Marketers love a benchmark.
We compare our brand with the category leader, the fastest-growing competitor, the latest “best-in-class” case study, or an average calculated across hundreds of brands. The exercise feels rigorous. It gives us a number, a target and, often, a reassuring story about where we stand.
But comparison can quietly turn into a substitute for strategy.
That is the central warning in Jenni Romaniuk’s Marketing Week article,
“Comparison is the thief of brand growth”. Romaniuk argues that marketers should set objectives from the needs and expected performance of their own brand and not simply copy the metrics of other brands.
The benchmarking trap
There are several familiar ways to benchmark a brand against others.
You can imitate the category leader: if the biggest brand achieves a particular score, your brand should aim for the same score. You can behave like a marketing detective, searching for the metric that rose before another brand grew and then adopting it as your own growth indicator. You can borrow the image of an admired brand from another category and try to become “the Patagonia of yoghurt” or “the Apple of accounting software.”
You can also use database averages or top-quartile scores as targets, without knowing whether the brands in the database were practising effective marketing in the first place. Or you can select one flattering attribute (innovation, trust, premium quality) and decide that your brand should lead on it.
These approaches differ in style, but they share the same weakness: they make another brand the reference point.
That can produce a target without producing a reason.
A competitor’s result is not a strategy
A brand’s performance is shaped by circumstances that are easy to miss from the outside: its buyer base, distribution, budget, category structure, history, creative assets and the situations in which people buy it.
Copying the visible metric while ignoring those conditions can lead to the wrong conclusion about what caused growth. A rising score may be a consequence of growth rather than its cause. A competitor’s strength may be irrelevant to your brand. An impressive number may simply reflect scale.
Romaniuk cites research by Professor Scott Armstrong of Wharton, which found that managers who focused on beating rivals rather than improving their own profitability created long-term problems for their companies.
The same logic applies to brand metrics. A smaller brand can set an unnecessarily ambitious target by copying a market leader. A large brand can choose an easy benchmark and mistake modest progress for success. In both cases, the comparison distorts the decision.
The problem is not benchmarking itself. The problem is using an external number without understanding what it means for the brand in front of you.
Start with the job the metric must do
Romaniuk proposes a more useful approach: set objectives that improve both marketing practice and brand performance.
Consider distinctive assets. The relevant question is not whether your logo, color, character or pack design performs better than a competitor’s asset. The first question is whether people recognize the asset as yours.
That leads to a clear objective: build the asset’s fame towards 100%.
In Romaniuk’s terminology, fame measures the proportion of category buyers who evoke your brand when they see a distinctive asset. If the asset is recognised only by part of the audience, the remaining exposure creates less branded impact. You are paying to reach people, but some of that reach does not retrieve the brand.
The answer is not to accept the category average. It is to improve the asset or stop treating it as a distinctive asset until it works harder.
The same principle applies to advertising.
Reach is not branded reach
A campaign can reach millions of people and still fail to build the brand if viewers do not remember which brand paid for the communication.
Romaniuk therefore recommends a 100% objective for correct branding: people exposed to the execution should be able to identify the advertised brand afterwards.
This is not the same as asking whether people liked the branding or thought the logo was prominent. Those questions measure reactions in the moment. Correct branding tests whether the communication has created the intended link between the advertising and the brand in memory.
A gap between paid reach and branded reach is wasted media effectiveness. The audience saw something, but not necessarily something that helped the brand.
The reasons may include weak brand cues, poor execution or creative that attracts attention without transferring it to the brand. None of these problems becomes acceptable because a competitor has a similar score.
Mental availability needs a scale
Mental availability creates another temptation to compare brands directly.
Romaniuk identifies three useful measures:
- Mental market share: the share of category responses associated with the brand.
- Mental penetration: the proportion of category buyers who link the brand to a particular category entry point.
- Network size: the number of category entry points linked to the brand.
These metrics help marketers understand how easily people can think of a brand in buying situations. But they need to be interpreted in relation to brand size.
A large brand has more buyers. Its buyers are more likely than non-buyers to associate the brand with category entry points. As a result, larger brands will normally generate more mental availability responses than smaller brands.
So the relevant question is not, “Who has the highest mental availability score?”
It is, “Is this score what we should expect from a brand of our size?”
Romaniuk compares the logic to blood pressure. You do not celebrate having the highest or lowest reading. You ask whether the result is healthy for your circumstances.
The NBD-Dirichlet model can provide expected benchmarks for brands of different sizes. But marketers do not always need elaborate modeling to find unusual results. Scatter plots and regression residuals can also reveal when a brand is performing above or below expectation.
A brand that scores below expectation across certain category entry points may have a mental availability problem worth solving. A brand that scores above expectation in one area may have a strength worth understanding and protecting.
The better question
The practical lesson is not “ignore competitors.”
Competitor analysis still matters. Brands operate in markets, and marketers need to understand alternatives, category conventions and points of difference. But competitors should not automatically determine the objectives.
A stronger sequence is:
- Identify the marketing asset or outcome that matters.
- Define what good performance means in practical terms.
- Calibrate the expectation to the brand’s size and situation.
- Diagnose the gap.
- Set an objective that improves the underlying marketing practice.
This produces better questions.
Instead of asking, “What score does the leader have?” ask:
- Do people recognize our distinctive assets?
- Can they correctly link our advertising to our brand?
- Is our mental availability appropriate for our current or intended market position?
- Which category entry points are we missing?
- Is the problem the metric, the execution or the size of the brand?
These questions are less glamorous than copying a leader’s score. They are also more likely to lead to useful action.
Their poor performance is not your reassurance
Marketing teams often use comparison to reduce uncertainty. A benchmark tells us whether a result looks normal. It gives senior management something familiar to discuss.
But “normal” is not the same as effective.
If the average brand has weak correct branding, matching the average does not make your advertising good. If most brands have distinctive assets that only a portion of buyers recognise, reproducing that result does not make the asset distinctive. If a competitor’s mental availability is high because it has twice your buyer base, its score may be the wrong target for your brand.
A benchmark can describe the market. It cannot, by itself, tell you what your brand should do next.
That is why comparison can become the thief of brand growth: it replaces diagnosis with imitation. The better ambition is to set objectives that follow from how brands grow, how memory works and what your own data says about the gaps.
Your competitors’ poor performance should never be the reason you feel comfortable with yours.
