As Fashion, Lifestyle and Beauty brands compete for visibility across channels, brand performance cannot be assessed in isolation. Instead, it needs context. PR and marketing teams are under pressure to understand not just where impact is being generated, but how it compares to competitors pursuing the same audiences and objectives. This is where competitive benchmarking metrics play a critical role.
By selecting the right competitive benchmarking metrics, brands can interpret growth or decline in context and understand relative performance across the category. In this blog, we explore three essential metrics being adopted across the industry to benchmark performance against competitors.
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Competitive benchmarking is the comparison of your brand against a defined set of competitors using one or more consistent metrics. In PR and marketing, this can be used to measure yourbrand’s performance and compare it against competitors over time.
To do this effectively, brands should first examine competitor strategies to identify key differentiators across channels and a Voice-centric approach:
Instead of using a media-specific approach (Paid, Owned, and Earned Media), Launchmetrics categorizes its marketing activities by the Voices that influence the customer buying journey: Voices—Owned Media, Influencers, Celebrities, Media and Partners.
From there, brand performance analysis reveals which channels and Voices are driving impact, and where adjustments are needed to strengthen future strategy.
While every brand approaches benchmarking differently, using a structured and consistent measurement makes comparison clearer, scalable and easier to act on.
At Launchmetrics, our Insights benchmarking platform offers a range of key performance metrics specific to the Fashion, Lifestyle and Beauty (FLB) brands. These help uncover powerful insights against competitors, while allowing PR and marketing teams to see their brand’s overall performance within the industry.
What Specific Industry Does Your Brand Fall Under?
Launchmetrics has created an FLB industry index—a method that tracks the performance of a group of brands in a standardized way. The index is based on a brand’s market positioning and product categories. The eight different industry groupings are: Luxury Fashion, Premium Fashion, Mass-Market Fashion, Luxury Beauty, Premium Beauty, Mass-Market Beauty, Watches & Jewelry, and Retailers.
By organizing FLB brands into these different industries, the platform automatically makes it easier to understand and identify relevant competitors using three key competitive benchmark metrics, starting withMedia Impact Value® (MIV®).
Competitive Benchmark 1: Media Impact Value® (MIV®) Evolution
Media Impact Value® (MIV®) allows your brand to benchmark all PR and marketing initiatives under one single industry measurement standard that has been recognized by The New York Times, Le Monde, Vogue, WWD and Forbes to name a few.
MIV is Launchmetrics’ proprietary metric, made up of both quantitative and qualitative attributes to assign a monetary value to each post, interaction and article across Voices, channels (print, online and social) and markets. This helps create a level playing field for measuring PR and marketing impact, bringing consistency to an otherwise complex and fragmented topic.
With a single, consistent measurement metric, MIVbecomes a benchmark value, making it easy to compare your brand against your competitors over time. Using Launchmetrics Insights, the Industry Analysis Dashboard provides a key metric: year-on-year (YoY) MIV evolution. It’s a metric that looks at exactly how your brand performance and your industry has changed over the past year. Let’s explore how it works in an example below.
Example: Benchmarking MIV Evolution Against the Industry
A global marketing manager wants to understand Brand D’s brand performance over the past year, while understanding how Brand D compares to the rest of the Premium Fashion Industry. At an industry level, this is calculated using the median change in MIV across all brands within a given category. When navigating to the Industry Analysis dashboard, they instantly see both YoY MIV evolution benchmarks.
Brand D appears to have a YoY MIV evolution of +15%, indicating strong performance growth for the brand itself. In the overall Premium Fashion Industry, the +5% YoY MIV change indicates that Brand D is performing above the industry average when it comes to MIV.
This comparison puts Brand D into a wider industry perspective. Now, let’s say Brand D’s own brand performance decreases by -2%, but the industry decreases by +15%. This MIV evolution would indicate that Brand D is actually performing well. After all, these performance KPIs should always be analyzed with relativity.
