Written by Kelli Binnings, Brand Expert & Entrepreneur
Kelli Binnings is a multi-disciplined creative who loves talking and writing about brand, psychology, and leadership. She is founder and Chief Brand Strategist at Build Smart Brands, soon-to-be author of, The Breakout Creative, set for release late '25, and currently completing her Master's in Marketing and Consumer Behaviour in London.
Just like our physical fitness, a brand's health can decline without proper attention. Brands need to be maintained, measured, and optimized just like we do. When we want to improve our physical health, we hire personal trainers, follow diets, and maintain a consistent regime to ensure our success. Why should brand maintenance be any different? In this article, I share a proven ‘Brand Macros’ formula or strategy aimed at helping leaders and their teams maintain a strong, thriving brand so they can create the balance and consistency needed to stay competitive and successful.
What are “Macros”
Common terminology used in the health and fitness world, macronutrients (macros) refer to the percentages of protein, carbohydrates, and fats we should consume in order to achieve and maintain our health and fitness goals. How we structure our macros depends on the problems we face from being overweight or undernourished, to wanting to build lean muscle and maintain a fit lifestyle. Macros give us structure and guidelines to monitor our daily progress no matter the fitness journey we’re on. The combinations may vary, but the goal remains the same: find balance in what works for you and supports the health fitness goals you’re trying to achieve.
How does this apply to brand
Brands aren’t just built and released into the world, they need to maintain a steady evolution and be resilient in both internal and external change as they grow. Without the proper measures in place to guide that maintenance, it’s impossible to know how you’re doing, what you need to focus on, and where your weaknesses are. Applying the macros concept to brand, allows brand leaders and teams to track their progress, be accountable and competitively motivated towards results, and strive to perform at their absolute best.
What makes an ‘out of shape’ brand
According to a recent Forbes article, three of the top ten reasons businesses fail is due to poor and complacent leadership, attracting and keeping talent, and a lack of authenticity and transparency. These consistent missteps impact a brands value over time and slowly decrease brand perception, trust, and customer choice. To further solidify the influence of brand value on brand success, Statista notes that brand value is one of the major drivers in enhancing business performance, leading to a brands’ attractiveness and influence on customers, employees, and investors. When a brand has a low perceived value, they lose customer interest, which in turn diminishes the opportunity to “attract, retain, and motivate talent;” and create loyalty within their customer base for continued growth. And to quote William S. Burroughs, ”If you’re not growing, you’re dying.”
Out of shape brands suffer from lack of direction and systematic processes, lack of clarity on their purpose and shared mission, and undefined leadership identities within operations. The good news is, all three of these reasons can be solved when you focus on your brand’s health and internal fitness by properly maintaining the best ‘Brand Macros’ for you and your team. The goal with any journey to improvement isn’t the end result but falling in love with the process. One of my favorite authors and productivity master, James Clear describes it best through his 1% better rule. This rule illustrates the power of small incremental growth and how it leads to consistent progress over time. Every goal starts with awareness and grows into actionable, accountability steps.
So let’s get started.
The ideal “brand macros” formula: a 40/30/30 ratio
Having competed in 2 bodybuilding competitions, I know the importance of meticulously tracking and calculating literally everything you consume so you can be your absolute best come show day. Through that experience, I learned that anything is possible if you’re committed to the process and willing to measure every detail to achieve a goal. I’m now an avid promoter of a high-protein diet because it focuses on building muscle mass and reducing body fat, making you a fit and lean machine.
Using the same principles from my health and fitness journey, tracking and measuring brand fitness allows leaders and teams to become lean, thriving ecosystems focused on structure and processes while nurturing culture and clarity. This high-functioning brand diet divides time instead of calories, where 40% goes towards fine tuning business processes, structure, organizational workflow, and leadership identities. This is the fuel for everything in your business and the foundation that supports your brand. The next 30% is dedicated to behavior management and performance and how you shape team culture, customer experience, and marketing efforts. The last 30% is devoted to identity and alignment across your brand purpose, shared mission, and message clarity.
