Author: Jeremy Braune

Jeremy specialises in delivering market research and consultancy programmes that enable organisations to maximise the impact of their brands, products and services, communications and customer experience delivery. His company, Brandspeak, has offices in London and Bristol and since 2004 it has been helping companies all over the UK and globally. Jeremy has also been a guest lecturer and speaker on London Business School's acclaimed MBA course, on the subject of Brands and Branding.

Brands that thrive are those that keep a close eye on their performance and public perception.

Brand tracking refers to the continuous process of measuring your brand’s health, awareness, and customer sentiment, versus those of your competitors’, over time. Rather than treating brand research as a one-off project, consistent brand tracking is an ongoing investment to monitor your and it can pay dividends in terms of business growth. After all, we can’t manage what we can’t measure, so regularly measuring brand metrics is essential.

In this article, we’ll explore why continuous brand tracking is so important, how it helps businesses adapt to changing consumer perceptions and market conditions, and look at some real-world examples of tracking in action.

What is Brand Tracking?

Brand tracking is the practice of monitoring and analysing the performance of a brand over time. It typically involves gathering data on key brand metrics such as awareness, familiarity, consideration, preference, and loyalty on a regular basis. By surveying consumers and leveraging other data sources (like social media sentiment or sales figures), companies can create a brand tracker – a tool (often an ongoing survey or dashboard) that captures these metrics consistently. The goal is to establish a baseline for brand equity (the overall value and strength of the brand) and then watch how it evolves.

Brandspeak’s own Complete Guide to Brand Tracking explains that tracking covers various dimensions of brand equity – from brand awareness and image to customer experience and perceived value. In simple terms, if you imagine your brand as a living entity, brand tracking is like a regular health check-up for that entity. It tells you what’s working, what isn’t, and where you might need to focus your attention.

Key Metrics to Monitor

A robust brand tracking programme will measure a range of indicators that together paint a picture of brand health. Common metrics include:

Brand Awareness: How many people know your brand? This can be spontaneous awareness (consumers recall your brand unprompted) or prompted awareness (they recognise it when shown). High awareness is usually a prerequisite for growth. (Fun fact: 94% of people on the planet recognise the Coca-Cola logo, showing the power of a well-established brand).
Brand Associations & Image: What qualities or attributes do people associate with your brand? Does it align with the image you want to project? Tracking brand imagery and personality associations reveals if consumer perceptions match your brand positioning.
Customer Satisfaction & Loyalty: Do customers stick with your brand? Metrics like repeat purchase rate or Net Promoter Score (NPS) gauge loyalty and likelihood to recommend. Loyal customers tend to forgive occasional missteps and spread positive word-of-mouth.
Consideration & Preference: Among those aware of your brand, how many would consider purchasing it? Preference metrics show where you stand versus competitors in the customer’s mind.
Usage & Purchase Metrics: How often are people buying or using your product/service? Tracking purchase frequency and usage occasions helps you understand engagement depth. It can reveal, for example, if a marketing campaign led to more frequent use of your app or product.
Perceptions of Value and Quality: Do consumers feel they get good value from you? How do they rate your quality relative to others? These perception metrics often drive repeat business and pricing power.

By keeping tabs on these factors (and more, depending on your industry), you build a rich dataset over time. This historical view is crucial – a single data point only tells you so much, but a trend can reveal whether your brand is on the rise, holding steady, or declining in the eyes of customers.

Why Consistent Measurement Matters

One-off market research can give a snapshot, but consistent measurement through brand tracking provides a moving picture. Business growth is rarely linear or static; consumer attitudes and market conditions are always changing. Here’s why regular tracking is so critical for growth:

Catch Trends Early: Continuous tracking allows you to spot shifts in brand metrics as they happen, rather than long after the fact. For instance, if brand awareness starts dipping or if customer sentiment takes a negative turn, you’ll see it in your tracker data right away. Early warning means early action. As Brandspeak notes, “things change and tracking can help you get ahead of the curve.” A small issue caught early might be fixed with a tweak in messaging; left unnoticed, it could snowball into a major problem.
Measure the Impact of Marketing: When you measure consistently, you can correlate changes in brand metrics with specific actions your company took. Did a new advertising campaign in Q3 boost awareness? Did a product improvement lead to higher satisfaction scores? By comparing metrics before and after campaigns, you can evaluate what’s working and ensure your marketing spend is driving results. This iterative approach – test, measure, learn, repeat – is how brands refine their strategies and fuel growth.
Informed Decision-Making: Strategic decisions (like repositioning a brand or entering a new market) should be based on evidence. A well-maintained brand tracker provides a wealth of evidence to guide big moves. For example, if your tracking shows a certain customer segment has exceptionally high loyalty and growth potential, you might decide to focus product development or advertising efforts on that segment. Without continuous data, such decisions would be a shot in the dark.
Accountability Over Time: Consistent metrics create a culture of accountability. Teams can set targets (e.g. increase brand consideration by 5% in 12 months) and use tracking to hold themselves accountable. If goals are met, it’s a cause for celebration and learning; if not, the team can investigate why and adjust course. This focus on data-driven goals often translates into business growth, because everyone is aligned on what success looks like in measurable terms.

Adapting to Changing Consumer Perceptions

Perhaps the greatest benefit of ongoing brand tracking is the ability to adapt to changing consumer perceptions in real time. Consumer tastes, needs, and attitudes can shift remarkably quickly in response to new trends, technologies, or events. We’ve seen examples of once-iconic brands that failed to keep up with changing consumer expectations – and paid the price by fading away. Consistent tracking helps ensure you’re not caught off guard by a change in sentiment.

For instance, imagine a scenario where a sudden social media trend or a viral news story starts to negatively impact your brand image. If you’re running brand tracking surveys continuously (or even in real-time with digital tools), you’ll notice a dip in image or trust scores this quarter, not next year. That means you can respond promptly – perhaps with a PR campaign or a change in policy – to address the issue and mend customer trust. On the flip side, tracking might reveal positive emerging perceptions (maybe consumers are associating your brand with a hot new cultural movement) which you can amplify in your marketing. Brands that adapt in step with their customers stay relevant and maintain growth, while those that don’t track risk drifting into irrelevance.

Moreover, brand tracking isn’t just about problems – it can uncover opportunities. Regularly monitoring the market can highlight gaps your brand could fill. For example, if tracking data shows consumers increasingly value sustainability in your category and competitors lag in that area, that’s a chance for your brand to step forward (maybe by promoting your eco-friendly initiatives) and win new fans. You would only catch that insight by asking the right questions consistently.

Final thoughts …

Track Today, Thrive Tomorrow!

Consistent brand tracking is not a luxury reserved for global giants – it’s a strategic necessity for any business that wants to grow and stay relevant. By measuring your brand’s performance continuously, you gain the power to manage it effectively. You’ll know what your customers think and feel about you in the present moment, allowing you to make informed decisions for the future. Importantly, you’ll be equipped to adapt to changing consumer perceptions, ensuring that your brand’s message and offerings always resonate with the people who matter most – your customers.

In summary, brand tracking is an ongoing investment in your brand’s success. It shines a light on where you stand today and where opportunities for growth lie ahead. Companies that embrace consistent measurement tend to be more agile, customer-focused, and ultimately more successful.

As Brandspeak’s own research experts often remind clients, a brand that is regularly measured is a brand that can be proactively managed. So, start tracking – and let the data guide you to new heights of business growth.

For more insights on implementing a tracking study, get in touch with Brandspeak using enquiries@brandspeak.co.uk to see how our brand tracking services can help you keep your finger on the pulse of your brand’s health.

Jeremy Braune

In a modern competitive landscape, building a standout brand is no small feat.

An effective brand strategy calls for something beyond creativity; it needs to be based on real understanding of the market, the consumer and the competition.

That’s where the role of market research becomes invaluable. The effectiveness of your brand’s proposition, positioning and targeting may depend entirely on the extent and quality of your market insight.

Let’s dive in to see how market research underpins the brand and why it’s crucial for success.

What is Market Research?

Market research is typically undertaken by a market research agency that will gather, analyse, and interpret data relating to your target audience, competitors, and industry trends.

You can use the insight the agency provides to make informed decisions that shape your brand’s identity, messaging, and offerings. From quantitative surveys and qualitative focus groups to competitor analyses and social listening, market research encompasses a range of tools and techniques to uncover actionable insights.

How Market Research Informs Brand Strategy

1. Defining Your Target Audience

A clear understanding of your audience is the foundation of any brand strategy. Market research helps you:

Identify demographics: Age, gender, location, income level, and more.
Understand psychographics: Values, interests, and behaviours.
Track buying habits: Preferred products, spending patterns, and decision-making processes.

For example, a brand targeting Gen Z will need a vastly different approach than one targeting baby boomers. Market research ensures your strategy resonates with the right audience.

2. Refining Brand Proposition and Positioning

The brand proposition is a marketing and communications-led encapsulation of what the brand is actually offering consumers and should be designed to reflect their core needs, attitudes and behaviours.

The brand’s positioning is crafted to convey its position in the market relative to its peers. The positioning’s purpose is to enable the brand to create an identity that is both distinct, relevant and appealing in the minds of consumers.

Market research plays a fundamental part in the development of the brand’s proposition and positioning by uncovering:

pain points your audience is trying to overcome or their needs;
unique selling propositions – what makes your brand different;
brand purpose
competitor gaps – opportunities for your brand to differentiate itself in the market.

For example, Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign repositioned it by tapping into an unmet emotional need for authenticity in beauty advertising. This was informed by deep consumer insight.

3. Crafting Compelling Messaging

Your messaging should speak directly to your audience’s aspirations, values, and needs. Market research enables you to:

Identify the language and tone that best resonates with your audience
Spot cultural nuances, thereby ensuring your message is relevant and inclusive.
Test campaign concepts, by validating ideas before a full-scale rollout.

For instance, Nike’s “Just Do It” slogan remains iconic because it taps into universal emotions of determination and achievement—insights gleaned from through research.

4. Optimising Consumer Targeting

Market research allows brands to segment their audience effectively, creating tailored strategies for each group. This may involve:

Behavioural segmentation: Targeting based on actions like purchase history or online activity.
Geographic segmentation: Focusing on specific regions or local preferences.
Interest-based targeting: Aligning with hobbies or lifestyle choices.

