Is Brand Tracking Really Dead?

Image attribution: Photo by Daniel Herron on Unsplash

The short answer is no. Brand tracking is the regular measurement of a brand's health over time, using a consistent set of survey questions so that changes in awareness, perceptions and preference can be seen and acted on. What is dying is the traditional way many trackers are run: slow, rigid, overlong and reported in decks that nobody reads. The brand tracker itself, the research that helps brand managers decide what to do next, is as relevant as ever.

Commentators have been predicting the death of brand tracking for as long as I’ve been in research, which is over 30 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:

1. 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.

2. To move the industry forward; thought-leadership pieces exploring how traditional brand tracking can and should evolve to be more useful and responsive.

To 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, let’s 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 were probably the cause of mutterings about the death of the brand tracker at that time. These were more likely to have been discussions in the pub, or possibly conference papers, than blogs: the first blog is thought to have been written in 1994, but 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.

What is the brand tracker for?

The brand tracker remains one of the most enduring and capable research tools available to marketers, when it is understood and used correctly.

However, in recent years there has been pushback from some companies that feel trackers are too ‘rear view mirror’, only identifying potential brand-related issues when it is too late to do anything about them.

Many of those organisations are missing the point. The tracker’s purpose isn’t to flag issues before or as they occur; social media listening is one of the best research approaches for that. Neither is it the role of the tracker to measure the impact of individual marketing events immediately after they have occurred; a quick, tailored survey will do that job much better.

Instead, the tracker’s role should be to act as a relatively inexpensive way of evaluating and comparing brand performance over set periods of time, whilst also enabling the organisation to scrutinise the:

• Effectiveness of its underlying brand strategy

• Relevance of supposed brand performance drivers

• Performance of the individuals responsible for brand stewardship

Based on the above, it is not surprising that many organisations assume that a tracker’s ultimate purpose is to measure the impact of the annual marketing plan and reason that, if minimal marketing activity is taking place, there is no need for a tracker.

That is a mistake. There are many events outside the control of the marketing department that can influence brand performance, including economic downturn, the activity of competitors and government legislation. Indeed, 60 seconds on Google is enough to identify numerous examples of brands that went into a nosedive as a result of events not of the marketing department’s making.

Consider the catastrophic damage to BP’s brand as a result of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. Or the negative impact on Ryanair in 2017 when the airline had to cancel some 2,000 flights due to issues relating to its pilots’ holiday roster.

Of course, these are extreme examples and neither company needed brand tracking to tell them their brands were in a tailspin. However, they both certainly needed ongoing tracking data to help them identify and implement the strategies required to repair the reputational damage caused and get back on the front foot.

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: waves are often set by habit rather than by how quickly the category moves. If the gap between waves is longer than the gap between meaningful changes in the market, the tracker will confirm a shift long after the business needed to know about it.

• The ‘rear view mirror’: the longer results take to arrive, the less useful they become. A wave that takes weeks to analyse and report describes a market that may already have moved on, which is why turnaround matters as much as frequency.

• Measuring what, not why: a tracker can show that consideration has fallen without showing what caused it. Unless the questionnaire includes diagnostic measures, such as the perceptions and brand attributes that drive choice, the business is left with a number and no explanation.

• Static survey questions: consistency is what makes a tracker work, but brands, competitors and buyers change. A questionnaire that never evolves gradually measures a market that no longer exists. The answer is a fixed core of key metrics with modules that can be swapped in and out.

• Return on investment: a tracker earns its cost only if its findings shape decisions. When results are filed rather than used, even a modest budget is hard to justify.

• Read in isolation: brand tracking results are often reviewed without the other evidence the business holds, such as sales, search and social data. Read together, they explain far more than any one source can on its own.

• Death by PowerPoint: reporting that presents every chart, rather than what has changed and what to do about it, buries the findings that matter.

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.

How do you stop a brand tracker becoming a tradition?

Most of the problems above are avoidable if the tracker is set up and managed with a few disciplines in mind:

• Be clear about the brand and the metrics before commissioning anything: its proposition, its competitive set and the brand metrics the business already uses to manage it.

• Time the results to the planning cycle, ideally four to six weeks before plans and budgets are set, so that there is time to agree targets and actions.

• Resist the temptation to keep adding questions. Every extra question dilutes the tracker's clarity and lengthens the survey.

• Measure the drivers of brand performance, not just the scores, so that the tracker explains why the numbers move as well as what moved.

• Bring the whole business on board and share the results widely, tailored to each team, rather than keeping them inside marketing.

Future changes may include using AI to create synthetic respondents, which would 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.

The evidence so far supports that caution, particularly for tracking. A 2026 study reported in Research Live found that surveys using synthetic respondents were on average two to three percentage points away from real respondents on headline results, but had only a 47% success rate in accurately tracking changes between two waves, which the paper described as essentially no better than a coin toss. Since measuring change over time is the whole point of a tracker, AI brand tracking with synthetic respondents is not yet a substitute for asking real people.

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 vital research that helps brand managers to make decisions about their brands, lives on.

Frequently asked questions about whether brand tracking is dead

Is brand tracking dead?

No. What is fading is the traditional model of long, infrequent surveys reported in lengthy decks. Brands still need to know how they are performing against competitors over time, and a well-designed brand tracker remains the most direct way to find out.

Why do some companies think brand trackers are backward-looking?

Because trackers report on periods that have already passed, and slow analysis can mean results arrive too late to act on. That criticism often misunderstands the tracker's job, which is to compare brand performance over set periods and show whether the brand strategy is working, not to give an early warning of every issue.

What is the difference between brand tracking and social listening?

Social listening, sometimes called brand monitoring, picks up what people are saying about a brand online as it happens, which makes it good at spotting emerging issues. Brand tracking surveys a representative sample of the market at regular intervals, so it can measure awareness, perceptions and preference among buyers and non-buyers alike, including people who never post about the brand.

How often should a brand tracker run?

It depends on how quickly the market moves and how often decisions are made. Many trackers report annually or every six months to fit the planning cycle, larger brands often review quarterly, and some run continuously so that results can be read at any point.

Can synthetic respondents replace a brand tracker?

Not yet. Recent testing suggests synthetic respondents can come close to real ones on headline figures but are unreliable at detecting change over time, which is exactly what a tracker is for. For now they are better treated as a supplement than a replacement.

What should a brand tracker measure?

At its core, the measures that show how buyers move towards a brand, such as awareness, consideration, preference and usage, together with the perceptions that drive them. Our guides to brand tracking metrics and measuring brand performance cover this in more detail.