Cost Effective Brand Health Tracking
How best to approach brand tracking:
In the absence of using a large research establishment such as Kantar Millward Brown to conduct ongoing brand tracking, much of tracking the health of your brand can be done yourself via a specifically constructed brand track quant survey.
If you brand plan annually, work to a modest marketing budget (less than £350K) and activate via peak campaigns, we recommend tracking once a year only. Many large organisations track continually throughout the year, monitoring monthly, but this requires significant spend and is only relevant if the brand is spending throughout the year. Instead, it is often more than sufficient to use an annual track to assess the health of your brand and guide your objectives for the year ahead.
It is a good idea to plan to receive the results of your brand tracking survey 2 months prior to a brand strategy session and before your budgets are set for the year ahead. This is because a brand track will quickly highlight any weak spots, through the eyes of your consumer. This information becomes vital in planning how best to spend your marketing budget. Or we recommend conducting a full brand track within 2 months post of activating a peak campaign.
Our research partners advise on the required sample size, recruit your sample, and execute the survey in full, including a highly detailed analysis and written report, presented to you in person via an online call. Our brand tracking surveys are bespoke built every time and ideally kept to 25 questions. Typical project lead time is 6 – 8 weeks from brief to reporting. We ordinarily ask 2-3 of our known and trusted research partners to quote on your brand track, offering you choice and comparison. We are careful to only select research partners who truly follow and measure against our trusted professor principles, namely Mark Ritson and Byron Sharp.
How to glean the very best insights to help you plan:
The purpose of brand tracking is to establish whether someone is aware of your brand and if they are, how strongly do they associate your brand with things that you want to be known for. It is vital your brand track offers the respondent up to 10 attributes, both positive and negative (50/50).
50% of the brand tracking surveys we run offer attributes you want to be known for and 50% are attributes you do not want to be known for. Assessing the awareness levels across both positive and negative is vital to establishing a realistic health track, again in through the eyes of your consumer.
A best-in-class brand tracking survey will then ask consumers to rate your brand on the attributes and then rate a competitor against the same list. This gives a lovely reality check on how consumers view your brand versus others and offers you a clear position within the market, again not from size of market thanks to sales, but through how consumers perceive you.
We also include preference and Net Promoter questions in our brand tracking surveys to give you a Net Promoter Score (NPS). This provides a highly useful stat to compare year on year the satisfaction levels of your brand amongst those who buy it. When measured annually your NPS can become an early indicator of issues as they arise, giving you time to address them before they become too large.
Measuring distinctive brand assets within the same survey:
It is vital that your annual brand health track also measures your brands distinctive assets (DAs). DAs are the building blocks to your brand and act as signals to the brands name for consumers.
Developing DAs requires a commitment from brand owners to keep these assets consistent. They do not become DAs overnight. Instead, consumers need to learn the link between the asset and the brand. This requires reinforcement over time.
Our approach to measuring the strength of DAs is consumer-based, as only consumers can tell you what, of all the brand assets you have used, are imprinted in their memory.
Our approach provides an evidence-based, quantitative assessment of the strength of your DAs. Examples of assets tested include:
Logos
Colours
Slogans
Graphics
Symbols
Format pack shapes
Endorsements (i.e., celebrities)
Music, sounds & jingles
Style of advertising
Ideally, we are looking for the DAs to be both:
Unique - to your brand
Famous - consumers should know the DA represents the brand name
During our brand health track, we ensure we ask the right questions to establish two things:
Which of the DA’s shared are recognised as your brand in the eyes of your consumers?
Is there any confusion with other brands from a DA point of view?
The output is to then plot the success and strength of each of the DAs to give you a clear and robust plan on any assets to consider losing, which to consider avoiding because they are being associated with your competitors and which to use and invest in.
Brand tracking is a fascinating and an enlightening process to go through. By approaching the project in a nimbler way, you can make significant cost savings and reinvest this straight back into marketing your brand.