This precision targeting not only enhances ROI but also strengthens brand loyalty by delivering personalised experiences.

The Role of Market Research within a Competitive Landscape

Stay Ahead of Trends

Consumer tastes change fast. Market research keeps your brand up to speed with emerging trends, whether it’s sustainability, digital transformation, or new product categories. Being ahead means that your brand stays relevant and competitive.

Mitigating Risks

Launching new products or entering new markets is always risky. Research reduces uncertainty by validating assumptions and recognising potential pitfalls before launch.

Benchmark Performance

It’s important to understand where your brand stands in relation to other competitors. Survey based market research can be used to create brand performance benchmarks that can be used to subsequently track brand performance and areas for improvement.

Practical Steps to Leverage Market Research

Establish Concrete Objectives: First of all, define what you want to learn and why.
Mix Methods: Combine qualitative and quantitative to achieve a complete perspective.
Analyse and Act: Turning insights into actionable strategies, tracking their performance over time.
Iterate and Adapt: The dynamics of the marketplace continue to change. Market research is an ongoing process.

Final thoughts …

Market research forms the backbone of any brand strategy that has ever emerged as a winner. It allows you to uncover insights into your audience, competitors, and industry trends that enable you to position your brand in the best way possible for your target market.

At Brandspeak, we specialise in helping businesses use market research as an effective driver in crafting compelling brand strategies. Let us get your brand positioned for lasting success.

Jeremy Braune

In today’s fiercely competitive marketplace, where customers are constantly bombarded with choices, building brand loyalty has become more challenging and more critical than ever.

Strong customer loyalty not only fosters repeat business but also turns your customers into ambassadors who advocate for your brand.

So, how can businesses in the UK and beyond foster strong, lasting relationships with their customers? Let’s explore some actionable strategies to build brand loyalty in a crowded market.

1. Know Your Customer Inside and Out

Your audience is the foundation of brand loyalty. Perform detailed market research to understand what your customers like, what bothers them, and how they make purchases. Conduct surveys, focus groups, and use analytics tools to provide a clear customer persona. The more you understand your customers, the better you will be at offering products, services, and communications that appeal to their needs.

2. Ensure your brand is top-of-mind

Byron Sharp and Jenni Romaniuk from the Ehrenberg Bass Institute developed the concept of Brand Salience, which is “the propensity of the brand to be noticed or come to mind in buying situations”. If your brand isn’t repeatedly coming to mind when your customer is ready to buy, they can’t become a loyal customer. So ensure that your marketing is targeting the right people with the right messages with the right frequency to generate brand salience.

3. Deliver Consistent Quality

Consistency is the bedrock of trust. Returning customers are most often those that received what they wanted, over and over. Make sure your products or services are consistently top-notch and offer uniformity throughout all touchpoints: whether it be your website, social media channels, or in-store experience.

4. Provide Exceptional Customer Service

Exceptional customer service is one sure-fire way to make your brand stand out in a competitive landscape. Be prompt, friendly, and solution-oriented in interactions. Train your team to go above and beyond in resolving customer issues and creating memorable experiences. Remember, a happy customer is more likely to stay loyal and recommend your brand to others.

5. Communicate Your Brand Values

The modern consumer is more value-led than ever; from sustainability, diversity, and social responsibility, your brand’s values must mirror those of your audience.

Share your ethical practices for greater transparency.
Be authentic; clients can tell if the brand is on to something or just jumping on a bandwagon..

6. Reward Loyalty

Loyalty schemes are the surest way to guarantee repeat business. It might be point-based early access or special deals on certain merchandise. For example, the Marks & Spencer’s Sparks scheme has nailed customer loyalty due to its mix of personalised offers coupled with the ability to give to charity. Ensure your rewards reflect what customers say matters to them most.

7. Leverage Personalisation

Customers love to be noticed and appreciated. Use data analytics to personalise your communications – from greeting customers by name in emails to suggesting products based on past purchases. Amidst a sea of noise, personalisation can set your brand apart with the subtle signal that you truly care about the preference of every single customer.

8. Create Engaging Content

Establish your brand as an industry leader by publishing high-value, engaging content. Publish informative, entertaining, or inspirational blogs, videos, or podcasts. Good-quality content not only helps in acquiring new customers but also helps keep the already existing ones engaged with a deeper sense of attachment with your brand.

9. Encourage and Act on Feedback

Requesting customer feedback proves that you consider their opinions. Furthermore, following through on the feedback that is given to you creates trust.

Regularly ask your customers how to improve their experience, and visibly change your operations based on customer suggestions. When customers witness their input forming part of your brand, they feel much more invested in your brand’s success.

10. Foster a Sense of Community

Build a community around your brand where customers can connect with you and each other. Social media groups, live events, or exclusive membership clubs are excellent platforms for cultivating this sense of belonging. A strong community makes customers feel like they’re part of something bigger, strengthening their loyalty.

11. Adapt and Innovate

To be competitive, your brand must move with the times. Keep up with industry trends and the changing needs of customers. Adapt to the latest developments and introduce innovative products or services that would amaze and delight customers, thus keeping your brand current and fresh.

Final thoughts …

Brand loyalty in a competitive market does not happen overnight; it takes time, consistency, and authenticity. Understand your audience, deliver exceptional experiences, and be true to your brand values. That is how you build relationships that last through the high tide of market pressures. Remember, loyal customers are your greatest asset-nurture them, and your brand will thrive.

For more insights on brand strategy and customer engagement, visit Brandspeak. Let us help your brand be different and shine brightly, even in the most competitive environment.

Jeremy Braune

There’s a misbelief that brand tracking remains the preserve of established brands with significant research budgets. In this article, we outline what start-up brands can gain from brand tracking and why it’s important to be tracking from the start.

Let’s start with the benefits of brand tracking. You can find a fuller explanation as well as more in-depth articles on brand tracking on our website.

The Main Benefits of Brand Tracking from Day One

But to summarise, the six main benefits of (early-stage) brand tracking are the ability to:

Monitor the overall strength of your brand
Track key brand metrics
Compare brand performance against your competitors
Understand your brand’s stature amongst different audiences
Link brand performance with marketing activities
And ultimately, grow market share and increase profitability

We would argue that these benefits are as applicable to start-ups as they are to established brands. In fact, a start-up brand that enjoys these benefits by deploying brand tracking from Day 1 will gain competitive advantage, particularly over other start-up competitors or indeed any competitors not investing in brand tracking.

Another advantage of being a Day One brand tracking company is that tracking will be embedded into your company culture from the start, helping to ensure that:

The brand is placed at the heart of the business
The value you place on the brand (and branding) is clearly demonstrated

And with brand tracking being there from the start, its integrity is protected, avoiding it being highjacked and used as a general consumer research tool – the downfall of many an historical brand tracker.

Budget Constraints

Next, we consider how best to address the likely budgetary challenges facing any start-up that wishes to undertake early-stage brand tracking but needs to make a relatively small budgets go a long way.

It’s important that you find a research agency that is able to tailor your brand tracker to your brand’s needs and budget in the early days, whilst also building in the flexibility to extend the brand tracker over time..

We could call this version of brand tracking the ‘lite’ or ‘skinny version’. And by skinny we mean being hyper-focused on the four elements that determine overall tracker cost:

1. The number of questions asked: one of the key variables impacting brand tracker cost is the time it takes for respondents to complete a brand tracking survey. The old adage that time is money applies here, and rightly so.

Consumers must be fairly compensated for the time they have taken to share their knowledge and opinions and therefore the variable costs of a 15 -minute survey are proportionately higher than one that is say, around 5 minutes long.

The skinny version should lean towards the shorter survey – one that focuses on the key brand metrics and includes just two to three, key competitors.

2. Sample sizes: this is another (and understandable) variable that impacts on fees. The more people interviewed in a brand tracking survey, the more it will cost.

As with any data set, as a general rule, bigger is better, but in real life we make pragmatic compromises all the time and that’s what we need to do with sample sizes. The good news is that we can be smart about how we build up our overall sample size, ensuring that the data still provides for statistically robust analysis and tracking of the key audiences.

3. The frequency of waves: by now the picture should be clear – it’s a numbers game! The more questions asked and the more people asked together have a multiplier effect.

Another multiplier is how often brand tracking waves are run. Setting budget aside for a moment, there’s no fixed cadence for brand tracking and the ideal frequency should be determined by category dynamics; how active the category is and how susceptible it is to quick changes.

In fact, wave frequency doesn’t have to be at equidistant points in time. It might be more appropriate to run a first wave prior to a four-month summer campaign, another just after the campaign has finished, and then another just before the next summer’s campaign.

However, when it comes to the lite version of tracking, it’s better to think in terms of 6-monthly or annual waves, rather than quarterly or monthly ones.

4. The reporting: to an extent, we will have already built hyper-focus into the reporting by incorporating a shorter survey, with more targeted sample sizes, and optimised frequency.

However, there is still more that can be done. Rather than an in-depth analysis followed by a face-to-face presentation and workshop, the skinny brand tracker can provide an online dashboard that displays pre-agreed brand metrics whilst also providing you with the ability to download the data, run charts, and even carry out your own quick analysis.

The elements above that define an early-days brand tracker are all about making compromises whilst being hyper-focused on what really matters; the ‘must-haves’ rather than the ‘nice-to-haves’.

What shouldn’t be compromised on is the research target audience. It’s imperative that this is specified correctly from the start and doesn’t change. As a rule of thumb, the brand tracking research audience should be category users. The definition can be decided on at the outset and it’s best to spend some time thinking about this and getting it right, as changes down the line can throw out wave-on-wave comparisons.

Bread and Depth of Insights

One of the truisms of any brand tracker is that key brand health metrics such as historical and current usage, future consideration, brand loyalty, and brand perceptions, can only be asked of those respondents that are already aware of the brand.

The challenge for any start-up brand is that, in the early days, brand awareness is likely to be very low, and as such, it makes no sense to ask brand tracker questions relating to this metric. And ergo, there’ll be no data on your own brand health, at least at the start.

