From Visibility to Business Impact: How Communication Demonstrates Its Value

From Visibility to Business Impact: How Communication Demonstrates Its Value

Reach, clicks, and publications are easy to count. It becomes more difficult, however, when it comes to determining the actual economic value that communication creates. Isabel Victoria, Head of Corporate Brand at Covestro, explains how her team tracks reputation and brand value over several years and uses that data to derive concrete strategies for steering the business. In a conversation with AG CommTech, she explains why reputation is not a “soft factor,” why its development is more important than a single metric, and why measuring impact only becomes meaningful when it drives decisions.

Metrics are worthless if they do not lead to action.

Isabel Victoria

AI cannot solve the crisis. But it can give us the crucial head start we need.

AG CommTech: Isabel, many communications departments track a lot of metrics these days. What’s still missing, though?

Isabel Victoria: For me, the crucial step is the shift from observation to steering. A metric on its own is of relatively little use to me. I need to be able to deduce what it means for my work and for the company. That’s exactly why we talk about “Brand Tracking and Driving” here. We don’t just want to know where our brand and our reputation stand. We want to understand how they’re evolving and what insights we can draw from that for our future communications. For me, that’s the crucial question for every metric: What will I do differently tomorrow because I know this number today?

AG CommTech: Why is reputation such an important factor in this regard?

Isabel Victoria: Because reputation isn’t just a matter of communication. It influences a wide variety of areas within a company—for example, employer attractiveness, customer relationships, and ultimately, business decisions as well. Yet, especially in the B2B environment, you often hear people say that reputation is something “soft,” hard to pin down, and really just a matter of communication. It is precisely this view that I find problematic.

Reputation is shaped by all of a company’s interactions with its stakeholders. Communication can influence it, but it is not created solely through communication. That is why it must also be understood as a corporate metric. This, in turn, creates an opportunity to align communication more closely with business objectives.

AG CommTech: However, companies often assess reputation more intuitively. Isn’t that enough?

Isabel Victoria: No. That’s actually dangerous. Companies tend to overestimate their own reputation. As long as I only have a sense of how we’re perceived, I can’t base sound decisions on that. It becomes even more critical if, based on this assessment, I make claims to management about potential outcomes that later don’t materialize at all.

That is why I make this clear case: Reputation must be measured. And we should take a very close look at the method used to do so. For me, reliability, validity, and objectivity are particularly crucial in this regard. The methodology is not just a technical detail. It determines whether I can actually use the results for corporate management afterward.

From Reputation to Brand Value

AG CommTech: How do you translate reputation into economic value?

Isabel Victoria: The approach is not to view reputation in isolation. In the webinar, Andreas Quest described the path through the various stages of impact: We first invest resources in communication, generate output through this, and then, in the next step, bring about changes among our stakeholders. Reputation belongs at this outcome level. It gets interesting when we can demonstrate how this translates into economic value.

Brand value seeks to translate the added value of a brand into a financial metric. To do this, factors such as brand strength, reputation, brand-driven earnings potential, and financial metrics are combined. The approach used is based on ISO 10668. However, it’s important to me to note that I would never single out a single euro figure and claim that it conclusively proves the effectiveness of communication. The value arises from the overall analysis.

Time, Markets, and Competition

AG CommTech: You’ve been tracking this development for several years now. Why is the passage of time so important?

Isabel Victoria: Because a single number is, at first glance, just a snapshot. That’s why we focus so heavily on trends. Where were we a year ago? Where are we today? How are our reputation, brand strength, and position relative to our competitors changing?

It is precisely this trend that makes the analysis interesting from a communication perspective. When something changes significantly, I can begin to ask: What happened during this period? What communication activities took place? What external developments played a role? This allows me to move away from mere reporting and closer to a genuine impact analysis. We’ve now been examining this approach over several years—and for us, the trend is sometimes more exciting than the absolute individual value.

AG CommTech: You’re looking at different markets separately. What’s the benefit of that?

