The Brand GPA

Making the Grade With Your Customers

Josh Grau

If your customers could give you a grade, do you know what it would be?

Odds are it would be different—potentially very different—than how you would grade the brand yourself.

Internal teams spend a lot of time hustling to develop KPIs each quarter. But those processes are rarely connected to one another, and nobody's grading on the same rubric. Worse, teams score themselves—which is like grading your own exam. Meanwhile, your customers evaluate you on a completely different set of criteria.

That's where The Brand GPA comes in. It's a new way to measure the health of your brand through the lens of the customer experience—while also redefining what brand should mean. Because here's the uncomfortable truth: brand has a brand perception problem.

Too often the term gets unfairly reduced to expensive Super Bowl ads or a logo refresh. But the most successful brands understand that brand is everything—from the product and experience they deliver to the way they communicate to the values they exhibit. So if your internal numbers give you an A but your customers' actions give you a C, you've got a serious brand problem.

145 Brands. 5 Subjects. 1 Framework.

The Brand GPA gives leaders—from CMOs to CPOs to CEOs—a customer-first alternative to the quarterly KPI scramble: a weighted, evidence-based framework that measures a brand the way customers experience it. It's a brand health diagnostic, a strategic planning framework, and a common language for your entire organization—rolled into one score that's easy to track, defend, and act on.

And as AI continues to change the game, The Brand GPA gives you a framework for harnessing it the right way so you can stay locked in and study the one thing that matters most: making the grade with your customers.

Josh Grau has spent his career at companies that weren’t riding waves—they were making them. As a four-time CMO and former executive at Twitter, YouTube, Wealthfront, and Yext, he helped build the marketing foundations for the defining technologies—online video, social media, fintech, and AI—that fundamentally changed how people interact with brands.

At the same time, he’s watched even the world’s most iconic brands struggle to connect with the people who matter most: their customers. After two decades helping brands find the plot, he translated those experiences into The Brand GPA: Making the Grade with Your Customers—a guide for leaders who want to move their brands to the top of the class.

He has taught marketing and storytelling at Northwestern and Stanford, coached NCAA Division I volleyball, and advises companies at all stages of growth. He writes Shades of Grau on Substack, where brands, technology, and popular culture intersect—and sometimes collide. He splits his time between Austin and San Francisco.