But there is still significant value in the initial investment:

The brand health of the competitor landscape is being tracked, and as such you’re gaining cross-market intelligence of what’s happening in your category – who’s doing well and why
You know where you started from. If your brand awareness is zero, you know that’s the start point and from there you can track your relative performance and improvement over the months and years ahead

As we hope to have demonstrated, it is possible for start-up brands to run brand tracking from Day One and that there is a clear, competitive rationale for doing so – one that will enable you to take you brand further – and faster.

For more information on brand tracking for start-ups please contact Mark Bagnall at Jeremy@brandspeak.co.uk.

Jeremy Braune

A customer segmentation is arguably one of the most strategically useful research projects you’ll commission. Done well, it will direct your marcomms strategy and your product/service development, ensuring your efforts are focused on the most valuable customer segments in the market place. To find out more about the fundamentals of a customer segmentation, read our article here.

There are two key activities involved in a customer segmentation that are pertinent to this article:

The gathering of a substantial and robust data set. Primarily captured through an extensive questionnaire administered to a large and broad cross section of category users / buyers.
The application of advanced analytical tools to identify how many segments existing in the marketplace, what sets them apart from each other (i.e. their demographic, behavioural, and attitudinal characteristics) and the relative size of each segment as a percentage of the whole marketplace.

Add to these the development of segment personas and other deliverables including company roll-out, and as one might imagine, the whole journey of commissioning and then delivering a customer segmentation is intensive and time consuming for all parties involved, including you as the client.

The Shortcoming of a Traditional Segmentation

A customer segmentation captures a snapshot in time and as such has an effective half-life. This is because the further in time we move away from the moment of its inception, the less of a true reflection it is of the current customer marketplace. As a result, the useful ‘working life’ of a customer segmentation is between 3 and 5 years – the differential can be affected by how fast moving a particular category is or a significant market/country/global event. The COVID pandemic is a good example of the latter as it changed the way people work and play, and what they choose to spend their money on.

A Future Possibility

To move beyond this shortcoming, we suggest a reappraisal of the ways in which a customer segmentation is set up, executed, and delivered. An approach that harnesses the proliferation of computational power and digital technologies to capture and analyse data in real-time to create living, dynamic segments that don’t suffer from having a relatively limited working life.

Perhaps the best way to explain this is to call out the traditional approach and then compare that with the suggested new approach. We’ll start with data capture.

the traditional approach:
1. design an in-depth questionnaire comprising of circa 45-50 questions
2. capture the data over a short, fixed period in time, circa 1-2 weeks
3. survey a robust sample size of circa 1,500 category users / buyers
the new approach;
1. design a series of short, quick-to-answer surveys (approx. 4-5 questions) that are individually discrete but pieced together, overall cover the totality of the questioning including in the traditional questionnaire
  - use AI-driven imputation to generate a comprehensive data set, drawn from the discrete variables captured in the bite-sized surveys
2. apply an ‘always on’ approach to data capture, ensuring a constant feed of real-time information on customer demographics, behaviours, and attitudes
3. survey thousands of category users / buyers

And next we’ll look at the application of segmentation analytics and identification of the segments:

the traditional approach:
1. An intensive two week period of data analysis using statistical methods including Factor analysis, Cluster analysis, and Discriminant Analysis to identify the segments in terms of the factors and features that set them apart from the other segments, and the size of the market each segment occupies.
2. Followed by a round of collaborative sessions between the research agency, the analytics experts, and the end client to look over and decide on which ‘segment solution’ to adopt, i.e. do we opt for the four, five, or six segment solution?
3. Bring the segments to life as customer personas, presented back in a formal presentation and/or workshop.
the new approach:
1. Retain the period of data analysis using statistical methods including Factor analysis, Cluster analysis, and Discriminant Analysis to identify the segments
2. And as before, decide on which ‘segment solution’ to adopt
3. Bring the segments to life as customer personas, hosted in an online environment, providing you with constant and ready access to your key customers segments along with the insights into how to most effectively reach and communicate with them
4. Then refresh the segmentation analytics every 6-8 weeks to track shifts in behaviours, attitudes, and demographic profiling across and within the segments

Conclusion

By harnessing the current computer power coupled with digital technologies (and untethering ourselves from the traditions of how a customer segmentation is set-up, executed, and delivered) we can move beyond the current shortcomings and provide you (our clients) with a living, breathing reflection of the real-world customer landscape. One that can tell you who your most important segments are, how to connect with them, and how they’re changing over time.

Jeremy Braune

In the digital space, where information spreads like wildfire, a brand’s reputation becomes highly vulnerable to crises. A negative review by a customer can go viral, and even ads can get misinterpreted, destroying years of trust and creating a PR crisis. This is where brand tracking comes into play and contributes much to crisis management. It helps a company keep its finger on the pulse of brand perception, catches early warning signals of trouble, and acts quickly to prevent possible crises from getting worse.

This blog explores how ongoing brand tracking can protect brand reputation through the detection and mitigation of emerging crises before they spiral out of control.

What is Brand Tracking?

Brand tracking encompasses the methodological procedures behind the process of continuous monitoring and measurement of brand perception within its target audience.

It is a technique that combines data from surveys, social media, customer feedback, questionnaires, and media coverage to measure fluctuations in brand sentiment and awareness. Brand tracking aims to give a crystal clear picture of the performance of the brand through the consumers’ eyes and allows shifts in public perception (which could signal a problem) to be detected.

Brand Reputation Matters

Before going into the details of how brand tracking will support crisis management, let’s outline why brand reputation matters. Perhaps the most prized asset of a brand is its reputation, because reputation influences consumer trust, purchasing decisions, and finally, loyalty over the long term. A good reputation typically leads to higher levels of customer retention, word-of-mouth recommendation, and brand resilience when a marketplace or economy is hit by adverse conditions.

On the other hand, a negative reputation can kill sales, destroy shareholder value, and sometimes even lead to legal or regulatory repercussions. With news and opinions now capable of spreading so rapidly thanks to social media, managing and protecting brand reputation is more challenging than ever.

Branding Tracking during Crisis Management

Ongoing brand tracking helps companies identify and understand the information that can be used to anticipate and manage any potential PR crisis.

There are various ways in which brand tracking can do this, including:

1. Early Detection of Negative Sentiment

The greatest advantage of brand tracking is perhaps that of being able to detect a change in sentiment before it has actually become a full-fledged crisis.

Businesses can use real-time feedback from social media, review platforms, and online forums to identify negative trends early. For example, the sudden rise in negative comments on a brand’s Twitter feed or serious criticism of reviews on a product page serves as a warning that something is amiss. These early signals enable the firm to deal with the issue quickly before it gathers momentum and explodes into the wider public domain.

2. Knowing the Root of the Crisis

Of course, not all negative feedback means that there is an imminent threat to a brand’s reputation. However, some issues have the potential of blowing out of proportion if left unattended. Brand tracking tools enable a business to identify the root cause of a problem through analysis of patterns in the data.

For instance, if a brand only receives quality complaints from a particular region or demographic audience, a brand tracker can be configured to identify this, meaning that a solution can be formulated to directly target the source of dissatisfaction, thereby minimising the possibility of worsening the situation.

3. Real-time Response and Crisis Containment

Speed is of the essence in crisis management. The faster the brand can move when a negative situation arises, the better it will be able to contain the damage.

Real-time brand tracking can be configured to enable companies to identify and respond to defamatory sentiment and misinformation with speed. For example, in the event that a defamatory rumour starts to make its rounds online, in a matter of minutes, a brand tracker which incorporates social media listening can alert the company to the issue. This will then enable the brand to take immediate action to clarify the situation or issue an apology, or correct false information with regard to the nature of the crisis.

4. Measuring the Effectiveness of Crisis Response

Having taken action to resolve the crisis, the brand’s ability to measure the effectiveness of its response is paramount. Brand tracking data reveals how public perception evolves in a post-crisis world.

Monitoring changes in sentiment, brand mentions, and customer feedback may reveal whether taken actions were successful in restoring trust, or if further intervention is needed.

With continuous tracking, the brand can be proactive in making necessary adjustments to its strategy in the journey of restoring customer confidence in it.

5. Long-term Brand Resilience

Brand tracking aids not only in controlling a crisis but also in building resilience in the long run. With periodic assessment of relevant brand perceptions, a business can identify weaknesses or points of vulnerability that wouldn’t necessarily become evident through the daily grind of operations.

In this way, a brand can take pre-emptive steps to avoid certain crises that could have come their way. Also, brands that understand the concerns of the customers and show receptiveness in the form of feedback are more likely to establish strong and continuing relationships with their audience.

How to Effectively Implement Brand Tracking

To maximise the benefits of brand tracking for crisis management, there are some key measures that can be taken:

Combining automated and manual tools: Automated social listening tools should be used in combination with more manual methodologies, such as customer surveys, to deliver a full view of brand sentiment.
Benchmarking: Continuously benchmarking and comparing levels of brand sentiment, share of voice, and customer satisfaction.
Channels: Tracking brand perception across different channels so that the brand is being monitored across social media, review sites, news outlets, and direct customer feedback.
Acting fast: A problem, once identified, requires rapid and clear responses to hold the fire from spreading.

Conclusion

When brands are under constant public scrutiny, maintaining a good reputation appears to get tougher day by day. Ongoing brand tracking forms the backbone of crisis management as it can help companies identify issues well in advance, react fast, and understand the effectiveness of the remedial actions they have put in place.

Jeremy Braune

Today, more than ever, consumers are bombarded with messages from all corners. Gone are the days when one-size-fits-all worked for a brand. To connect with an audience meaningfully, any business needs to craft communications and experiences that are personal and relevant. This is where customer segmentation really works its magic: segmenting discrete groups of an audience based on particular characteristics gives a brand the power to craft marketing strategies that can resonate so much more deeply.

Why Personalisation is no Longer Optional

Today’s customer expects more than ever from the brands they interact with. That means, among other things, a need for them to feel understood and appreciated, and that equates to receiving marketing messages relevant to them. In fact, 71% of consumers today expect a personalised experience, with many openly admitting to getting frustrated when brands blow it.

Personalisation is no longer a nicety; it’s a necessity. If done right, personalisation nurtures connections and helps build trust, driving conversions. But one cannot do personalised marketing without profound knowledge of the audience, and this is where customer segmentation comes into effect.

