do gap. See where the lived experience falls short of the promise made by your marketing. One brand found non-customers rated it more highly than its own customers did. Marketing had built an expectation the experience wasn't meeting. Not a perception problem. A delivery problem. Every additional investment in awareness spend was widening the gap, not closing it.
Know your real competitive position. Benchmark your strength on the growth drivers that create meaning and difference, across both your customers and your competitors.
Built on the measures that predict growth
Kantar Experience Impact is built on the Meaningful, Different and Salient framework - the only approach to evaluating brand growth independently accredited by the Marketing Accountability Standards Board.
The link to value is direct: brands in the top third for Meaning and Difference deliver five times the value growth of those that aren't. Meaningful Difference accounts for 94% of pricing power, and Meaningfully Different brands are significantly more likely to survive over the long term. Brands that show up consistently across every touchpoint enjoy a 111% growth advantage, growing more than twice as much as less consistent brands.
What it changes for you
- Build the business case. Walk into the CFO conversation with a quantified link between experience investment and brand value.
- Prioritise with conviction. Know which services and touchpoints are worth designing for difference, and which are simply meeting expectations.
- Brief with precision. Give agencies a clear, evidenced direction for new comms and experience propositions.
- See threats early. Spot where competitors are building an experience advantage before it shows up in your share.
- Prove the return. Track how experience changes move the brand over time.
The case for acting now
Experience already drives upwards of 71% of total brand choice. Yet it remains the least connected part of most insight stacks, and the biggest untapped source of brand growth on your plan.
Growing faster than the competition means designing and delivering experiences that are distinctive everywhere. Kantar Experience Impact shows you where to start.
Talk to us about Kantar Experience Impact