Every rebranding ROI conversation eventually reaches the same room, where a CFO asks what the company gets back for the spend. The most-cited answer is the Design Value Index, a portfolio study that claimed design-led companies beat the market by triple digits. It is real research, it is worth knowing, and it does not say quite what most agencies claim it says.
Here is the actual evidence, the part that gets overstated, and the way to measure the return inside your own numbers.
What the Design Value Index measured
The Design Management Institute built the Design Value Index with Motiv Strategies in 2013. It tracks a portfolio of publicly traded companies that meet specific design management criteria and compares their stock value to the S&P 500 over a rolling ten-year window.
The final published edition, covering 2005 through 2015, held 16 companies: Apple, Coca-Cola, Ford, Herman Miller, IBM, Intuit, Nike, Procter & Gamble, SAP, Starbucks, Starwood, Stanley Black & Decker, Steelcase, Target, Walt Disney and Whirlpool.
Three results are on the record. The index returned 211% over the S&P 500 in the 2015 edition, 219% in the 2014 edition, and 228% in 2013. That is three consecutive editions above 200%.
You will see the figure quoted as 211% ~ 219% depending on where you land, and both are correct. Each edition measured a different rolling ten-year window, so the number moved between editions; DMI’s own current overview leads with 219%, while the 2015 special report says 211%. Some secondary write-ups use 228%, which is the 2013 edition. If precision matters, cite the edition along with the number, because a figure that floats without a year is the first thing a sceptical reader will check.
Design-led companies in the 2015 Design Value Index returned 2.11 times the S&P 500 across a ten-year window.
The study that came first
The DMI index was not the original. The Design Council in London commissioned this work in 2003, published a first edition in 2004, and a fuller one in July 2005, which makes it the earlier body of evidence by almost a decade.
Its method was the same idea in a different market. The Design Council identified 63 publicly quoted UK companies with a strong record in design awards, then tracked their share prices against the FTSE 100 and the FTSE All-Share. From January 2004 the index has been calculated by FTSE itself, on 61 companies.
Over the full period, 28 December 1994 to 29 December 2004, the Design Index returned 262.6% while the FTSE 100 returned 57.0%. Relative to the FTSE 100 that is an outperformance of 205.5%, which is why the Design Council’s own summary says “more than 200 per cent” rather than quoting the raw return. The distinction is worth keeping straight, because a 262.6% absolute return and a 205.5% outperformance are different claims and only one of them is about beating the market.
The more interesting finding is what happened when the market fell. Through the bear market of March 2000 to March 2003 the Design Index dropped 24.7%. The FTSE 100 dropped 41.7%. Design-led companies lost roughly two fifths less of their value in a downturn that took the wider market down by nearly half.
They also recovered faster, though not as fast as the claim usually travelling with this study suggests. From March 2003 to December 2004 the Design Index rose 43.0% against the FTSE 100’s 26.2%, about 1.6 times the pace. The wider Emerging Index of 97 companies rose 74.3%, which is where the “twice as fast” figure comes from.
One caveat applies here as much as to the DMI index. Companies were selected on the strength of their design award record over the period being measured, so the headline decade is a retrospective selection, not a forward bet. Only the calculation from January 2004 runs in real time.
The part that gets overstated
Read the source and the caveats are stated plainly by the authors themselves. The DMI index is described as a theoretical construction rather than a fund, built from companies chosen by experts in the field, not by a blind screen. No regulator licenses it, and no one can buy it.
That matters for three reasons.
- Selection is human, in both studies. Companies were picked as design-centric, then their returns were measured. Apple and Nike would have anchored almost any ten-year growth portfolio assembled in 2005, and the same is true of the Design Council selecting on an award record it could already see.
- Correlation is not causation. Healthy companies can afford mature design functions, so the arrow may point both directions.
- The data is aging, and nobody is refreshing the index. The last edition covered 2005 to 2015 and was released in late 2016. No edition has been published since. DMI runs a Design Value Scorecard and an annual awards programme now, neither of which is a market-performance index. Anyone citing the figure today is citing a decade-old window. Recent evidence does exist, but it measures organisations rather than share prices, and it is the last section of this piece.
The scrutiny is not only ours. A peer-reviewed paper in Valuation Studies analyses how the McKinsey report frames design as an asset capable of delivering future shareholder earnings, and reads it as a case study in turning correlation into a financial narrative. Worth knowing that the strongest source in this piece has been examined critically in the literature, because someone in the room may have read it.
None of that makes the index worthless. It makes it evidence rather than proof, and a CFO will spot the difference in about four seconds. Lead with the caveat and you keep the room.
The study that carries more weight now
McKinsey published the larger follow-up in October 2018, and it was built deliberately on top of the work above. The authors say so in the second paragraph: their intent was “to build upon, and strengthen, previous studies and indices, such as those from the Design Management Institute.” So this is not a competing result. It is the third attempt at the same question, by the team with the largest sample.
They tracked the design practices of 300 publicly listed companies over five years, across medical technology, consumer goods and retail banking, interviewing or surveying the senior business and design leaders at each. The team collected more than two million pieces of financial data and recorded more than 100,000 design actions, then ran regression analysis to find which actions correlated with financial performance.