Image Credit: McKinsey & Company – The value of getting personalization right—or wrong—is multiplying

What is Customer Segmentation?

Essentially, customer segmentation means separating your customers into small groups based on some common traits among them. These can be demographic traits like age, gender, and location; behavioural traits like purchase history and browsing patterns; or psychographic traits that include lifestyle, values, and interests.

Segmentation enables the brand to slice into big, diverse audiences groups that are more manageable with which to craft messages that will speak very specifically to the needs and desires of each group. For instance, a skin care brand may need to sell anti-ageing products to older customers and acne treatments to a younger audience. It is about relevance, and segmentation helps you get there.

You can read more about the process and importance of segmentation on Brandspeak’s Customer Segmentation Research page.

The Benefits of Segmentation for Brands

Segmentation is much more than a buzzword. It’s a powerful tool that can help brands sharpen their marketing strategies in a number of ways:

More Targeted Messaging: With better targeted messaging segmentation, one can speak more precisely to the needs of the audience. Rather than publishing generic messages to your entire list, you can create content that tends to address the needs and interests of each segment. A travel company may want to make young professionals aware of budget travel deals while targeting high-income families with luxury holiday offers.
Efficiency in the Use of Resources: Each brand wants to get the most value from their marketing budget, and that is where segmentation comes in. By identifying high-value customer segments, you will know where to allocate resources for maximum effect. Targeted campaigns translate into less waste and higher efficiency.
Stronger customer relationships: Consumers today do not look for just a product or service but a relationship with the brands they patronise. This means segmentation lets you know your customers on a much deeper level and thus communicate with them personally and thoughtfully. This level of personalisation fosters loyalty, in turn contributing to higher retention rates.
Improved Customer Retention: It is infinitely cheaper to retain one customer than to gain a new one. Segmentation allows you to keep a close eye on customer behaviour and thus design appropriate marketing strategies that keep their attention and interest. A personalised discount or even a ‘we miss you’ email would do the trick if a customer hasn’t ordered in a long while.
Informed Decision Making: Segmentation is based on data, and that data will have much to say about what drives your customers. Whether it is their purchasing behaviour or the content they create that should help drive your marketing strategy and create better-informed decisions on how to engage your audience.

Personalisation in Action

Let me illustrate this with an example. Suppose you operate a small bakery outlet in the UK, whose clients range from busy working professionals to families with toddlers and young children. Applying segmentation may reveal that the office workers, who must commute daily, particularly like the morning coffee and croissant deal. Knowing this, one can develop an early bird offer for this type of customer by instituting a discount before 9 am.

On the other hand, it may be that families prefer larger family-sized portions and weekend treats. If you can target this group with your marketing messages at weekends, offering family-sized cakes, for example, or discounts for children’s birthday cakes, you are far more likely to receive positive responses. Both groups are receiving different marketing messages, yet both are made to feel valued and understood.

Why Customer Segmentation is a Must

Today, it’s not just a matter of casting a wide net and hoping to catch a few customers. Brands today have to get personal if they want to thrive. Customer segmentation lets businesses understand their audience on a deeper level and thus provide targeted, personalised marketing that speaks directly to their customers’ needs.

In the competitive landscape, segmentation is a powerful tool. With the help of segmentation, businesses can connect meaningfully, boost engagement, and drive growth.

To read more about the benefits of customer segmentation, refer to Brandspeak’s Customer Segmentation Research and learn how your brand can benefit from a more targeted approach.

Jeremy Braune

Riding out a recession

When times are tough, the impulse is to cut back. Consumers do so by avoiding ‘luxuries’ and trading down to own-label goods. Businesses do so by looking for opportunities to make savings across the board. However, whilst it may feel like a recession is a good time to cut back on expenses such as marketing and research; we disagree. Not only should you retain your research spend so you can understand consumer behaviour and adjust accordingly, but we believe that investing now in a brand tracker could actually safeguard your brand and help to recession-proof your marketing.

How do consumers behave in a recession?

Consumer behaviour is complex at the best of times and in a cost-of-living crisis, all bets are off. According to the Harvard Business Review, consumers can be allocated to one of four different groups during a recession, based on the attitudes and behaviours they exhibit:

Slam-On-The-Brakes. These are consumers who have been hard hit by the downturn and need to decrease their spending accordingly. It’s worth noting that this group can be made up of not just low-income consumers but also high-income consumers who simply have more anxiety and caution in their behaviour.
Pained-But-Patient. This segment tends to be the least affected by unemployment during times of recession. They are often positive about the long-term but more nervous about the short-term effects of recession on their standard of living. If economic news worsens, this group may transition to become Slam-On The-Brakes.
Comfortably Well-Off. These consumers tend to live frugally and have confidence that they can weather the storm and wait out the downturn. The group reflects those in the top 5% of earners, as well as those with fewer means who are nonetheless financially stable.
Live-For-Today. These individuals are typically younger consumers with little in the way of responsibilities and liabilities. They tend to delay big purchases but still indulge in consumer electronics and experiences, so as not to miss out on any trends.

All four groups broadly regard the different products and services they consume as one of the following:

Essentials: items necessary for survival or perceived as central to well-being.
Treats: indulgences whose immediate purchase is considered justifiable.
Postponables: needed or desired items whose purchase can be reasonably put off.
Expendables: unnecessary or unjustifiable

However, each group’s behaviour towards the individual categories is different, and changes further, depending on the economic conditions.

Image Credit: Harvard Business Review – How to Market in a Downturn (hbr.org)

What is a brand tracker anyway?

Brand tracking is the process of monitoring the health and performance of a brand over time. Brand health and performance can be evaluated using a variety of methods including social media listening, analysis of online reviews, qualitative interviews, focus groups, customer service feedback and website analytics. However, for the most effective and flexible way to measure brand health, we recommend a purpose-built, quantitative, longitudinal brand-tracking survey – a brand tracker.

One of the key benefits of a brand tracking agency is that they enable you to tailor its content so that it only focuses on the metrics your brand requires to inform decision-making regarding future marketing strategy, brand positioning, product development, customer service and other brand-related issues.

How does a brand tracker help safeguard my brand?

Consumers don’t react uniformly to a downturn so you need to understand how different elements of your target audience will react to your brand. This is likely to reflect a combination of the following:

The extent to which they are financially exposed
Their wider attitude towards spending versus saving
How they categorise your brand: is it an Essential (hopefully) or an Expendable

The default brand response in a recession is to lower prices, or costs, or both. However, that only addresses Point 1. above. A better response to Point 3., might be a communications campaign that repositions your brand as Essential rather than Expendable, or in the case of Point 2., a bundling offer and communications campaign that illustrates the cost saving to be made, by buying in larger quantities.

Of course, identifying which action(s) to take requires access to suitably insightful data. Not necessarily lots of data, just the right data. And this is where brand tracking comes in. The data provided by a tracker will typically allow responses to key metrics to be analysed according to household income.

These standard tracker metrics are sufficient for brand owners to determine the extent to which recession is impacting:

Sales
Market share
Brand loyalty
Brand preference and usage

They can also reveal the extent to which perceptions of the brand and its perceived relevance are also being undermined by the economic conditions. Of course, whichever course of action is most appropriate, it still needs to be identified quickly – market conditions change rapidly, and brand owners need to be able to act quickly and appropriately, if they are to minimize the impact of the downturn.

Why is data so important?

During a recession, customer attitudes and behaviours can change quickly, so the ability to access the right customer data at the right time is essential. A brand tracker can act as an early warning system, to identify not just when the downturn is affecting your sales but, more importantly, your core brand equity and future purchase intent. It can also give you a means of evaluating the impact of your marketing strategy versus those of your competitors.

We would argue that the job of protecting the brand is a higher priority than addressing a fall-off in sales because your brand is for the long term. Recessions typically only last 6-15 months, on average, so while drops in sales are painful in the short term, a damaged brand can be terminal.

So, how will a brand tracker recession-proof my brand?

Your brand tracker can monitor all the metrics required to monitor brand health, including awareness, loyalty, intention to purchase, brand values and competitor activity and comparisons. In hard times it is also important to be flexible. At least 80% of your brand metrics should be constant and repeated with each wave. However, your tracker can also include a flexi-section, where individual metrics can be changed on a wave-by-wave basis. This flexibility ensures that your tracker is always able to take full account of changing market conditions and any campaign activity that could influence results.

Brand tracking guides you in directing your marketing investments where they will yield the most success given the economic climate. Whether you need to boost awareness, refine your relevance, or run better campaigns, brand tracking data ensures you don’t dilute your brand message.

By implementing a brand tracker as a lens when the going gets tough, you will become more attuned to how your consumers are reacting to your comms strategy and learn which campaigns and messaging resonates best and performs best with your customers. Perhaps a tracker will reveal which different channels have become more important. Or that advertising that you created before the cost-of-living crisis is likely to appear tone deaf in the current climate. Having a tracker in place will allow you to be proactive as well as reactive and agile to the state of flux in the economy. Measures you may take as a result of insight from your brand tracker could include:

Creating offers and payment structures to help alleviate the economic pressures
Delivering more (frequent) empathetic brand communications, reflecting the pressures customers are facing
The development of longer-lasting strategies to deal with more fundamental changes in customer attitudes and behaviours
Responding to successful competitor activity with the right initiatives and campaigns

Getting on the front foot with the data will give you an edge over your competitors, who are all vying for the attention of the overwhelmed public – whether they are the Slam-On The-Brakes variety or the Live-For-Today. Your brand wants to be the voice of certainty, security, relatability and grounded reassurance, and you can only do that by getting under the skin of how you consumers are feeling. This can only be discovered through the data obtained from a robust brand tracker that adapts and asks the right questions.

Summary

The recession-proofing power of brand tracking is the best weapon in your market research arsenal because it will provide the data that helps you navigate your way out of an economic downturn. It can help you gain competitive advantage, maintain brand resilience and give your marketing and advertising messaging the nuances and relevance to resonate with your consumers. Ultimately, it is about building trust and ensuring that with what reduced expenditure they have, your brand is one they will invest in and ride out the recession with, to better times ahead.

