Brand Tracking: Now More Important — and Better Than Ever

Your brand is one of your most important business assets. For consumers, your strong brand provides peace of mind, reducing risk and providing safety in a crowded marketplace. For business, your strong brand builds value, which is critical for meeting your corporate strategic goals. As published by Reuters in 2014, “In a Pitchbook survey about sourcing private equity deal flow, 82% of respondents see brand strength as becoming increasingly important for key stakeholders, including investors, CEOs of target companies, lenders, the media, and potential employees.”

The Importance of Brand Tracking – now more than ever!

With a global pandemic disrupting social norms and shattering economies, it is more important than ever that you make the investment in Brand Tracking to understand how your brand is being impacted. Brand tracking allows you to monitor and identify emerging vulnerabilities and weaknesses in brand health, to compare your brand to competitors, and to identify emerging shifts in consumer preference and behavior. Brand tracking helps you to evaluate and understand the impact of marketing actions, including the measurement of ad awareness.

What is a Brand Tracker?

Brand tracking – over time – measures “the funnel” (which includes some variation of awareness, consideration, purchase frequency, and loyalty) plus overall affinity metrics and computes a brand health score. Additionally, your brand tracker can measure the strength of specific brand attributes. Driver analysis should be conducted annually to identify what is driving brand health, allowing for improvement actions.

Brand Tracking Best Practices to Look for in a New Vendor

Pre-pandemic, marketers were always pressured to do more with less. With increased uncertainty and potentially even greater rates of change in our markets, that pressure is only going to increase. Brand tracking can be expensive, and you might have identified a more cost effective solution. But how do you confidently switch to another vendor without risking data integrity and making sure results are comparable, from one vendor to another. Or you may be concerned about the very real challenge of moving all of your historic brand tracking data to a new vendor.

Whether you are a brand with an established – but very expensive – existing brand tracker, or a small brand with limited budget just starting to invest in brand tracking you can make the switch to a brand tracking vendor who will meet your specific needs. Here is a checklist to use when investigating potential brand tracking providers:

• Pricing to meet your brand and business needs while delivering high quality at any price point. The goal of this process is to get more for your money: the brand tracking you need at a price that makes brand sense. That price really depends on your business, your market, and your strategic goals and objectives.

• Willing to learn your business at a strategic level. A brand tracking provider who understands your business strategy can be an invaluable ally to your brand. Brand tracking should not be formulaic, so having a partner who understands your business can make sure you are getting the data – and the insights – you need; a partner that thoroughly understands your KPIs.

• Easy to ensure data integrity. If you are changing providers for an existing brand tracker, your new provider should give you a cost-effective way to make sure the switch is not going to invalidate your historic results.

• Easy transition of historical data. With an existing brand tracker, a great deal of value lies in your historical data. But it can be a nightmare to transition it to a new provider. Don’t make the mistake of walking away from that valuable history. Your new provider should give you a fast and easy option for moving your brand tracking data to their system.

• Flexible reporting options. Depending on whether your brand is B2C or B2B, and depending on how rapidly your market is changing, reports should be tailored to your decision-making needs. In addition to strategic implications reports (including action items and recommendations), a more frequent interactive dashboard gives nearly instantaneous access to your brand tracking data.

• Flexibility to add timely and topical questions to get more value without impacting brand metrics. As we have mentioned before, your brand is facing massive change in their environment and you need information to manage that instability. Your brand tracker is a great opportunity to include additional more topical questions – without compromising your tracking data. Make sure your provider is flexible enough to offer you this option at a low or no additional cost.

Summary

Brand tracking delivers information and insight to help you more effectively manage one of your organization’s most important assets. If you don’t have a brand tracker, you need one. If you have a brand tracker, you owe it to yourself and to your brand to work with a brand tracking partner who is flexible enough and experienced enough to help you get the most out of your brand tracking investment. Whatever your situation, what you do with your brand can make or break your business success.