The finding: top-quartile scorers posted 32 percentage points higher revenue growth and 56 percentage points higher total returns to shareholders than their industry peers over the period. In annual terms that is 10% revenue growth against an industry benchmark of 3 to 6%, and 21% total returns to shareholders against 12 to 16%. McKinsey’s own framing is that the best design performers grew “at nearly twice the rate of their industry counterparts.”
Those annual numbers are the ones to take into a meeting. A 32 percentage point spread is a statistician’s sentence. Ten percent against three to six is a number a CFO can hold.
The most useful detail in the report is the part nobody quotes. Differences between the second, third and fourth quartiles were marginal: 4.0%, 4.6% and 6.3% revenue growth against the top quartile’s 10.0%. Partial commitment to design produced almost nothing. Only the top quartile separated, which means the honest read is that this is not a dial you turn a little way.
Does a rebrand pay for itself?
Not on its own, and the research is consistent on this point. None of the three studies measured logo refreshes, color palettes or new websites. All of them measured design operating as a management discipline, with executive ownership, sustained investment and enterprise reach.
A new identity delivered into an organization that has not changed how it makes decisions is a cost. The same identity, backed by a clear position that sales, product and service all execute against, is the asset every future campaign draws from.
That distinction is the honest answer to give a finance team, and it is more persuasive than the 211% figure, because it tells them what has to be true for the money to come back.
Six criteria to audit your own company
The inclusion criteria behind the Design Value Index work as a self-assessment. Score your company against each one before you commission anything.
- Design operates at scale across the enterprise.
- Design holds a prominent place on the organizational chart and either sits on the leadership team or reports directly to a member of it.
- Experienced executives manage the design function.
- Investment in design is growing, not flat.
- Design has senior leadership support from the top tier of the organization.
- The commitment has a multi-year history rather than a single budget cycle.
Companies that fail four or more of these are not looking at a rebrand. They are looking at an organizational change with a visual layer on top, and the budget should be scoped accordingly.
The second criterion is the one with the most recent evidence behind it. The DesignSingapore Council and Oxford Economics surveyed 270 organisations in November 2025 and found that 41% of those with a design champion in a leadership position reported very high performance impact, against 17% of those without. More than double, on the single question of whether design has a seat at the top. The same survey found over 90% of design-using organisations reporting positive outcomes, more than 75% citing high impact on profitability through revenue growth or cost efficiencies, and 48% of the design-mature group reporting strong profitability.
It is a survey, so it reports what leaders observed rather than audited attribution, and the authors are explicit about the difficulty of proving causality. But it is the most recent large sample on this question, it points the same way as the two indexes, and it is measuring the thing you can actually change: where design sits in the organisation.
How to measure rebranding ROI in your own numbers
Index data builds the case. Your own baseline proves it. Capture these before launch, because none of them can be reconstructed afterward.
- Win rate on qualified opportunities. The cleanest signal that positioning is landing with buyers.
- Average sales cycle length. Clear positioning shortens the explaining phase.
- Price realization. Track discount frequency and average discount depth. Brand strength shows up here before it shows up anywhere else.
- Customer acquisition cost by channel. Compare the twelve months before and after.
- Branded search volume. A free, public proxy for whether the market is asking for you by name.
- Internal story drift. Count how many versions of the company story exist across your team today.
Pull the trailing twelve months on each, then set a review at six, twelve and twenty-four months. Lagging indicators take that long to move, and a review calendar set in advance stops the argument about timing later.
What to bring to the CFO
Bring three things. The evidence, stated with its limits. The six-criterion audit, scored honestly. The baseline metrics, captured before anything changes.
Then lead with the downturn number rather than the growth number. Every one of these studies has an upside figure, and an upside figure invites the response that the company would have grown anyway. The Design Council’s bear market column is harder to argue with: design-led companies gave up 24.7% while the FTSE 100 gave up 41.7%, through a recession neither group saw coming. That is not a growth story, it is downside protection, and a finance team already has a line item for that. It is usually the easier half of the case to win.
That combination turns a subjective request into a measurable investment, which is the only form the request tends to survive in.
Build the rebranding ROI case
If you are preparing to make this argument internally, we will pressure-test whether repositioning is the right move before we scope anything. Sometimes the identity is fine and the messaging is the problem, and that is a far smaller investment.
Common questions
Questions, answered.
Does a rebrand pay for itself?
Not on its own. The Design Council Design Index, the DMI Design Value Index and the McKinsey Design Index all measured design as a management discipline with executive ownership and sustained investment, not identity refreshes. A new identity returns value only when the organization changes how it makes decisions behind it.
What is the Design Value Index?
A study created in 2013 by the Design Management Institute and Motiv Strategies. It tracks a portfolio of publicly traded design-centric companies against the S&P 500 over ten years. The 2015 edition showed a 211% return over the index.
How do you measure rebranding ROI?
Baseline win rate, sales cycle length, price realization, customer acquisition cost and branded search volume before launch, then review at six, twelve and twenty-four months. Lagging indicators cannot be reconstructed after the fact.