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The Behavioral Barometer
The latest and greatest from your human experience guides at Element Human
Creator marketing drives brand equity by fostering trust, expanding reach, and influencing consumer decisions.
Creator marketing has emerged as a powerful tool for brands looking to enhance their reputation and credibility. By fostering genuine connections with audiences, it not only bolsters brand equity but also lays the foundation for long-term success. From boosting consumer trust to driving measurable impact, creator marketing has become an essential strategy. This article explores how creator marketing builds brand equity and offers practical ways to measure its effectiveness.
Brand equity is more than just a buzzword in the marketing world—it's the heart of a brand's success. It represents the value a brand holds in the eyes of its customers, built over time through trust, quality, and loyalty.
At its core, brand equity is the goodwill a brand gains based on how consumers perceive and interact with it. It's the combination of brand awareness, perceived quality, brand associations, and customer loyalty.
Strong brand equity makes a business stand out in crowded markets, giving it an edge that competitors often struggle to match.
This glorious PDF is brought to us by our friend, Jenni Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. It's a compilation of insights on effective brand health tracking - ranging from attitude measurement to marketing zealotry.
A brand with strong equity enjoys both financial and emotional advantages. Financially, it often leads to premium pricing, higher market share, and resilience in tough times. It builds an emotional connection with customers that fosters loyalty and long-term engagement. People don't just buy products—they buy into your story told by other people. For example, think about how Nike’s equity isn't just about shoes but about empowerment and athletic excellence. This is the magic of brand equity—it goes beyond products and into people’s hearts.
Brand equity is a a predictor of future business success. Rising brand trust, preference, and momentum often precede revenue and market capitalization acceleration. Take Celsius' comeback story for instance. The Harris Poll has a great analysis of how one renegade hedge fund used brand equity measurement data to predict the unexpected. Check out the full story here.
In brief, from May 2024 to February 2025, Celsius shares dropped 80%. Their lighthouse distributor, PepsiCo, orders came in $100M under prior. At the same time as this doom and gloom, Celsius continued to build brand.
In February 2025, Celsius smashed earnings and shares jumped 36% overnight. Revenue rebounded - up 26% QoQ, and good for a 59.7% CAGR since 2020. Market share jumped to 11.8% - good for 3rd in the energy drink category. Again, lots more to this story over at The Harris Poll's article.
Creator marketing works because it's authentic. Creators, with their genuine connection to their audience, act as trusted intermediariy between brands and consumers. Let’s look at specific ways this strategy fuels brand equity.
Audiences trust creators because they keep it real. Whether they’re sharing a product experience or using a service in their daily life, it’s often unscripted and relatable. For brands, aligning with such creators creates an authentic image. Instead of feeling sold to, customers feel engaged.
For example, when a beauty blogger shares how a skincare product improved their routine, their followers are more likely to trust the endorsement compared to traditional ads. Trust is at the root of brand equity, and creators embody trust.
Creators come with ready-made communities, often filled with the exact audience your brand is trying to reach. By partnering with creators, brands tap into these networks, gaining visibility far beyond their immediate reach. This expanded reach naturally leads to increased brand awareness, one of the key components of brand equity.
Creators significantly influence purchasing behavior. Their content introduces followers to new products, simplifies the decision-making process, and instills confidence in the brand. Whether through product tutorials, honest reviews, or engaging storytelling, creators help consumers make informed decisions, directly enhancing brand value.
This magnum opus of a study is brought to us by our friends at Suzy. It's an examination of the role creators play in the lives of consumers, and the influence they have in the consumer decision making process.
Creator marketing is rapidly evolving, but here’s the truth: most brands still can’t properly measure its impact. We’ve all seen the metrics—impressions, clicks, likes—but let’s be honest: they’re often surface-level, proxy indicators that don't capture what really matters. Enter Stopping and Staying Power (SSP), the game-changing framework that cuts through the noise and gives us a true picture of how creator content drives brand success.
In the world of endless scrolling, does your content actually stop people in their tracks? Stopping Power is a measure of how effectively your content grabs attention in the noisy digital landscape, kicking off the journey of brand awareness. Simply put, it’s about being the ad people actually notice. No more blending in with the background—this is the stuff that cuts through the clutter.
Think of it this way: if you can’t grab someone’s attention, you’ll never make it to the next step. So, stopping power is where brand visibility begins—right at the very top of the funnel. The more your content stands out, the greater the chance it has of making an impact.
