Brand tracking, a staple of market research, has long been a critical tool for understanding brand health and guiding strategic decisions. In the UK alone, brand tracking accounts for an estimated £1 billion annually, representing 15-20% of the market research industry.
Despite its prominence, many businesses remain dissatisfied or uncertain about their brand tracking strategies. Why is this the case, and how can organisations navigate these challenges effectively?
In this blog, I explore the frustrations, fundamentals, and fresh perspectives shaping the future of brand tracking.
What is Brand Tracking?
Brand tracking is the process of measuring a brand's performance against key metrics over time. It helps businesses understand their brand's health and make decisions to improve it.
Some key metrics that can be tracked include:
Brand awareness: How easily consumers can recognise the brand. This includes aided awareness (when consumers recognise the brand when prompted) and unaided awareness (when consumers can recall the brand without being prompted).
Brand perception: What people think of the brand.
Brand associations: The emotional or psychological associations that consumers have with the brand, such as trust, reliability, or nostalgia.
Behavioural metrics: How people interact with the brand.
Purchase metrics: How people buy and use the brand.
The Frustrations: Why Is Brand Tracking So Challenging?
While brand tracking seems straightforward on paper, its execution often reveals complexities. Common frustrations among marketers include:
1. Lagging Responsiveness
Many brand trackers are slow to provide actionable insights, a significant drawback in today's fast-paced, data-driven environment.
2. Unclear Metrics
Metrics like "Is this brand for me?" are ambiguous, leaving marketers unsure of their implications or how to act on them.
3. Stagnant Metrics
Brand image and perception metrics often change slowly, leading to dissatisfaction among stakeholders who seek immediate results.
4. Short-Term Data Pressure
With the growing emphasis on ROI, marketers demand short-term, actionable data, often comparing brand tracking unfavourably with real-time tools like social media analytics.
5. Survey Overload
Bloated surveys with overly complex questions can deter respondents, compromising data quality and user experience.
6. The Daily Tracking Trap
The allure of daily tracking is strong, offering near-instant feedback. However, it risks creating unrealistic expectations for slow-moving metrics like brand associations, leading to premature or misguided actions.
These frustrations have prompted some to question the value of brand tracking altogether. However, as we’ll see, the solution lies not in abandoning brand tracking but in evolving its methodology.
The Fundamentals: Why Brand Tracking Still Matters
Brand tracking plays a vital role in understanding and driving brand growth. At its core, it serves three primary purposes:
1. Measuring Brand Health
Tracking key metrics like awareness, consideration, and loyalty provides a snapshot of how the brand is performing over time, this is essential for long-term planning and seeing the bigger picture and cumulative impact of brand and marketing activities instead of siloed campaign responses or returns.
2. Guiding Strategy
Insights from brand tracking inform marketing campaigns, product development, and strategic planning. It allows you to beach mark against competitors and establish where you are not performing and how your brands image, resonance and meaning is detracting from sales, engagement and growth. It builds the case for CapEx brand investment.
3. Proving ROI
By linking brand health metrics to business outcomes, brand tracking demonstrates the impact of marketing investments, and does so over time allowing a long-term ROI model and even econometric and MMM model to be built.
To maximise its potential, organisations must first clarify what they expect from brand tracking, and establish the investment and time required to deliver objectives - brand tracking is not a short-term investment and there must be understanding, belief and commitment across the business. Unrealistic expectations—such as expecting rapid shifts in entrenched brand perceptions—can lead to frustration.
Fresh Thinking: Innovations Shaping the Future of Brand Tracking
Thanks to recent advances, brand tracking is undergoing a transformation. Key developments include:
1. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s Contributions
The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has been a game-changer in brand science. Their books, How Brands Grow (Parts 1 & 2) has introduced frameworks that reshape how we think about and measure brand growth.
- Better Brand Health, authored by Professor Jenny Romaniuk, emphasises metrics aligned with real-world consumer behaviour, offering actionable guidance for brand tracking.
2. Category Entry Points (CEPs)
A major insight from Ehrenberg-Bass research is the importance of Category Entry Points (CEPs)— the moments or scenarios when a consumer considers a brand. Instead of focusing solely on brand attributes, trackers should explore the contexts in which brands become relevant to consumers’ lives. These points, in my opinion must be measured as part of brand tracking and offer valuable real-world brand tracking context and targetable insights to direct brand and marketing messaging and activity shifts.
3. Growing Through New Audience Penetration
Brand growth hinges not only on retaining existing customers but also on attracting new ones. Research shows that most growth comes from expanding audience penetration. By identifying CEPs, brands can understand the triggers or situations that prompt new consumers to consider their products, helping them craft strategies to reach untapped audiences and grow market share.
4. Balancing Fast and Slow Metrics
Effective tracking distinguishes between:
- Fast Metrics: Campaign awareness or short-term brand awareness, responsive to recent marketing efforts.
- Slow Metrics: Long-term brand associations, requiring sustained investment to move the needle.
By understanding this distinction, marketers can set realistic expectations and tailor their strategies accordingly.
5. Streamlined Surveys
Simplifying surveys—avoiding lengthy grids and overly technical questions—improves respondent engagement and data quality.
A Path Forward: Making Brand Tracking Work
To address the challenges of brand tracking and harness its full potential, consider the following actions when reviewing your brand tracking:
- Focus on CEPs
Identify the scenarios where brands can “pop into” consumers’ minds, plot out their customer journey and identify pain oints, needs, triggers and barriers across different audiences, aligning tracking with real-world decision-making.
- Target New Audiences
Design strategies that leverage CEPs to reach new audiences, be in their worlds, identify metrics that matter and track new audience penetration and long-term growth.
- Adopt Tailored Metrics
Balance fast and slow metrics to ensure actionable insights for both short-term campaigns and long-term brand growth. Use brand tracking as just one tool, dont rely in it for everything and also don't just rely on performance marketing metrics or brand listening tools. Be cler on waht you are measuring, how you are measuring and why.
- Optimise Surveys
Prioritise concise, engaging surveys that respect respondents' time and provide meaningful results.
A Bright Future for Brand Tracking
Brand tracking is far from dead, it is an essential tool that helps to establish the Cap Ex value of brand, and while it has faced criticism for being slow, static, or unclear, innovations like the Ehrenberg-Bass frameworks and CEP-focused strategies are breathing new life into this essential tool. By emphasising new audience penetration and aligning metrics with real-world consumer behaviour, organisations can drive meaningful brand growth.
As the industry continues to evolve, one thing is clear: brand tracking, when done right, remains an indispensable element of successful marketing.
If you need help with brand tracking or any aspect of brand strategy please contact
Sally Chuku for a free Brand Start session to identify the problem and plan the way forward. Email sally.chuku@thinkcollectiv.co.uk or connect here.
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