The high-functioning brand diet
Business as your powerful protein at 40%, behavior as your good fats at 30%, and
identity as your energy-dense carbs at 30%.
This percentage split is designed to maintain proper brand balance and optimal health. You may not be here just yet but this is where you should strive to be. If you aren’t ready for this percentage and feel like you need to focus on one area more than another at the start, that’s totally understandable and honestly to be expected. We all have different starting points so let’s identify where you are to figure out the proper macros for you.
Identifying where to start
Every brands’ needs are different. Depending on the problems you and your team are facing, your focus will be different, so it’s important to identify what you need to improve before diving in. Below are some other brand macro combinations that may be better suited for you and where you are on your brand journey. As you work through these and start to see progress, you can tweak your focus and percentages more towards maintaining and becoming a high-functioning brand.
Low business high behavior
Where your focus should be: Business 60 / Behavior 10 / Identity 30
Things to look for: great company culture just lacks direction, average sales but people can’t really describe what you do, lacks structure or a system-led operational workflow
High business low identity
Where your focus should be: Business 20 / Behavior 30 / Identity 50
Things to look for: rigid structure with little room for creativity and team contribution, exists through transaction rather than relationship building experiences, lacks alignment and team inspiration
High identity low behavior
Where your focus should be: Business 40 / Behavior 40 / Identity 20
Things to look for: strong shared mission but no strategy to get there, no accountability and ownership of progress, lacks defined workflow and consistent message
Measuring your success
Monitoring our progress is part of falling in love with the process. It’s hard work, but that’s what makes it so rewarding when you start to see change. In a world full of KPIs, metrics, and surveys, measuring brand is still one of the hardest things to quantify. Brand is influenced by reputation, owned by the audience it serves, and strives to create lasting value through experience. It’s difficult to put a number on any of these much less hard deadlines for when you’ll achieve them, but there are things you can do that will set you up for success along your journey. In my ebook, Transforming Brand Perception: 7 Actions to Change the Way People See Your Brand, I discuss 7 behavior-focused efforts that can improve your brand value and audience perception. Download it here and find out how you can start implementing these strategies. And if you have room in the budget for hard data, like monitoring online engagement, survey questionnaires, and reputation tracking (reviews, social mentions), check out my 10 Tools to Measure Brand Performance here. You’ll see the companies I recommend as resources and learn how certain metrics impact your progress. So you can go back to the strategy, and like a mad scientist, tweak and adjust your brand macros from behavior-backed research.
Related article: If You’re Not Going To Measure It, Don’t Bother Making Changes
What’s next?
Making adjustments in life and business are never easy. Most of us are resistant to change or struggle to find the ways in which we need to change to truly maximize our potential. Brands are even harder to move because they are a collection of people, rallying around a shared vision, trying to move in unison towards a particular goal. In order for a brand to thrive it has to be its healthiest, most fulfilled self, which only happens through commitment and routine. By focusing on clear direction and systematic processes, seeking clarity in your purpose through a defined mission, and actively building strong leadership identities, your brand can move from simply surviving to thriving.
Connect with Kelli on LinkedIn, Instagram or visit Build Smart Brands to read more from her thoughts and learn about her unique brand-building process.
Read more from Kelli Binnings
Kelli Binnings, Brand Expert & Entrepreneur
Kelli Binnings is a fearless thinking, multi-disciplined creative, who loves talking and writing about brand, psychology, work culture and leadership. As a life-long learner and "design your life" believer, she thrives on bringing ideas to life and joy to others through her work. Outside of her brand business and love of writing, she’s a published music photographer, wellness athlete, soon-to-be author of her first book, titled The Breakout Creative, set for late '25, and currently completing her Master's from Goldsmiths University in London in Marketing and Consumer Behaviour. Her mission: To reframe the way people think and apply positive psychology to their professional lives.
