The purpose of brand tracking is to track a brand’s performance against key metrics. This information is based on insights gathered from key audiences through research. It helps organisations understand their customers and make better decisions about their brand.
What is brand tracking?
Brand tracking is a way of understanding the relationships people have with a brand. It’s essential to understand this because it links directly to their connection with the organisation and commercial performance. Organisations track a brand to understand its performance across a variety of elements, including key performance indicators (KPIs) and competitor performance.
Why do we need to do brand tracking?
Brand tracking is a bit like a health check for a brand.
The way organisations develop brands has evolved over the years. In the past, a consumer would typically enter a shop, browse around and follow an orderly process of evaluation and trial, then choose a brand and remain loyal over time.
Today, consumers access brands from many different routes – it could be online, on the high street, through social media, or by word-of-mouth recommendation. Evaluation and trial can take many forms and there’s no systematic process to this. Competitors often quickly adapt their brands to change the customer journey, and things shift a lot more quickly. Brand loyalty can be fleeting and can change based on one bad review.
Brand tracking is a way to stay one step ahead in a changing and competitive landscape. It generates insights to inform marketing planning and decision making.
What are the objectives of brand tracking?
To get people to choose your brand over another
- To help brands better understand how to stand out from the competition
- To allow a brand to command the desired or premium price
- To scale competitive advantage
- To provide consistency across markets locally and globally.
The typical process of brand tracking is to:
Define your target audience
- Create custom questions specific to your brand
- Measure a variety of elements, including brand KPIs, brand drivers, competitor performance, audience profile and advertising campaigns
- Compare your brand’s performance against the competition
- Analyse your findings.
What will you learn from brand tracking?
Regular brand tracking helps organisations:
- Gain key insights about a brand – specifically what people think and feel about a brand and what they do as a result
- Understand KPIs and drivers that are right for the brand and their contribution to commercial outcomes – identifying what can you do to impact key KPIs and understanding what drives people to engage with a brand
- Monitor a brand across different categories and audiences – discover to what extent a brand is achieving its objective of being perceived in a certain way across categories and audiences
- Make outcomes actionable across the marketing mix – so that you can target gaps in the market or where there is potential competitor overlap.
Summary: How brand tracking works
Brand tracking is research that helps you understand the rational and emotional responses a target audience has about a brand, and what they do as a result of that. Using this insight can help organisations make better business decisions and gain competitive advantage.
- Brand tracking is not just about looking at historical data, it’s also about using insights to predict commercial outcomes. For example, you might look at if a campaign or experience focuses on x, the impact will be y. This information can be used for marketing planning.
- Brand tracking is about measuring what matters, it’s about answering key questions that link directly to business commercial outcomes.
- Brand tracking helps build brand strength, by enabling organisations to understand the role of campaign, product, service and experience and adapting these to meet customer needs.
- Brand tracking is an ongoing activity, and brand trackers can take place monthly or quarterly to help organisation stay up-to-date.
Get in contact
To learn more about how we could help you successfully track your brand, please get in touch.
