Run a quarterly brand health review

A quarterly review should answer four questions and nothing else: where are we, what moved, what did we do about it, and what next. This is a structure that survives a sceptical audience.

What you'll learn

• The five sections, in order
• Which numbers belong in the room and which do not
• How to handle a bad quarter honestly

Before the meeting

Pull three things:

1. The brand report for the quarter, from Reports.
2. Your Changes ledger, filtered to the quarter.
3. Two verbatim sentences from Proof, with their dates and surfaces.

The third one is not decoration. It is the item people remember.

Section 1: Where we stand

Lead with share of voice, not rate. Share survives the question "but is the category growing?" and rate does not.

State the window. State which surfaces are included, and name any surface reported as excluded rather than leaving a gap somebody else will notice.

Section 2: What moved, and why

For each material movement, say which of the two kinds it was:

• We changed. Our citations rose or fell.
• The space changed. More or fewer businesses are being named, so our share moved without our citations moving.

Then attribute where you legitimately can, using the ledger. A change at Confirmed moved is an attribution. A change at Attested is a claim.

Section 3: What we shipped

Straight from the ledger, grouped by tier:

Reporting the Not measurable group out loud is what makes the Confirmed group credible. A review where everything worked is a review nobody believes.

Section 4: What the competition did

One slide. The rival that gained the most, the rival that lost the most, and one sentence an engine wrote about the gainer. If a new entrant appeared in your landscape, that goes here.

Section 5: Next quarter

Three items, from This week, in its order. Say explicitly that the ordering is the reliable part and the projected sizes are estimates, because somebody will write the number down.

Handling a bad quarter

1. Lead with it. Two sentences, no preamble.
2. Separate cause from blame. An engine changing its retrieval behaviour is not a failure of execution, and the evidence for that distinction is whether the whole benchmark moved. See Industry Pulse.
3. Show the Not measurable list. If the quarter's work cannot be scored, the honest finding is that the measurement loop needs fixing, and that is a concrete next action rather than an excuse.

What not to bring

• An industry average as a target. A global benchmark across every category is not a goal for your business.
• A projected lift presented as a forecast.
• A confidence score averaged into a headline number. It is a property of one check.

Try this in Outercite

Open the ledger, filter to the last quarter, and count how many changes are at Confirmed moved. That count, rather than your citation rate, is the honest measure of whether the quarter was any good.

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