But even with that huge incentive, it could not persuade itself that pressing on with the acquisition made commercial sense (and this from a co-operative, whose profit motive is less acute than most PLCs).
So whilst click-through rates on emails and website hits are both free to measure and very seductive, it takes time and money to measure the value of your brand (many big PLCs value these on their balance sheet as goodwill running into several hundred million).