How High Value Actions (HVA) Marketing Mix Models Are Reshaping Brand Measurement

In a world where marketing investment is scrutinized more than ever, CMOs are under constant pressure to justify spend, prove effectiveness, and drive both brand equity and revenue. Yet the industry’s dominant measurement tools have long struggled to capture the true value of upper and mid-funnel activity. Brand trackers are often lagging or disconnected from performance metrics. Traditional Marketing Mix Models (MMMs), while powerful, have focused almost exclusively on sales as the primary output.

This is beginning to change. A new wave of Marketing Mix Models centered around High Value Actions (HVAs) is emerging as a more actionable, nuanced way to measure marketing’s real impact across the entire funnel. For CMOs seeking to drive profitable growth while building enduring brands, this shift offers a meaningful step forward.

The Evolution of Marketing Mix Models

Traditional Marketing Mix Models were developed in a very different era of media and data. Designed primarily for large CPG brands in the 1980s through early 2000s, these models were built to evaluate the impact of a limited set of marketing inputs (e.g. TV, radio, print, and in-store promotions) on top-line sales. The goal was straightforward: determine which levers were driving revenue, using whatever aggregate data was available at the time.

Watch the unfolding of the history of MMM below!

Catch this quick, engaging breakdown of how Marketing Mix Modeling has evolved over the decades:

But today’s marketing landscape looks nothing like it did then.

We now operate in a highly fragmented, digital-first environment. Consumers engage with brands across dozens of touchpoints from connected TV and TikTok to influencer content, programmatic display, streaming audio, and more. At the same time, marketers have access to an unprecedented volume of behavioral data, enabling real-time insights into how people discover, evaluate, and engage with brands.

The legacy MMM framework was not built for this level of complexity. It often fails to capture the impact of mid-funnel activity and brand-building tactics that influence consumer behavior over time. As a result, CMOs are left with a distorted view of what’s working, especially when brand investments don’t translate to immediate sales.

To keep pace with today’s consumer journey and media environment, we need a more flexible, behaviorally informed measurement approach. That’s where High Value Actions come in.

Introducing High Value Actions

High Value Actions are meaningful digital behaviors that signal consumer interest, intent, or future purchase likelihood. They are not soft vanity metrics, but rather quantifiable moments that serve as leading indicators of revenue.

Examples include:

• A prospective buyer using a store locator after seeing a digital video
• A consumer completing a product quiz or subscribing to a newsletter
• A user saving a product to a wishlist or joining a waitlist
• A shopper returning to a site and viewing multiple product pages
• A CPG consumer downloading a recipe or coupon after viewing an ad

What makes HVAs so powerful is their ability to connect brand marketing with observable, measurable behavior. Unlike traditional brand KPIs, HVAs occur in real time and are tied directly to engagement. Unlike sales, they happen earlier in the customer journey and are often more responsive to upper- and mid-funnel activity.

But not all HVAs are created equal. Before incorporating these behaviors into your measurement framework, it’s critical to take a strategic approach to identifying which actions truly matter. The first step is to create a comprehensive list of potential HVAs relevant to your customer journey. This should include behaviors across your website, app, CRM, and other owned platforms, as well as external signals such as organic search queries, social media engagement, and referral traffic.

From there, brands can take one of two approaches to identify the most meaningful High Value Actions. If a brand tracker is in place, run a regression analysis to estimate the strength of each HVA in explaining brand equity as measured by key metrics such as awareness, consideration, or preference. The resulting model can then be used to create an HVA Index, defined as a weighted composite of behaviors that serves as a proxy for brand strength over time.

For brands without a brand tracker, correlation analysis can help identify which actions are most strongly associated with key business outcomes such as qualified leads, conversions, or sales. In either case, the selected HVAs or the resulting HVA Index can be integrated into a traditional MMM as an input, allowing marketers to quantify the incremental role of brand-driven behaviors in driving performance.

How HVAs Are Changing MMM

Once you’ve identified your strongest HVAs whether through regression analysis tied to a brand tracker or correlation to sales or leads, these behavioral signals can be integrated directly into your Marketing Mix Model.

Regardless of the approach, HVAs can drive incremental value in two key ways:

1. As output variables: Use HVAs as the dependent variable in a model to understand how media and marketing activity builds brand value over time.

2. As input variables: Include HVAs or an HVA Index as an additional input in a traditional sales-oriented MMM to quantify the contribution of brand-driven behaviors to revenue.

This dual modeling approach allows you to quantify not only the direct impact of paid media on sales, but also its role in building brand equity through HVAs. By assigning a monetary value to your HVAs either individually or through an HVA Index, you can estimate the incremental contribution each marketing channel makes to brand strength. This additional value can then be layered into your overall channel performance analysis. The result: a more holistic view of effectiveness, and often, significantly different ROAS estimates once brand-building impact is factored in.

Ultimately, this creates a more complete and dynamic view of marketing effectiveness. Intermediate behaviors become measurable ROI signals. Feedback loops are shortened, allowing for more agile optimizations. And upper- and mid-funnel investments can be evaluated with greater precision.

For brands operating in long-consideration or omnichannel environments, this approach is especially valuable. It bridges the gap between brand-building and performance, giving CMOs a more actionable and defensible framework for planning, measuring, and justifying their marketing investments.

Watch the PowerHeal case study unfold below!

See this approach in action as Katie Reed unpacks how PowerHeal leveraged HVAs and modeling to evaluate a major sponsorship opportunity:

The Strategic Advantages for CMOs

Adopting an HVA-centric approach to MMM offers several strategic benefits:

1. It bridges brand and performance. By focusing on measurable behaviors that sit between awareness and purchase, HVAs dissolve the artificial divide between brand building and sales activation. This enables smarter investment decisions and clearer cross-functional alignment.

2. It improves media efficiency. Channels that once seemed hard to justify through sales data alone can now be evaluated through their impact on HVAs. CMOs gain a clearer understanding of which top- and mid-funnel tactics are truly moving the needle.

3. It accelerates decision-making. Faster signals mean faster learning. Marketing teams can iterate more quickly and avoid costly overinvestment in underperforming tactics.

4. It sharpens storytelling with the C-suite. HVAs offer a tangible way to show how brand marketing drives real business outcomes. They help translate brand investment into a language CFOs and CEOs understand.

What It Takes to Succeed

Implementing HVA-based MMM is not plug-and-play. It requires collaboration between analytics, marketing, and product teams to identify the right actions, ensure accurate tracking, and integrate those signals into the model.

It also demands discipline in prioritizing HVAs that truly reflect business value. Not every click or engagement qualifies. The most effective HVAs are those that correlate strongly with downstream revenue and can be measured consistently across time and tactics.

Finally, CMOs must foster a culture that values learning, experimentation, and full-funnel thinking. HVAs are not the end goal: they are the bridge between marketing activity and meaningful business results.

The Future of Brand Measurement

As marketing grows more complex and fragmented, CMOs need tools that provide both clarity and nuance. High Value Action-based MMM is one of the most promising innovations in this space. It allows brands to connect the dots between awareness and purchase, emotion and action, storytelling and performance.

The brands that lead in this next era will not be the ones who simply spend more. They will be the ones who know what to measure and who are willing to evolve how they measure it.