Isabel Victoria: Among other things, we analyze the German, English, and Chinese-speaking regions. In doing so, we sometimes see significant differences. That’s exactly what’s important, because an aggregated global metric can mask such differences.

The reasons can vary widely: management’s media presence, different communication activities, market conditions, or cultural characteristics. That is why we look not only at our overall reputation, but also at how it evolves across different language regions and individual reputation dimensions. Only then do we get a picture that we can actually work with.

AG CommTech: What role does comparing ourselves to competitors play?

Isabel Victoria: A big one. If my reputation has remained the same as last year, I’m not sure yet whether that’s good or bad. Maybe my competitors have improved significantly. Or maybe the entire industry has changed.

That’s why we also look at rankings and what’s known as brand relevance within the industry. For me, the real insights often come only through this context. After all, communication doesn’t happen in a vacuum. “No brand is an island” is a phrase I’ve carried with me for a very long time. A brand is shaped by its context, the strength of its connection to that context, and the consistency of that connection. This also applies to measuring impact.

From Monitoring to Control

AG CommTech: How do these analyses translate into concrete control measures?

Isabel Victoria: That’s the most important point for me. We compare the trends in our key metrics with relevant events and activities. This includes things we can influence ourselves—such as communication strategies, campaigns, product launches, or specific topics—as well as external events over which we have no direct control.

For example, if a reputation metric rises significantly, I look at what happened during that period. Did we focus particularly consistently on a certain topic? Was there a launch? Did our presence on an important platform change? Conversely, a decline may indicate that we didn’t cover a relevant topic or event sufficiently. That’s when a metric suddenly becomes the basis for a decision.

Of course, one must be cautious when it comes to causality. Just because two things occur at the same time does not automatically mean that one is the cause of the other. But when you look at data spanning several years, combine different data sets, and systematically compare trends with specific activities, mere observation gradually gives way to a robust decision-making framework.

What will I do differently tomorrow now that I know this number today?

Isabel Victoria

ROI and Getting Started with Impact Measurement

AG CommTech: How important is return on investment in this context?

Isabel Victoria: We’re also considering comparing brand-driven revenue or profit to various communication costs. But in doing so, we need to define very clearly what actually counts as an investment: just project-related communication costs, the total costs of corporate communications, marketing communications as well, or even personnel costs?

This shows why we should be cautious when it comes to ROI. A seemingly precise metric can quickly create a false sense of security if the numerator and denominator aren’t clearly defined. That’s why I’m less concerned with producing a spectacular ROI figure as quickly as possible. What’s crucial is to establish a consistent measurement system that the company can actually work with.

AG CommTech: Does this require the full financial brand value right away?

Isabel Victoria: No. That’s also an important message: You can work toward it step by step. Brand value is a very comprehensive way of demonstrating impact. But even a robust reputation measurement can make a big difference.

If I know in which reputation dimensions I am strong or weak compared to competitors, I can examine the underlying issues and determine how our communications should respond. The key to progress lies in setting a strategic target and then aligning our communications with it based on data.

AG CommTech: What advice would you give to a communications department that currently focuses primarily on measuring reach and engagement?

Isabel Victoria: Don’t try to calculate the total business value of communication right away tomorrow. The first step is to clarify what impact you actually want to achieve. Then you need a metric that meaningfully reflects that impact, a robust methodology, and a longer observation period.

And then comes the step that I consider the most important: You have to link the results to your own activities and draw conclusions from them. Impact measurement should not be just another reporting task that you complete once a year. It must become an integral part of your communication strategy.

Ultimately, the key question is not: What did we measure? But rather: What will we do differently as a result?

More on this topic

• Predictive Intelligence for Communication: From Reporting to Strategic Management
• All articles on strategy & impact measurement
• CommTech Index Report 2025/2026
• All Best Practices from the CommTech Working Group

More on this topic

AI agents need more than just good prompts
What AI agents can do in corporate communications
More about Christian Albrecht