Brand tracking. Grow your brand with confidence

Brand tracking is an essential survey for marketing teams in all industries. As consumers, we all tend to choose brands that we know and remember in a specific purchase context. Even more so if the image we perceive of the brand is associated with the attributes that are important to us. That is why brand managers in all types of companies work to make their brands recognisable, recognisable and remembered. Brand tracking surveys help them to know if they are achieving their objectives.

What is a brand tracking survey?

A brand tracking survey is a market survey that continuously or periodically measures the performance of a brand in the market. Its objective is to understand how consumers perceive the brand, how its position is evolving against the competition, and how marketing campaigns and communication are influencing it.

What does a brand tracking survey measure?

The questionnaire of a brand tracking survey is very flexible and can be adapted to the needs of each company. However, there are some key elements that all brand tracking studies cover.

• Brand recognition: This is the percentage of consumers who are aware of the brand. The questionnaire usually asks about different levels of brand awareness, including top of mind, spontaneous awareness and suggested awareness.
• Consideration and future purchase intention. Beyond brand recall, it is important to understand how the brand funnel is constructed. Among the stages of the funnel is consideration, which measures whether in a future purchase situation the consumer would consider choosing the brand, and purchase intent, which measures more precisely whether the consumer is considering not only evaluating the option, but actually buying that brand. For example, iPhone users tend to have high loyalty and high future purchase intent. When they change their device, they are likely to choose another iPhone. However other consumers may have a broader competitive set that includes Apple, Samsung, Huawei or other brands that they will survey more closely when the time comes.
• Brand image. It is important to know whether or not the brand is associated with the image attributes on which it wants to position itself. For example, whether a brand is quality, innovative, sustainable, fun, or whatever has been chosen to differentiate it from other options on the market.
• Advertising recall. Knowing whether or not the consumer remembers the brand’s advertising is fundamental to evaluate the impact of communication efforts. In addition, if details are collected on specific campaigns and the media in which they remember seeing it, it is possible to learn lessons to enhance advertising effectiveness through better creative and media plans.

All this information is collected for the brand under survey, as well as for the main competitor brands. In this way we can identify strengths and weaknesses against each of them.

Brand tracking. Ideal frequency

Another essential characteristic of brand tracking surveys is that they are periodic or continuous. Unlike other brand surveys that are carried out at a specific moment in time, brand tracking surveys are designed to be repeated over time in order to compare brand performance at two different points in time. The minimum frequency of brand tracking is annual, as it is important to have the brand performance data to make the new marketing plan and justify the required budget. However, many brands consider that the annual periodicity is not enough to make decisions in an agile way. The more short-term decisions are made with brand tracking information, the more important it is to opt for a higher frequency, such as semi-annually, quarterly, monthly or even continuously. The higher the frequency, the higher the cost, so balance the frequency with the brand’s ability to make decisions that make a difference in the short term. For example, if a brand runs a large annual campaign, it would not make sense to invest in monthly brand tracking. On the other hand, if the brand is campaigning on an ‘always-on’ basis and dedicates a significant budget, a monthly frequency will make sense so as not to have to wait more than 30 days to evaluate the results and make corrective decisions when necessary.

Benefits of brand tracking surveys

All medium to large brands have their own brand trackers to manage their brands, as they provide numerous benefits to brand managers.

• Boost the brand’s impact on sales. With brand tracking, the brand manager collects relevant information on a regular basis to increase awareness, consideration and purchase intent levels. This allows him to make better decisions to improve all these values progressively over time. Higher values, higher sales attractiveness.
• Early warning of sales problems. If in the brand tracking survey you start to perceive a decrease in awareness, consideration or purchase intention, it is quite likely that sooner rather than later difficulties with sales will start to appear. Using the brand tracker as an early warning system allows decisions to be made to boost the brand’s ability to attract sales before it is too late.
• Better brand image. By collecting information on image attributes, we can check whether or not consumers are perceiving us as we want them to and make product or communication decisions that will help us to better convey the attributes we want.
• Evaluation of the effectiveness of communication campaigns. Thanks to brand trackers, we can check whether the campaigns we have developed have helped us to improve brand performance. If this is not the case, we will have to look for appropriate solutions such as improving the campaigns or increasing the budget allocated to advertising.
• Better marketing plans. Brand tracking is essential for a proper assessment of the success of the previous plan and therefore for the design of the new one.
• Identification of opportunities. Thanks to the survey tracking we can also know if there are opportunities to improve our brand in specific target audiences or if by reinforcing some brand attributes we could gain positions.
• Goodbye to guesswork. Without a brand tracking survey, the brand is managed blindly and it is impossible to allocate resources in an optimal way. Should we invest more or is it not necessary to invest so much? Has the strategy of the year worked or do we need to modify some key elements? Which ones? With which consumer segment? The number of unanswered questions is enormous, and everyone in the organisation will have an opinion, which can lead to endless debates. All that disappears if you have objective data to put on the table.

With brand tracking, the brand manager is better equipped to manage the brand and lead this important aspect of achieving sales targets.

Brand tracking and category entry points

Since the theory of category entry points became popular, some experts advocate that brand tracking should collect the main variables for the main purchase situations. In other words, instead of asking about brand awareness, consideration or purchase intention in general, they should ask about the list of brands that ‘come to mind’ in each category entry point or purchase situation. The theory behind this is that the list of brands you will be able to identify depends on the buying situation. Let’s imagine you want to do an MBA survey programme. Depending on the buying situation, different brands may come to mind. For example, if you want to do an MBA to gain access to a wide network of quality contacts, you might choose a reputable national organisation that offers face-to-face courses. If we want to do an MBA to complement our CVs in a way that is more compatible with our current professional activity, we might opt for an online option, and here the list that comes to mind might be different.

If the list of marks depends on the category entry points, wouldn’t it make sense to collect the list of marks for each of the category entry points so that we know where we compete well and where we don’t? Including category entry points will make brand tracking more complex, but it will also allow us to make it more actionable so that our brand is associated with more category entry points in the category.

Brand tracking surveys with We are testers

Whether you need to tailor brand tracking to your needs or refresh your existing brand tracking, We are testers can help. We have a team of research experts to help you create the perfect questionnaire. If you choose to introduce category entry points we will help you with the research to determine which ones are most important to you. And then we can make the necessary waves of your brand tracking efficiently with our research platform. Thanks to automation, brand tracking is now much more accessible for all types of brands.

Learn about all the possibilities to design the brand tracking you need, forget about making blind decisions and build the brand you need to grow your sales. Contact us today.