Brand Tracking Studies
Understanding your customer isn’t just important as a brand, it’s everything.
Having on-going, consistent, detailed feedback from your customer base can be a game changer when building and sustaining a meaningful brand with high levels of customer loyalty - but how do you achieve this? A brand tracking study can be your secret weapon.
Research type - quantitative and qualitative
Focus - comparable, repeatable, consistent metrics that demonstrate brand health
Timescale - on-going and long term, minimum of a year
Panel - current customers with a control group of non-customers
What is brand tracking?
Brand tracking studies are a way of monitoring key metrics that reflect your brand’s performance over time. This can include awareness, consideration, usage, where you sit among your competitors, customer experience and even marketing and advertising performance.
How does brand tracking work?
A consistent set of questions are sent out to a targeted group of consumers at regular intervals. The data generated by these surveys are compared with each other allowing for trends and developments to emerge. These insights allow brands to identify opportunities, areas for improvement, successes and failures and strengths and weaknesses. The proactive nature of a tracking study enables early detection of changes which allows for strategic and informed decision making.
What can I find out from a brand tracking survey?
Brand performance - measure your brand’s awareness, consideration and usage to give insights into your brand’s health and the effectiveness of your brand and marketing activities.
Brand perception - understand how your customers see your brand and how its values are perceived. Get clarity on your customer’s view of brand association, personality and trust.
Brand preference - see how your brand measures up against its competitors and how loyal your customers are, to identify potential opportunities and current brand weaknesses.
Customer satisfaction - identify how your customers feel about your brand and their experience at every touch point, to refine your brand and communication strategies.
What problems can brand tracking solve?
Brand tracking can cover a huge amount of information depending on the questions you ask, but the key is to identify areas of interest which are likely to change over time, have a high impact on your brand’s success, and may not be clear from short term interactions with your customers.
Here are some examples of questions that can be clarified by brand tracking -
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Do our customers consider our brand to be good value based on the quality and cost of our products?
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Are our brand values being effectively experienced by our customers?
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Do Gen Z and Millennial perceptions of our brand differ?
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Do we really know who our competitors are - which other brands are our customers buying?
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Are we offering enough innovation to keep our customers engaged in the future?
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Does our current visual brand identity connect effectively with our core customers?
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Has our social media content reached the right people and is it leading customers into stores?
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What is motivating our loyal customers to make repeat purchases?
How will brand tracking add value?
While instincts can play an important role in decision making, having specific data about the health of your brand is the only way to make informed decisions, and understand ROI on your marketing and branding efforts. Sales figures give a picture of product success and failure, and social media analytics can show what is connecting with an audience, but this information not only lacks the ability to predict future trends and customer needs, it also misses the nuance and detail that brand tracking can provide.
Things to consider
Consistency is key - the power of brand tracking is in comparable data. Ensuring that the same questions are asked repetitively provides high-quality data that will deliver valuable insights. New questions can be added or dated ones removed, but not too frequently.
Survey questions - It sounds obvious, but not everything can or should be tracked. Questions should be important to the brand over time to ensure consistency, and specific enough to prompt detailed responses from participants.
Survey frequency - Known as a wave, the frequency with which your brand tracking survey is sent out can be critical. Too frequently and there won’t be enough variance in the data to identify changes, not frequently enough and nuance and emerging themes can be missed.
Panel - Survey data is only as good as the participants, so asking the right people is key. The majority of the panel should be current customers, with a control group of non customers, with criteria that makes it simple to replace any lost participants easily.
Think strategically - there may be a specific problem that you are hoping brand tracking will solve, but it needs to be seen as an ongoing strategic investment. Be open minded about the future of your brand and its customers to allow for surveys to maintain long-term value.