If you want to speak to our in-house expert regarding all things trackers, contact our Head of Quant Mark Bagnall today, on +44 (0)7825 303 244 or at Jeremy@brandspeak.co.uk

Jeremy Braune

Competitor analysis services

Anyone who has ever come last in the egg and spoon race at school sports day may still be pondering, many years later, why everything must be a competition. But, deep down, we all know that getting a medal just for participation doesn’t cut it.

Competition is a necessary and important part of life. In a business context, competition drives innovation, increases consumer choice and promotes economic growth. You just need to be sure that it is your business that is innovating and growing more effectively than your competitors. That’s where competitor analysis market research comes in.

In this article we explore the subject of competitor analysis (also called competitive analysis or competitor research) and its vital importance to any brand wishing to establish or maintain competitive advantage.

We explain what competitor analysis is, the different ways in which it can be undertaken, and when up-to-date competitor insight is essential for brand success. We’ll also identify the issues to consider when looking for an agency to undertake competitor research on your behalf.

What is competitor analysis research?

Competitor analysis in market research is the process of gathering and evaluating information about competing companies or organisations within your category or market. It involves studying and analysing the strategies, products or services, strengths, weaknesses, market positioning, customer base and any other relevant factors relating to direct competitors.

The primary goal of competitor analysis is to gain insights into the competitive landscape and understand how rival companies are operating to inform your decision-making and support your marketing and innovation strategy. It provides a comprehensive understanding of market dynamics and helps identify potential opportunities and threats.

It can be done as stand-alone research or incorporated into other types of research. For example, competitor analysis is integral to brand tracking – it is hard to understand how your own brand is performing without the context of other brands in the market.

What is the difference between competitor analysis and competitive analysis?

In practice, the terms ‘competitor analysis’ and ‘competitive analysis’ are often used interchangeably and refer to the process of examining and evaluating the competitive landscape in a particular industry or market. However, some may argue for a slight distinction between the two terms.

Competitive analysis can be seen as a broader term that encompasses the analysis of not only direct competitors but also the overall competitive environment. It involves assessing various factors that influence competition in the market, such as industry trends, market dynamics, customer preferences, regulatory factors, technological advancements, and other macro-level influences. Competitive analysis aims to gain a holistic understanding of the competitive landscape beyond just individual competitors.

Benefits of competitor analysis

There are many benefits of conducting competitor analysis, as follows:

Gaining insights into competitor strategies: by conducting thorough research into your competitors’ product and service portfolio, pricing, advertising, customer base and positioning, you should be able to understand a great deal about their marketing strategies – which will help you to identify your own strengths and weaknesses.
Understanding consumer preferences: do other brands attract a different customer base? Are they eating into your target base? What are they doing that attracts those customers and are there gaps in the market that you could fill?
Understanding pricing strategies: pricing is complex – why are some brands perceived as premium and others as bargain basement? For example, consumers are happy to pay more for Apple phones because they perceive them as high quality, innovative and conferring status.
Informing innovation: looking at what competitors are doing well can give you ideas, and looking at what they are not doing can also highlight opportunities and demonstrate where there are unmet needs that your brand may be better placed to fill.
Understanding your own business: we all know it isn’t healthy to compare ourselves with others. But for brands, comparison can be extremely helpful in providing context to better understand your own approach, know where you are vulnerable and get clarity on how you are perceived by your customers and prospects.
Identifying industry trends: by seeing where competitors are successful and where they are placing their marketing efforts, you will gain an impression of the direction of travel of the category or wider market.
Gain competitive advantage: this is the ultimate goal and benefit of competitor analysis – the insights gained through this type of research will enable you to improve your ability to compete in your market.

How to conduct competitor analysis

There are five key steps to conducting an effective competitor analysis.

Identify your competitor set: this may include both direct and indirect competitors. Direct competitors offer similar products or services, whereas indirect competitors may provide alternative ways to achieve the same customer benefit. For example, Uber competes directly with traditional taxi services, but indirectly with other forms of public transport, or with driving. You need to research both.
Define the scope and objectives: what do you want to analyse about your competitors and how are you going to use the results? You could include any or all the following: product offerings, branding, pricing strategies, marketing and advertising efforts, distribution channels, target market, customer base, and competitive advantages.
Plan and conduct your data collection: this will include primary research with consumers as well as secondary research, looking at websites, social media, industry reports and press coverage. Primary research will typically involve online surveys but can also include qualitative research such as focus groups or depth interviews to help get a more in-depth understanding of the competitive landscape.
Analyse your data: SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) is a useful framework for competitive analysis – strengths and weaknesses are internal to your business whereas opportunities and threats are external, dictated by the competitive environment.
Monitor and update: competitor analysis should be an ongoing process. The frequency with which you need to refresh your competitor analysis will depend on business and market dynamics, as discussed further below. For example, in a mature market, the landscape will be unlikely to change rapidly, so less frequent research will still be effective.

How to use competitor analysis research

Competitor analysis research can be used at any stage of the product life cycle and as part of, or in addition to, other types of market research. It’s sometimes not clearly defined as competitor analysis research – for example, branding research will always gather opinions about competitor brands, but will be called brand research, rather than competitor analysis research.

NPD – competitor analysis can help you generate ideas, identify gaps in the market or unmet consumer needs.
Branding and positioning – competitor analysis is an integral part of branding and positioning research as you are always defining your positioning relative to the other brands in the market.
Customer segmentation – understanding how consumers relate to competitors can be helpful in dividing the market and prioritising which segments to target.
New market entry – competitor analysis is key here. If you are looking to enter new markets or extend your brand into adjacent markets, it is crucial to have a clear understanding of the space you are trying to occupy. Are there a lot of small brands, or a few big dominant brands? How have the market dynamics changed over time and what is the direction of travel?

How often should competitor analysis be conducted?

As so often, the answer is ‘it depends’. In this case, it depends on factors including the nature of the industry, the pace of market changes, and the specific goals of your business. However, as a general guideline, it is recommended to conduct competitor analysis regularly to stay up to date with market dynamics.

In industries with rapid technological advancements or intense competition, it may be beneficial to conduct competitor analysis more frequently, such as quarterly or semi-annually. This enables you to closely monitor your competitors’ actions and changes in the market. For industries with slower-paced changes or less competition, conducting competitor analysis on an annual basis may be sufficient. However, even in such cases, it is important to keep a pulse on the market and stay aware of any emerging trends or shifts in customer preferences that may impact your business.

Working with a competitor analysis company

If you are new to conducting competitor analysis research, it is helpful to understand what the process of working with a competitor analysis company will involve. In every case, you should expect to go through a detailed briefing process. This does require you to think carefully about what your objectives are for the project and how you will know if you have been successful. Often, competitor analysis companies can help you to put a brief together – some offer templates – and should certainly have a consultative approach, questioning the brief that you deliver, to help refine the process.

Following the briefing, the competitor analysis agency will typically produce a proposal which steers you through the choice of methods as well as pricing and timing. The agency will be able to help you understand whether you should be conducting stand-alone competitive research or weaving an understanding of the competition through a separate piece of research. They will also help you to understand whether you should be conducting a one-off ad-hoc research project or looking to set up a program of ongoing tracking.

How to choose a competitor analysis agency

We recommend you ask prospective competitor analysis agencies the three following questions:

What experience do you have of similar work? Ask to see case studies and/or client testimonials.
Who will be working on my project and what skills and experience do they bring? Ask whether the senior team members that you meet at the beginning of the project will be involved all the way through.
What methods will you use? Can the team explain why they have proposed particular methods and why they are better than the alternatives? How transparent are the methods? Are there ‘black box’ processes or research products that are ‘one size fits all’ or do you get a truly tailored approach that is right for your business?

Summary

It’s a tough world out there, but we know that we need competition to stimulate us to try harder and to work smarter. Without competition, there would be no growth, and without competitor analysis research, your brand might just be the last one over the finish line. And there is no participation medal for companies that fall behind.

To find out more about competitor analysis research contact Jeremy@brandspeak.co.uk or call us on +44 (0) 203 858 0052.

Image attribution: Photo by Daniel Herron on Unsplash

Commentators have been predicting the death of brand tracking for as long as I’ve been in research, which is over 20 years. A quick Google search uncovers headlines such as “Is brand tracking irrelevant?” and “How to revive your brand tracker.” But what are these articles really saying? We read some so you don’t have to and – surprise, surprise – none of them actually say that it is no longer important, relevant or useful to track key brand metrics to assess brand performance and stay on top of brand health.

So why the headlines? Betteridge’s law of journalism says that when a headline ends in a question mark, the answer is always no. But if we were to frame the question differently, “Is traditional brand tracking dead?”, we might come up with a different answer.

Most of the articles on the death of brand tracking fall into one (or sometimes both) of two camps:

To sell a new brand tracking product, technology or approach by highlighting problems with traditional brand tracking to make a case for the ‘new improved’ version.
To move the industry forward; thought-leadership pieces exploring how traditional brand tracking can and should evolve to be more useful and responsive

To really understand what’s happening, we need to look in more detail at what these articles are really saying and, in particular, the term ‘traditional’ in the context of brand tracking. We can take this to mean ‘the way brand tracking is currently being set-up, run, and delivered’.

What is traditional brand tracking?

As a thought experiment, lets travel back in time to the 1990s when brand tracking interviews were carried out either face-to-face or over the phone (and a landline at that). The advent of the internet and the beginnings of an idea that online research could be cheaper and faster than traditional methods was likely the cause of mutterings about the death of the brand tracker at that time. Although they were more likely to have been discussions in the pub, or possibly conference papers than blogs; although the first blog is thought to have been written in 1994, corporate blogging didn’t take off until the new millennium.

Skip forward a few years and the majority of brand tracking interviews were indeed conducted over the internet; brand tracking didn’t die-off, but one of its traditions – face to face and telephone interviewing – did. And over the years what used to be ‘new and improved’ – online brand tracking – has become today’s traditional approach.

We think brand tracking, in some format or other, is as unlikely to die as branding itself. While there are brands, brand managers need to know how they are performing, and a brand tracking agency will develop brand tracking studies to help them to do so.