Don’t forget: the MIV evolution can be filtered at any time by date, Voice type and channels. When filtering Voices in particular, brands can see MIV shift due to it showing the evolution related to the selected Voice types.
To round up, YoY MIV evolution is a competitive benchmark metric that enables brands to benchmark its own performance and how it performed against the industry.
Competitive Benchmark 2: Industry Analysis
When moving further down in the Industry Analysis dashboard, brands can see the exact ranking within its index ranking, showing exactly where the brand is placed in the industry. In other words, this is where brands can see whether they appear in the top 10%, 25% or 50%, or have sunk to the bottom 10%, 25% or 50%.
Example: Learning Where You Sit Within the Industry
In this example, Brand D is performing among the top 25% of the Premium Fashion Industry and is ranked 4th overall. Once again, depending on the user’s needs, the brand ranking range and placement can change when the date, Voice type, and country are filtered.
As a competitive benchmark metric, brand ranking clearly shows a brand’s exact placement (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.) and ranking range within its industry. While this provides an immediate snapshot of performance, the third metric adds the deeper context needed to understand how and why that position has evolved.
Competitive Benchmark 3: Industry Ranking
The third and final metric is the Industry Ranking list—showing all of the brands in the brand’s specific industry by MIV. This ranking indicates the YoY placements, YoY MIV and the overall YoY evolution. The user is also able to see how their brand’s industry ranking has changed over time and can detect new competitors that they can analyze in more detail.
Most importantly, using the filters in the Industry Analysis dashboard can help brands dig deeper into their performance. For example, a global marketing manager may want to assess press coverage performance against competitors during peak moments such as fashion week and awards season. By filtering the date to February, selecting the Media Voice, and focusing on France, the U.K., the U.S. and Italy, they can quickly identify which brands dominated media coverage and benchmark year-over-year evolution in the right context.
Overall, the Industry Ranking provides a clearer understanding of why the brand is ranking, whether 4th or 1st, and how its performance has evolved over the past year. It allows users to see directly where they stand against their competitors and is a key performance metric to keep in mind.
Wrapping Up: The Competitive Benchmarking Metrics That Matter
With endless metrics in the PR and marketing world, the most effective competitive benchmarking depends on three metrics: your brand’s MIV evolution, its position within the industry and how that position shifts over time. Together, these metrics provide the context needed to assess performance accurately.
All three metrics are available within the Launchmetrics Insights—our benchmarking platform with data on hundreds of Fashion, Lifestyle and Beauty brands across defined industry groups. If you want to learn more about measuring brand performance, our “10 Essential Brand KPIs To Measure Marketing Performance” eGuide is available for download below.
Download 10 Essential Brand KPIs To Measure Marketing Performance
For PR and marketing teams, brand performance benchmarking means understanding how brand visibility translates into competitive advantage. It goes beyond volume of coverage to reveal which Voices, regions and initiatives are driving impactful results compared to competitors. This helps teams refine campaign strategy, validate market focus and prioritize efforts that deliver stronger relative performance rather than short-term spikes.
In a data-rich world, brand performance benchmarking matters because it turns data into context. Without comparison, growth or decline can be misleading. Benchmarking clarifies whether performance reflects effective strategy, broader market shifts or competitive disruption. It helps brands see where they are gaining ground, where competitors are accelerating and where resources should be reallocated to strengthen PR and marketing outcomes.
Creating effective brand performance benchmarking reports requires access to structured industry data, consistent measurement standards and the ability to segment performance by region, channel and Voice. Teams typically rely on brand performance tools such as Launchmetrics Insights’ reporting features, designed to consolidate, structure and visualize data for data-driven insights. This enables brands to compare performance accurately, track year-over-year change, identify competitive gaps and surface opportunities for smarter investment decisions at both global and regional levels.
Gina is passionate about storytelling, creativity, and digital strategies. As Vice President of Marketing, she leads a rockstars team from the sunny city of Madrid! Being a crazy savvy marketer, in 2020 Gina co-founded the global community of b2bmarketers.com and currently combines all this activity, teaching Inbound Marketing in different business schools.
