
Josh Grau, "The Brand GPA"
Featured Book

The Brand GPA
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.
About This Event
Join us in-store to celebrate the release of Josh Grau's new book, The Brand GPA: Making the Grade With Your Customers!
Featured Author

Josh Grau
Josh Grau has spent more than two decades working with some of the world’s most iconic brands. As an early executive at YouTube and Twitter, he helped usher in new paradigms—online video and social media—that fundamentally changed culture and how companies and customers interact. As a four-time CMO at companies such as Wealthfront and Yext, he’s brought his sometimes-contrarian approach to the C-suite, repositioning those brands to realize their full potential. His breadth of experience gives him a unique perspective: no matter the industry—and no matter what technological shifts occur—the customer’s perspective is the same. They want a great brand experience, every time. Josh splits his time between Austin, Texas, and San Francisco. He has taught graduate-level product marketing, brand strategy, and business storytelling courses at Northwestern and Stanford, and he writes weekly on Substack at Shades of Grau, where brands, people, and culture get put into sharper focus.
About the Venue

The Book Cellar
What could be a better combination than books, wine by the glass, and cozy couches? Browse for the books you love to read at The Book Cellar in Chicago's Lincoln Square neighborhood, an independent bookstore featuring books by first-time authors, local authors, and more. The Book Cellar welcomes book clubs and discussion groups.
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