Brand tracking traditions that need to die

But we do think that there are some elements of traditional brand tracking that can be done away with or improved. Some of the issues that exist with brand tracking include the following:

Frequency: traditional brand tracking often captures data at specific intervals (e.g., quarterly or annually). This approach can miss out on recent changes in sentiment and can mean it takes too long to spot emerging trends.
The ‘rear view mirror’: compounding the problem of frequency, brand tracking surveys tend to be large and unwieldy and take a long time to analyse and produce results. This means that by the time brand managers get results, they are in the past and not actionable. The pace of business has increased rapidly, and backwards-looking data is not as effective in predicting future shifts or trends.
Quantitative emphasis: many brand tracking studies lean heavily on quantitative data, sometimes at the expense of qualitative insights, and can miss the nuance and depth of consumer emotions and perceptions.
Static survey questions: the very nature of trackers is that they stay the same so that you can track performance over time and see trends in the data. However this can be problematic in that brands aren’t static, the relationship between brands and consumers is always evolving and competitor sets change over time.
Return on investment: conducting comprehensive brand tracking research, especially using traditional methods, can be expensive and time-consuming – so it needs to deliver a return. If brand managers aren’t using the tracker to support decision-making, due to some of these issues, it can be hard to justify the expense.
Narrow view of the market: there are so many other sources of data about how consumers relate to your brand, such as online transactional data or social media which aren’t included in traditional brand trackers.
Death by PowerPoint: often brand tracking agencies take the reams of data that brand tracking surveys produce and put all of it into a presentation deck, which can be deathly to sit through.

What’s next for brand tracking?

Brand tracking agencies are getting smarter at creating the sort of brand tracking tools that brand managers need and value. For example, some of the issues around frequency and lagging metrics can be resolved by going to an ‘always on’ model of market research, rather than wave by wave with serial reporting.

Rather than endless charts and decks, agencies can present results in a self-service brand-tracking dashboard, enabling brand managers to consult the data at all times. Adding open-ended questions and bringing together other sources of data such as social media into the dashboard ecosystem helps to give a holistic view of everything happening to the brand. And the static nature of the survey can be managed by keeping one core section of the questionnaire for key metrics and adding dynamic modules that can be swapped in and out as needed. Progressive brand tracking agencies can help their clients to get the most out of their tracker and ensure that it is used to support decision making.

Changes that are in the future include using AI to create synthetic respondents which, will again reduce costs and time taken to get results. Cue cries of, “is the survey respondent dead?”, to which, as Betteridge suggests, we answer with a resounding, “no”. Currently using AI to simulate respondents is a technology that is in its infancy; as such it is subject to too many biases and concerns to be used in anger by most agencies or to be trusted by most brand managers. But AI is just another algorithm and, with time, the use of AI respondents will no doubt become an accepted part of our research methods toolkit.

So, is the brand tracker dead?

These changes all go to show that reports of the death of the brand tracker have been greatly exaggerated. And no doubt, in time to come, we will look back at what is traditional now and wonder why we ever did it that way. The traditions of brand tracking do die off to be replaced by different or better approaches that augment the whole but the brand tracker, the critically important research that helps brand managers to make decisions about their brands, lives on.

For more information on brand tracking, and how it can be used to maximise the performance of your brand, please email us at enquiries@brandspeak.co.uk, or by contacting our Head of Quantitative Research, Mark Bagnall, on +44 (0)7825 303 244

Mark Bagnall

Mark Bagnall is a Senior Partner and Head of Quantitative Research at Brandspeak. He has worked in market research for over 20 years and in this time has worked on and led many brand tracking studies across several sectors; from gaming, finance, and FMCG through to automotive. And from domestic UK studies to global trackers.

Mark draws on this expertise to provide Brandspeak clients with brand tracking studies that fit their needs and builds in the latest thinking and methodological tools.

12 Important Brand Tracking Metrics

First, here’s a quick list of the 12 important brand tracking metrics that we cover in this article:

Unprompted brand awareness
Prompted brand awareness
Emotional brand loyalty
Brand attributes
Brand personality
Need states
Brand quality
Brand satisfaction
Behavioural brand loyalty
Brand preference
Brand purchase
Brand usage occasions

What are brand tracking metrics?

In this article, we explore in detail what brand tracking metrics are and how they are used to monitor brand health. Brand health can be influenced by many things, and key brand tracking metrics can be analysed through brand tracking projects.

The term brand metrics refers to the different metrics that are derived from the questions typically included within a brand tracker.

A brand tracker is a form of ongoing market research survey used to assess your brand’s health and the impact of your marketing activity.

The results of a single brand tracker wave provide a snapshot of brand health. Results are presented for each brand tracking metric (e.g. brand awareness, brand loyalty) individually, but can also be rolled into a single, overall brand health score.

Why are brand tracking metrics important?

Your brand’s health ultimately depends on the extent to which consumers:

are aware of your brand
can bring it to mind in a purchase situation
feel that it meets their needs
are subsequently willing to (re-)purchase it

As a brand manager, without suitable, up-to-date brand tracking metrics, you are almost certainly working in the dark – lacking the critical insights required to target the issues that are undermining your brand’s ability to grow.

In addition, your brand is also more likely to be susceptible to targeted activity by competitors that are closely monitoring it, as part of their own brand-tracking activity. I.e you might not be tracking your brand at the moment, but your competitors might be tracking their own brands and yours, positioning themselves to capitalise on any opportunities.

However, by comparing brand metrics across different tracker waves over time, you can quickly identify any significant changes, so that targeted action can be taken to improve your brand’s performance, in relation to:

customer satisfaction
market share
brand loyalty
lifetime value

Figures provided by InMoment demonstrate the importance of managing these issues closely:

Nearly 50% say that they have rejected a brand to go to a competitor which they felt was better able to meet their needs
75% of loyal customers say they are likely to recommend their favoured brand to others

Brand tracking metric selection criteria

Of course, the ability of your brand tracker to drive meaningful brand growth will depend on whether you have selected the right brand metrics in the first place.

The brand tracking metrics you choose should:

Reflect your long-term brand strategy, rather than short-term brand tactics.
Be customer-centric, meaning that they accurately analyse your brand from the point of view of the target audience, rather than the way your organisation thinks about it internally.
Compare the performance of your brand to those of established and upcoming competitors. Reviewing your brand in a vacuum will provide a very misleading view of brand health.
Be actionable. Metrics that are ‘interesting’ but can’t be acted upon are of no use.
Be flexible. At least 80% of your brand metrics should be constant and repeated with each wave. However, your tracker can also include a flexi-section, where individual metrics can be changed on a wave-by-wave basis. This flexibility ensures that your tracker is always able to take full account of changing market conditions and any campaign activity that could influence results.
Encompass your brand’s distribution strategy. To obtain a realistic picture of overall brand performance, the tracker questions resulting metrics should be applicable to all channels and touchpoints used by the brand.
Be concise. Historically, brand trackers have tended to be too long! The more brand tracking metrics that are included, the more chance there is that the person completing the tracker will lose interest.

Types of Brand Metrics

Core brand tracking metrics can be divided into 3 groups: brand awareness, brand closeness and brand behaviour.

Brand awareness

This group assesses the ease and speed with which your brand is brought to mind by the target audience. It comprises:

Unprompted brand awareness
Prompted brand awareness

Brand closeness

This group focuses on the nature and extent of the relationship between brand and consumer. It includes:

Emotional brand loyalty
Brand attributes
Brand personality
Brand need states
Brand quality
Brand satisfaction

Brand behaviour

This group is concerned with the more functional aspects of the consumer’s behavioural relationship with your brand. Specific metrics include:

Brand usage occasions
Brand preference
Brand purchase frequency
Behavioural brand loyalty

Not all of these metrics may be relevant or important to your brand. The trick is to work out in advance which ones are, and how you will use the insights they provide.

Brand awareness metrics

In this section, we look at each group in more detail, and provide example tracker questions from which the individual brand tracking metrics can be derived.

Unprompted brand awareness

Quite simply, if your brand is more top-of-mind than others then it stands a better chance of being purchased.

The unprompted brand awareness metric reveals the extent to which your brand comes to mind – in the context of the sector in which it operates – without being prompted by name.

Unprompted brand awareness example question:

Thinking about brands in the [INSERT CATEGORY HERE], which brand first comes to mind? And which other brands come to mind?

If consumers are unable to recall your brand at an unprompted level, this indicates that it hasn’t yet succeeded in permeating the conscious mind and only resides in their subconscious – if at all.

Prompted brand awareness

In the brand tracker, the prompted brand awareness question typically follows the unprompted one. If there is a low level of unprompted awareness, its inclusion is particularly important, to determine whether the brand even exists in the consumer’s subconscious mind.

In a prompted brand awareness question, a shortlist of brands (including yours) is provided for the respondent to select from. For example:

Looking at the list of brands below, before today, which were you aware of?

Clearly, if this question results in a low score as well, then it means that your brand hasn’t yet achieved threshold levels of consumer awareness and has a considerable amount of work to do amongst the target audience.

Brand closeness metrics

Emotional brand loyalty

Brand loyalty is often seen as the most important metric for most brands! A loyal customer will keep purchasing from you and is more likely to forgive the occasional brand slip-up. Moreover, once the fundamentals are in place, it can cost far less to retain a loyal customer than it does to convert a new one.

In reality, there are actually two brand loyalty metrics; emotional brand loyalty and behavioural brand loyalty (discussed in more detail later).

Whilst the two metrics are usually in-step (i.e. if someone is emotionally loyal to your brand they are likely to display the same level of loyalty in their purchase and usage behaviour), they can become detached from each other.

For example, the iPhone is a social phenomenon that commands a high degree of emotional loyalty. However, its high cost may still prevent emotional loyalists from buying the latest model.

Emotional brand loyalty is often assessed using the classic Net Promoter Score question:

On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend [brand] to your family and friends?

In your own words can you tell us why you gave [brand x] a score of [insert score selected here]?

Brand attributes

How do consumers perceive your brand and its associated attributes, such as performance, reliability, and uniqueness? What comes to mind when they think of your brand and does that image reflect the one that your organisation has worked hard to create?

The ability of customers to associate specific attributes with your brand is important because they establish brand relevance, create memorability, and can even act as prompts to brand recall at the moment of purchase.

Positive brand attributes are often the result of carefully crafted marketing campaigns, but they can also reflect the use of striking packaging or a distinctive font.

A brand attributes question will typically include rating scale statements for each attribute to be assessed. For example:

Thinking about [BRAND X] how strongly do you agree with each of these statements? Please use the 5-point scale where 5 means completely and 1 means not at all.