Getting attention is one thing; keeping it is another. Staying Power evaluates whether your content creates a lasting emotional connection with your audience, which influences their memory of your brand when it’s time to buy. Does the brand linger in their thoughts after they scroll away? Does it spark desire or action?
The best campaigns don’t just reach people—they resonate, and they stick. Staying power doesn’t just drive awareness; it accelerates your brand’s path to conversion. It's what happens after the campaign when your brand remains embedded in the minds of your audience, driving purchase intent and loyalty.
Enter SSP, a framework that measures both stopping power and staying power to predict campaign outcomes. With over 30 billion data points collected over a decade across 223 brands, our HX data model provides unparalleled insight into how your campaign performs, not just in terms of immediate reactions, but in long-term brand impact. It's predictive, comprehensive, and tailored—no more guessing.
The magic of SSP lies in its ability to capture human behavior at the deepest level. By combining biometric data (like emotional reactions and attention mapping) with content benchmarks, SSP delivers the most precise measurement available today. Forget "vanity metrics" like likes or reach. SSP reveals the full iceberg—the 98.8% of the campaign impact that traditional metrics leave hidden beneath the surface.
This means brands don’t just see which content works—they understand why it works, offering them powerful insights into how to optimize future campaigns and partnerships.
Let’s take a step back. Traditional methods of measurement, like views, clicks, and even conversions, miss critical components of a successful campaign. These metrics often fail to capture the deeper, emotional engagement that determines whether a consumer will remember your brand and, more importantly, buy from you.
With SSP, brands and creators can assess what truly drives performance—emotional engagement, memory recall, and intent to purchase. And it’s not just theory. This isn’t fluffy “best practices”—this is about real data that predicts business outcomes with precision.
By leveraging insights from measurement frameworks such as SSP, brands can get rid of the guesswork. They can optimize their creator partnerships and content strategies in real-time. They’ll no longer wonder if their creators are resonating with the right audience—SSP tells them exactly what’s working and why.
As the creator economy continues to soar, brands need a better way to quantify their investments. The creator economy is a $127.65B market, growing at a 22.5% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) (Coherent Market Insights). Meanwhile, creator marketing spend is expected to reach $24B globally in 2024, growing at a 34.2% CAGR (Statista). But despite this explosive growth, the industry is still grappling with a major issue: measuring success.
A recent survey from Statista revealed that 94% of creators worldwide are earning less than $10,000 annually, with the top challenge for creators being finding the right brand partnerships. On the flip side, marketers report that their biggest challenge is determining the right success metrics (Influencer Marketing Hub). That’s where SSP comes in: providing clarity, actionable insights, and real impact that fuels smarter decision-making.
The future of creator marketing measurement is here, and it’s time to leave the old ways behind. With Element Human’s SSP framework, we can finally move beyond vanity metrics and into the realm of real, human-driven insights. This isn't just a better way to measure creator marketing—it's a new way to think about its true value.
By embracing this cutting-edge technology, brands can align their creator partnerships with their business objectives and track performance more effectively than ever before. No more guesswork. Just results.
Creator marketing is a game-changing ally in building brand equity. By connecting with audiences authentically, expanding reach, and influencing decisions, creators transform how brands interact with consumers. Measuring the impact requires thoughtful metrics, active listening, and a focus on long-term outcomes.
As brands continue to navigate a competitive landscape, creator marketing offers both the creativity and precision needed to stand out. Focus on crafting genuine partnerships with creators and use the right tools to measure success. With the right approach, creator marketing can become the cornerstone of your brand’s lasting impact on the world.
"You guys are excellent partners, and we appreciate the innovativeness."
"We are proud to partner with Element Human to delve even deeper into the emotional impact of creator content on audiences and offer actionable insights, empowering brands to maximise the impact of their influencer marketing campaigns."
"Element Human has been an invaluable partner in showing the business impact creators can have on brand performance."
"They’re responsive, collaborative, and genuinely invested in our success, a rare combination that has made them a trusted partner of mine across multiple companies."
"Creator Economy PSA... Vanity metrics surpassed long ago. Effectiveness, impact and ROI are all measurable with partners like Nielsen, Element Human and Circana."
"Element Human was not just key for the BBC’s project but also was engaging and a great learning experience for me personally!"
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