Sweaty Betty: Proving the Business Case for Brand Investment

The Challenge

Sweaty Betty had confidence in how paid media drove short-term sales. What remained harder to prove was the longer-term impact of brand investment -the kind of return that compounds over months.

Without causal evidence connecting awareness spend to downstream outcomes, defending brand budgets internally was a recurring challenge, particularly with finance teams anchored to immediate ROAS and CAC metrics. Each budget cycle required marketing to make the case for upper-funnel investment without the data to back it up in terms finance could interrogate and trust.

Marketing and finance were effectively working from different frameworks. The team wanted a data-driven approach to bridge that gap - and to establish a single shared view of how brand investment drives commercial results across the business.

The Solution

Sweaty Betty joined the beta for Fospha's Glow - the brand measurement layer within Fospha's Measurement Operating System - to their existing measurement setup. Glow uses Bayesian network modeling to isolate true cause and effect: specifically, whether awareness spend is what caused downstream outcomes to move. This moves beyond correlation to give marketers and finance leaders shared proof they can both stand behind.

The analysis identified two metrics as the most sensitive early signals responsive to Sweaty Betty's awareness activity: engaged visits and branded search impressions. These leading indicators move quickly in response to brand spend and are reliably predictive of downstream outcomes like conversions and AOV, giving the team measurable, short-term proof of brand impact without waiting months for revenue uplift to appear.

The result was a measurement framework that marketing and finance could work from together. Sweaty Betty embedded engaged visits and branded search impressions as core KPIs across the business, incorporating them into board reporting, campaign tracking, and planning cycles, creating a shared language for brand investment decisions that had previously been missing.

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Following the launch of Sweaty Betty's integrated brand campaign, Fospha's Glow analysis identified a 2.3% uplift in AOV specifically among new customers. The team described this as a "game changer" in understanding how brand investment drives pricing power - a performance pattern they had observed for years but had never previously been able to account for.

Beyond the headline metric, embedding engaged visits and branded search impressions as shared KPIs shifted the internal dynamic between marketing and finance. With both teams aligned to the same causal framework, the marketing team gained the confidence to defend and scale brand investment on an ongoing basis - and finance had the evidence to support it.

"Glow was the missing piece of the puzzle for us in understanding why AOV was moving in ways we had never been able to explain before. It has absolutely shaped the way we think about future decisions to influence AOV." - Jon Grail, Director of Growth, Sweaty Betty

The Bottom Line

Sweaty Betty's experience shows that brand investment doesn't have to be a matter of faith. With the right causal measurement layer, the link between awareness spend, leading indicators like branded search and engaged visits, and downstream outcomes including AOV and pricing power can be quantified and defended. For brands where marketing and finance have historically worked from different frameworks, this is the shared evidence base that changes the conversation.

Download our Glow report to find out more about the research conducted.