Brand personality

This metric is closely linked to the brand attributes metric outlined above, but the questions that underlie it focus on the brand’s personality. For example, whether the brand is perceived as being ‘warm’, ‘caring’, ‘smart’, etc.

Whilst your brand’s personality is mainly derived from its marketing, it can also be inferred by customers through their experience of buying and using your product/service (versus those of your competitors), through social media and even word of mouth.

Not only does your brand’s perceived personality reveal the extent to which you have been successful in creating emotional resonance, it can also determine the extent to which it is seen to be similar to, or different from, its competitors.

The absence of key brand personality traits provides a clear understanding of where the brand needs to develop its profile if it is to increase top-of-mind awareness, resonance, and differentiation.

Example question:

Thinking about [BRAND X], how well do you associate it with the following characteristics?

Please use the 5-point scale where 5 means completely and 1 means not at all.

Need states

The need states tracker questions are used to evaluate the perceived suitability of your brand in relation to their needs and expectations. Needs can be either practical or emotional in nature.

Using yoghurt as an example, some consumers may need a low-fat healthy probiotic yoghurt to fulfil their need for physical fitness and well-being, whereas others may need a tasty treat with chocolate pieces to fulfil their need for indulgence that is still perceived as healthy.

Example question:

How well do you believe [BRAND X], meets the following requirements?

Please use the 5-point scale where 5 means completely and 1 means not at all

Brand quality

No matter how well you market your brand, if the customer’s actual experience of it is underwhelming, they are far less likely to repurchase or become brand loyalists.

When assessing brand quality, it is important to consider the issue from the point of view of the customer and the features and benefits that are of most importance to them.

For example, a brand that commands a premium price on the basis that it offers a lifetime guarantee is of little interest to a customer who is looking for a cost-effective, ‘quick fix’.

Conversely, a brand that promises years of service, only to break down or become redundant within a year or two is likely to result in future brand rejection.

The criteria used by the consumer to assess your brand’s quality may include, amongst others, the following:

Performance
Reliability
Durability
Appearance and finish
Style
Fit

To identify perceptions of brand quality, the following questions may be asked:

How would you describe our products to a friend or family member?

If you had to describe our brand in five words, which words would you choose?

Brand satisfaction

The satisfaction metric reflects the totality of the consumer’s interactions with the brand. For this reason, it is regarded by many organisations as one of the most important, along with brand loyalty.

A typical brand satisfaction metric question would be:

Overall, on a scale of 0 to 10, how satisfied are you with [brand X]?

However, this can provide a fairly ‘blunt’ measure of overall satisfaction and can actually obscure lurking issues. Therefore, it is best to supplement it with other questions that address the individual issues that can affect overall brand satisfaction and loyalty.

For example:

Price
Customer service
Staff behaviour
Product or service availability
Speed of delivery

Behavioural brand tracking metrics

Behavioural brand loyalty

Unlike emotional brand loyalty, the behavioural loyalty metric reveals the extent to which customers will actually purchase your brand in preference to others, rather than being simply emotionally wedded to it.

High levels of behavioural loyalty are important to manage the cost of customer acquisition and retention. They are also more likely to result in the spread of positive word of mouth about your brand.

A typical brand loyalty question:

Thinking about [BRAND X], which of the statements below would you most agree with?

It’s the only brand I would buy
It’s one of a few brands I would buy
It’s one of a wide range of brands I would buy
It’s not a brand I would buy

Brand preference

Brand preference is a brand tracking metric used to record the number of customers who would select your brand ahead of named competitors when presented with a brand list. As such, it provides a clear understanding of your brand’s appeal within the context of the wider marketplace.

The question can be as simple as:

Tick which brand of [product] you prefer to buy…OR

If you had to choose just one of these brands the next time you are ready to make a purchase, which one would you choose?

Brand preference is a very useful indicator of overall brand strength because it usually reflects positive sentiment across a number of other key brand metrics, including brand awareness, brand associations and brand quality.

However, it doesn’t explicitly take price into account, and this is a criterion that could still see the consumer selecting another, cheaper brand ahead of their preferred one.

Brand purchase – including frequency

Brand purchase metrics are used to determine purchase behaviours.

For example:

Frequency – how often an individual customer purchases your brand
Quantity – how much is purchased on each occasion
Location – where purchases are made
Share of wallet – how much of a consumer’s spend is devoted to a particular brand

The results are used to monitor overall sales patterns, to assess the impact of any market activity that has taken place (e.g. a communications campaign, an offer or price change), and to identify any unusual purchasing behaviour.

They can also be used as the basis for future financial and logistical planning and in association with competitor data they can be used to calculate market share.

Typical brand purchase metric questions could be:

On average, how often do you purchase [BRAND X]?

When you buy [BRAND X] on a typical occasion, how many [packs, units, pieces] would you usually buy?

Thinking about the different places you can buy [BRAND X} from, which of these would you consider?

Imagine you were buying [CATEGORY X] for a whole year, how many times would you buy each brand?

Brand usage occasions

Brand usage metrics are used to determine how and when the brand is actually being used by consumers.

They can be used to identify and quantify the different usage occasions, the individual need states that correspond to each of those occasions, the extent to which the brand is able to address each of those need states, and the volume of brand consumption on each occasion.

These metrics enable you to ensure that your product and brand communications are appropriately configured to address consumer needs and behaviour.

A typical brand occasions metric question would be:

Example Question:

Thinking about the range of occasions below, in which ones do you feel [BRAND X] is appropriate?

Which brand metrics should you track?

In this article we’ve described the brand tracking metrics most commonly used in brand trackers today, but you may not need to use all of them to monitor the health of your own brand. You should select the brand metrics that you track based on what you want to achieve with your brand tracking research.

A brand tracking agency like Brandspeak can help you choose which brand metrics you should be tracking, and will help you to use metrics to create an effective brand tracker.

Conclusion

In this article we have outlined the tried and trusted brand tracking metrics most commonly in use today, as well as a host of possible survey questions that you can use to measure these metrics.

As we have shown, many are interlinked, with their power lying in the composite picture of brand health that they provide.

However, individual metrics can also be used together with other forms of sales data, to identify and address specific challenges and opportunities at different stages in the relationship between brand and customer.

Whilst their role and prominence will vary on a brand-by-brand and strategy-by-strategy basis, the chart below shows where and how individual brand metrics can be considered, together with other data, to monitor and support the marketing focus at different stages of the customer relationship, in order to maximise loyalty and share of wallet.

As a brand tracking agency, it is Brandspeak’s job to work with you to:

Identify the most appropriate brand tracking metrics for your brand and strategy.
Ensure each, underlying question is as closely aligned to your brand and its position in the market as possible.
Advise on the most suitable brand tracking frequency.
Provide an overall brand health score that best reflects your sector and your place in it.
Use the brand tracking metrics as a diagnostic tool to provide you with the best guidance to help achieve your business and brand goals.

For more information about how brand tracking metrics can be used to transform your brand, get in touch with our team of expert researchers today.

Brand tracking is a way to invest in your brand

Your brand is one of your biggest assets. The most effective brands – the ones that we all love the most – deliver real benefits for organisations such as customer loyalty and business growth.

But what makes an effective brand? Typically, top brands have great awareness and recognition. For example, 94% of people worldwide are reported to recognise the Coca-Cola logo.

So, it makes sense to invest in your brand – and because we can’t manage what we can’t measure, one of the key investments must be in brand tracking.

What is brand tracking?

Brand tracking is a way of measuring your brand across a variety of metrics to establish brand equity, as well as other information about brand activities such as communications campaign awareness or pricing perceptions.

Brand equity is a composite measure of the value of your brand, which shows likely brand performance. Brand equity is the sum of the following elements:

Brand awareness and mental availability: Awareness refers to the extent to which consumers are familiar with and recognise a brand. Mental availability references the extent to which it readily comes to mind at time of need or at purchase. You want both to be high so that when the consumer is (for example) looking at a supermarket shelf full of competing yoghurt, cereal or hair dye brands, your yoghurt, cereal or hair dye is the one that they recognise and pick up.

Brand loyalty: The extent to which consumers consistently choose your brand over others. This is important not only in terms of the cost of acquisition and retention of customers but also in terms of the ongoing relationship – loyal customers are more likely to forgive the occasional customer service failure, for example. They are also more likely to spread positive word of mouth about your brand.

Brand image: How do consumers perceive your brand and its associated attributes, such as quality, reliability, and uniqueness? What comes to mind when they think of your brand and does that image reflect the one that your organisation has worked hard to create?

Brand associations: This refers to the emotional or psychological associations that consumers have with your brand, such as (hopefully) feelings of trust, reliability, or nostalgia. Trust is really important: research shows that 75% of people with high brand trust say they will buy the brand’s product even if it isn’t the cheapest, it is the only brand of the product they’ll buy, and they are far more likely to check out a new product from that brand to purchase.

Brand value: This is the sum of perceived benefits and corresponding value that consumers attribute to your brand, based on the extent to which they feel it meets or even exceeds their needs and expectations. Perceived brand value can subsequently have a significant influence on purchasing decisions.

Brand experience: How do consumers interact with your brand? How often do they use it, when, and where? Which are the key touchpoints and how positive is the nature of the brand experience that is delivered?

Need states: this refers to the suitability of your brand in relation to the consumers’ main need states – so what need they need your product or service to fulfil. Going back to yoghurt, for example, some consumers may need a low fat healthy probiotic yoghurt to fulfil their need for physical fitness and wellbeing, whereas others may need a tasty treat with chocolate pieces to fulfil their need for indulgence that is still perceived as healthy.

Your brand tracking metrics

Your brand tracking study may report on some – or all – of these measures individually, as well as providing an overall brand equity score. It’s important to track these measures over time, as well as tracking sales, so you can see which initiatives have been effective and how to improve your marketing.

A brand tracker will enable you to determine the health of your brand and identify the issues that need to be addressed in order to drive brand growth.

Brand tracking vs a brand tracker

So what is the difference between brand tracking and a brand tracker? Simply that brand tracking is the process, described above, and a brand tracker is the vehicle – most often a quantitative online market research survey – that is used to conduct the brand tracking process. Typically, market research agencies that specialise in brand tracking will offer brand trackers as products. In many cases, these will be standardised ‘black box’; approaches; however, at Brandspeak, we believe in a more flexible approach to brand tracking – for more on this, see our other article on brand performance measurement.

