About this Event
The event is free to attend, but RSVPs are encouraged so we can accomodate everyone.
Books will be available for purchase at the event.
Join us for an evening of Q&A featuring Josh Grau, interviewed by Katie Staton, Founder & General Partner of Moxxie Ventures.
About the book:
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 the author:
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.
In The Brand GPA: Making the Grade with Your Customers, Josh Grau turns that insight into a practical and actionable framework for measuring a brand's performance on what customers value most. He uses rigorous research and irreverent humor to land a key point: your customers are your toughest graders, so everyone in a customer-impacting function has a shared interest in delivering an A-level experience at every touchpoint.
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.
Event venue & nearby stays
Best Bookstore in Union Square, 226 Powell St, San Francisco, United States
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