A guide to understanding brand tracking

Ever thought about brand tracking? Don’t know where to start? Alternatively, ever thought that brand tracking is something that only the biggest brands can afford the luxury of doing? Well you wouldn’t be the only one!

What is brand tracking?

Your organisation’s most valuable asset is your brand. The most loved brands across the world have better awareness and recognition / recall than anyone else in their competitive sphere; thereby creating both a desire to engage and interact with your brand, alongside giving you the opportunity to charge your product out at the value premium. 

It’s an accepted fact in the industry that a strong brand generates a higher margin and profitability than other brands.

Brand tracking measures your brand’s health on an ongoing and continuous basis over a period of time. The same survey is asked each time, and analyses how your customers buy, use and interact with your products and services, as well as what they think and feel about the brand itself (including channel specific marketing or advertising campaigns). 

Done in the correct way, brand tracking will highlight which of your product lines, advertising messages or initiatives work well and can have a positive impact - but crucially also identify those that don’t or could potentially be damaging, so that those can be targeted and improved to yield better results.

How brand tracking helps you understand your customers

Customer and prospect perceptions of your brand can (and do) make huge differences. From: building trust or not, providing you critical pricing intelligence, allowing you to attract and retain the best talent based on reputation and smashing those ambitious targets - whether they be financial, marketing, or logistic in nature.

The future success of your business is at stake - implementing brand tracking offers peace of mind, and can be a quick and painless way to improve business performance.

Over and above what’s already been mentioned - brand tracking allows you to listen to your customers. If you want to improve your product or service to align better with your customers’ needs and wants, this is the place to start. 

You can measure and evaluate your performance, compare yourselves to previous work or keep an eye on your competitors and also identify which new areas are arising that you might be able to lead from the front with. Testing those new strategies can give you a critical advantage you might not otherwise have.

Metrics and methods to consider in brand tracking

Generally quantitative in nature - brand tracking is about measuring your brand regularly. This allows you to track key metrics over time and learn what’s impacting performance and driving improvement. Generally speaking, for most brands we would recommend running brand tracking quarterly; however if you are a brand that regularly and much more frequently runs new campaigns - then monthly should be a consideration. In those cases, by increasing frequency you can pinpoint in much greater detail which of these activities are impacting your brand performance.

The core attributes to measure brand tracking

There are several core attributes to measure in a brand tracking study, and they can include: 

• Brand Awareness (Spontaneous & Prompted)

• Brand Recall

• Brand Loyalty

• NPS (Net Promoter Score)

• Brand Association and Preference

• Brand Usage and Purchasing

• Brand Perceived Quality

By including 4 or 5 of your key competitors (or the brand you aspire to be) in this, you can gain hugely insightful intelligence not only for your brand but on your competitors.

All you need to do to get started is to design your survey, choose your metrics and competitors to measure, and identify your core target market to measure. This might be a nationally representative sample, or be more specific to your needs (e.g. if you only operate in London, and you only target adults under the age of 45).

Brand Tracking takes a lot of work and is very costly, right?

On the face of it, brand tracking can be highly detailed, time consuming and potentially cost a five figure sum each and every time you run it.

But the reality is, with panel availability and choice, combined with tech innovation in the research sector - it’s now perfectly possible (and normal!) for brand tracking to only take a matter of days for a budget much closer to your realistic budgeting availability than you might think.

Final thoughts

It’s so important to visualise your trends with a ready made and instantly updated reporting method to keep an eye on how your brand is being perceived by your target audience.

Here at Rare: Consulting - we have many years of experience tracking brands; globally, nationally and regionally and have developed best in class survey methods for delivering this work in very quick turnaround times. With the addition of Rare: Labs, our tech and innovation development team - we have uncovered the way to allow this work to be done in a fraction of the time (and at a fraction of the typical cost). 

When designing your brand tracking we can set up dash boarding reports that you can drill down on audience types, time series and other core components. These are updated immediately upon completion of fieldwork so that you can share data with your wider team in a timely fashion. 
Get in touch to understand more about how we can help you and run through some of our relevant case studies in Brand Tracking.

Find out more about our consulting services by emailing us at hello@rare.consulting or calling us on 020 7859 4627.