What are the benefits of brand tracking?

Brand tracking should be seen as an investment which enables you to improve your product or service to better reflect your target audience’s needs, expectations and behaviours.

Brand tracking also helps you do the following:

Measure performance: you need to understand what is happening with your brand in the market and over time – things change and tracking can help you get ahead of the curve.
Prioritise customer segments: brand tracking can be used to understand the preferences and behaviours of different customer segments. If you have an existing segmentation, you can apply this to your brand tracker to identify segments that show strong affinity, loyalty, or growth potential.
Evaluate marketing: you can test hypotheses and validate assumptions about your marketing strategies by monitoring brand metrics before and after implementing a specific strategy, and seeing if the impact aligns with your expectations. This should be an iterative process.
Generate ideas: brand tracking enables you to monitor changes in the market landscape, including shifts in consumer preferences, emerging trends, and competitive activities. This can help you identify gaps in the market where your brand can potentially fill a need or offer a unique value proposition.
Compare with competitors: by tracking key metrics for your brand as well as competitors’ brands, you can identify areas where you outperform or lag behind the competition. This information helps you understand your brand’s position in the market and informs your marketing strategy decisions.
Evaluate the impact of marketing communications: brand trackers can help evaluate comms by measuring brand metrics before and after campaigns and by measuring message resonance, recall and relevance.

Brand tracking should be seen as an investment in your brand which enables you to improve your product or service in line with customers’ needs and wants.

Brand tracking also helps you do the following:

Brand tracking methods

These days, the majority of brand tracking is conducted via online survey, which is the most cost-effective and fast way of gathering data.

However, surveys aren’t the only way to gain insight about your brand. There is scope to enhance your survey with data from additional sources such as social media, online search data, share of voice and share of spend data, internal sales data and CRM analysis and qualitative research. When you bring together these disparate data sets, it helps you get a more holistic picture of what is happening with your brand.

Brand tracking metrics

A brand tracking survey should contain the following key metrics:

Spontaneous brand awareness
Prompted brand awareness
Brand imagery associations
Brand personality associations
Product/service quality ratings
Brand preference
Brand purchase including frequency
Future purchase intent
Brand usage occasions
Brand need states fit
Brand closeness – emotional connection
Net promoter score (NPS)

In addition to the above, a tracker can also be used to evaluate the impact of a recent marketing campaign. For example, brand awareness, associations and purchase intent scores can be compared before and after the campaign has run, to determine uplift in those areas. Specific questions regarding campaign recall can also be included.

We’ve written in more depth about brand tracking metrics here.

How to design your brand tracker

There are seven key steps to follow:

1. Include the right target audiences – Your tracker should include not only your current customers, but your competitors’ customers too. If appropriate, you should also aim to include a demographic spread that will enable you to identify any age-based differences in relation to your brand.

2. Ensure you have a sample size that allows for statistically robust analysis. There is always a tension between cost and sample size, but choosing too small a sample is a false economy.

3. Determine tracking frequency – Agree on the correct frequency of tracking relative to your brand and sector dynamics. Some brand tracking agencies recommend that you conduct a brand tracker once a year, so you can compare annual results. Others suggest that quarterly is more appropriate, so you can be more aware of changes in the market and pick up on specific campaigns and changes. However, the right answer is the one that works for you and considers the size and stability of your brand and your strategic objectives.

4. Include a ‘flexi-section’ so that you can respond to special circumstances without disrupting the core questioning. Core questioning should remain stable, wave on wave, so you can compare and see trends over time, but the tracker can also be a vehicle for exploring current issues.

5. Implement ongoing and recurring reporting that enables you to visualise trends. Brand managers often use an interactive, always-on’ dashboard that shows key metrics at a glance, whilst enabling them to carry out their own data analysis and quickly export the results for internal sharing.

6. Calculate an overall aggregate brand health score drawn from all the key brand health metrics. This sounds simple but in reality can be a nuanced and complex exercise which involves careful consideration; this will be the key measure that you use to track performance so it is important to get it right. Again, there are no hard and fast rules, other than to consider what is important for your brand and your goals.

7. Carry out annual strategic deep dives using the full year’s data set. Regardless of how often you conduct your brand tracker, an annual review makes sense as part of your wider marketing strategic review. If you are interviewing more frequently than once a year, the aggregate data set will give you a larger base for more detailed analysis.

Five types of brand tracking studies & brand trackers

There are five main types of brand tracking studies to consider:

1. Consumer brand tracking

For brands that sell to consumer audiences. This form of tracking is suitable for any brand involved in the provision of goods or services to the consumer.

For example, broadband suppliers, food, clothing retailers, car manufacturers, package holiday providers and retail banks.

2. B2B brand tracking

For brands that supply other brands, rather than consumers. Brand health is vital for all brands, meaning that it is just as important that it is measured by organisations that specialise in supplying products and services to other businesses, rather than consumers.

For example, car leasing companies, facilities management companies, and organisations that provide insurance for businesses.

3. Pure brand tracking

In contrast with brand and comms tracking, pure brand tracking focuses on brand metrics only and doesn’t use the survey as a vehicle to delve into other areas of insight.

A pure brand tracker will therefore focus on core brand metrics only, like brand awareness, brand associations, brand preference and purchase intent. It won’t include analysis of any particular marketing campaigns.

4. Brand and comms tracking

Unlike pure brand tracking, brand and comms tracking includes elements of the brand that relate to marketing communications, such as ad recall or recognition.

5. Always on brand tracking

As the name suggests, ongoing sampling and completion of your brand tracking survey, with the data cut in waves to provide agile and responsive insight when needed.

Reporting on your study

A brand tracker is only as useful if it is actionable. The first step to using your tracker to drive change is to ensure that you have easy-to-understand and accessible reporting. There are several ways you can do this:

Create a brand health scorecard that reports on overall brand health metrics and the brand equity score. The equivalent to an executive summary when only the headlines are needed.
An online reporting platform for always-on brand trackers. This enables you to monitor brand health in near time including the provision of easy-to-use data interrogation so that you can ask and answer ad-hoc questions quickly and easily
A post-wave analysis and presentation that includes a detailed data analysis of the results and answers both core objectives and wave-specific brand questions.
A strategic, annual deep-dive. An opportunity to look back at the data set over a full year and carry out a much more detailed analysis, usually to answer bigger, more strategic questions and objectives.

How frequently should you carry out brand tracking studies?

For smaller, established brands operating in less volatile sectors, where less-frequent marketing activity is conducted, an annual or bi-annual brand tracking exercise is likely to be sufficient.

But for larger organisations and those operating in fast-moving sectors where there is significant competitor activity or price fluctuation, ongoing brand health monitoring can be essential so that brand issues can be rapidly identified and acted upon.

Measure the ROI of brand building

Measuring the ROI of brand building can be challenging because brand-building initiatives often have long-term effects that are difficult to attribute solely to specific marketing activities – you could argue that all of your marketing investment is a form of brand building.

However, a well-thought-out measure of brand equity represents the intangible value of your brand, including customer perceptions, loyalty, and brand associations.

Measuring changes in brand equity over time can indicate the effectiveness of brand-building efforts. Trackers can help measure ROI of specific campaigns by measuring brand equity before and afterwards. And finally, metrics such as market share, sales and revenue, customer acquisition and loyalty are also indicators of the impact of brand-building activities.

Get expert help with your Brand Tracking

Brandspeak is a market research and brand tracking agency that specialises in B2C and B2B brand tracking. For more information about our services, or to have a chat about the benefits that brand tracking will have for your brand, please contact Mark Bagnall, our Head of Quantitative Research at Jeremy@brandspeak.co.uk .

Table of Contents

What is Brand Tracking?

Key Metrics to Monitor

Why Consistent Measurement Matters

Adapting to Changing Consumer Perceptions

Final thoughts …

Table of Contents

What is Market Research?

How Market Research Informs Brand Strategy

1. Defining Your Target Audience

2. Refining Brand Proposition and Positioning

3. Crafting Compelling Messaging

4. Optimising Consumer Targeting

The Role of Market Research within a Competitive Landscape

Stay Ahead of Trends

Mitigating Risks

Benchmark Performance

Practical Steps to Leverage Market Research

Final thoughts …

Table of Contents

1. Know Your Customer Inside and Out

2. Ensure your brand is top-of-mind

3. Deliver Consistent Quality

4. Provide Exceptional Customer Service

5. Communicate Your Brand Values

6. Reward Loyalty

7. Leverage Personalisation

8. Create Engaging Content

9. Encourage and Act on Feedback

10. Foster a Sense of Community

11. Adapt and Innovate

Final thoughts …

Table of Contents

The Main Benefits of Brand Tracking from Day One

Budget Constraints

Bread and Depth of Insights

Table of Contents

The Shortcoming of a Traditional Segmentation

A Future Possibility

Conclusion

Table of Contents

What is Brand Tracking?

Brand Reputation Matters

Branding Tracking during Crisis Management

How to Effectively Implement Brand Tracking

Conclusion

Table of Contents

Why Personalisation is no Longer Optional

What is Customer Segmentation?

The Benefits of Segmentation for Brands

Personalisation in Action

Why Customer Segmentation is a Must

Table of Contents

Riding out a recession

How do consumers behave in a recession?

What is a brand tracker anyway?

How does a brand tracker help safeguard my brand?

Why is data so important?

So, how will a brand tracker recession-proof my brand?

Summary

Competitor analysis services

What is competitor analysis research?

What is the difference between competitor analysis and competitive analysis?

Benefits of competitor analysis

How to conduct competitor analysis

How to use competitor analysis research

How often should competitor analysis be conducted?

Working with a competitor analysis company

How to choose a competitor analysis agency

Summary

Table of Contents

What is traditional brand tracking?

Brand tracking traditions that need to die

What’s next for brand tracking?

So, is the brand tracker dead?

Mark Bagnall

Table of Contents

12 Important Brand Tracking Metrics

First, here’s a quick list of the 12 important brand tracking metrics that we cover in this article:

Unprompted brand awareness