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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 Mark@brandspeak.co.uk.
