Brand Tracking Agency

Brandspeak measures core indicators such as awareness, recall, consideration, loyalty, salience, differentiation and brand associations. These metrics reveal how your brand performs today, providing the foundation on which deeper driver, opportunity and competitive analysis is built.

Where it suits the category, the tracker can also measure mental availability and the category entry points through which buyers come to think of a brand. Our guides to brand health and to the metrics worth tracking explain which measures matter and why.

Our tracking evaluates performance alongside established competitors, challenger brands and indirect alternatives. We analyse changes in market dynamics, category expectations and customer behaviours to uncover strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities. This provides a clear picture of relative brand position across countries, enabling more confident investment, targeting and planning decisions.

Around 20% of each tracking survey can be used to evaluate the impact of recent campaigns, communications and major market events. This flexible section identifies what is working, what is not, and how perceptions change in response to real-world activity, helping teams optimise spend and messaging in near-real time.

Measurement tells you what moved. Modelling tells you what to do about it. Brandspeak identifies which brand measures actually predict acquisition, retention and switching in your category, so that brand investment can be argued in the same terms as the rest of the marketing budget.

GrowthTrack, Brandspeak’s proprietary brand tracking programme, is built around this. It adds buyer-dynamics segmentation, driver modelling and a What-If Simulator for testing the likely effect of a change before committing budget to it, and it can run wave-based or continuously.

Each wave is reported against the one before it, with movements explained rather than listed, and recommendations attached to them. Where you want one, a dashboard can be added to any tracker, giving your team access to KPIs, segments and markets between waves so that questions can be answered when they arise rather than at the next debrief.

Where it helps, Brandspeak runs a working session with your stakeholders to turn the findings into agreed actions. Tracking data identifies where the issues and opportunities lie; deciding how to respond is usually better done in a room than in a circulated chart pack.

Most trackers change hands at some point, and the worry is always the same: losing the trend that made the tracker valuable. Brandspeak maps the existing questionnaire against the new one, keeps the measures that carry history intact, and is explicit from the outset about which series continue and which have to restart.

You get a considered transition and a clear account of what you keep, rather than a blank sheet and an apology. Our guide to evaluating brand tracking companies covers what to ask a prospective supplier.

Brand tracking with Brandspeak starts at around £10,000 for a single consumer wave and around £14,000 for a business audience, where the sample is harder to reach. Most annual programmes run from about £10,000 to £40,000 or more, and B2B programmes covering several markets with quarterly fieldwork from £30,000 upwards.

Four things move the figure: the sample size, which is set by how finely you intend to read the data; how niche the audience is to reach; how long the questionnaire runs; and how much reporting and interpretation you want on top of the data.

From the second wave onwards the cost falls, because set-up is a one-off. The questionnaire, the scripting and the sample design already exist, so a tracker is cheaper to continue than to start.

Some trackers are offered for less, but they typically require compromises in quality and content that can leave the outputs of questionable value. What you pay for with Brandspeak is a tracker designed around your funnel rather than a template, and a director who reads the data and tells you what to do about it. Our brand tracking cost guide sets out the ranges in full.

Brand tracking is sold two ways. Software platforms supply a standard questionnaire and a dashboard at a published annual price. Research agencies design the tracker around your brand and interpret what it finds. Both are legitimate, and they suit different buyers.

 The honest test is whether anyone in your organisation has the time and the training to turn a dashboard into a decision. If they do, a platform will serve you well and cost less. If the dashboard would be opened once a quarter and screenshotted into a board pack, the saving is illusory, because the measurement is not being used.

1.     What decision will this tracker inform, and what would we do differently depending on the result?

2.     Who designs the questionnaire, and who interprets the findings at each wave? Are they the same people who pitched?

3.     What sample size are you proposing per market, and what will that let us read at segment level?

4.     If we move from our current provider, which measures carry over intact and which restart?

5.     What does each wave cost after the first, once set-up is behind us?

Ask all five of us as well. If a supplier is uncomfortable with the fourth or the fifth, that tells you something useful. Our guide to choosing a brand tracking company covers the full list, and if awareness is the main thing you need to measure, our guide to the top brand awareness agencies in the UK compares the options.

Brandspeak builds a tracker in five stages:

1.     Scope the decision. We start with what the tracker has to inform, not with the questionnaire. That sets which measures matter and how finely the data needs to be read.

2.     Establish the drivers. Where they are not already known, a short qualitative stage settles what drives choice in your category.

3.     Design the questionnaire and the sample, around your funnel, with the competitor set drawn from the market and a base for every group you want to report separately.

4.     Field the waves to the same design each time, because consistent wording, sample and timing is what makes a trend line worth reading.

5.     Report and recommend. Each wave is reported against the one before, with movements explained and recommendations attached.