Is your brand tracking fit for purpose?
Your brand is your most valuable intangible asset. A strong brand helps you to grow your business and helps to ensure profitability through justifying a higher price. As Mark Ritson says, ‘if you’re not tracking your brand then you’re not managing your brand’. So, it’s perhaps no surprise that the majority of businesses have some form of brand tracking in place. Without tracking, how will you manage, steer and course correct your brand?
So what does a good tracking study look like?
We have put together what we are calling our Top 10 of brand tracking. 10 posts, that in combination aim to provide the most valuable advice we can based on our combined experience.
2. Make it actionable
Tracking is great at telling you what is going on – what happened last month or last quarter. This is useful but only the starting point. Ultimately its role should be to inform your marketing decisions. So, how to go about using it in this way? Firstly, through tailoring the survey to help you to understand whether you are achieving your strategic objectives. Secondly through actively using the tracking – both by adding questions and modules tactically - and by mining the data to try to answer specific business questions. For example, how is our brand performing in a particular region or segment? How do we justify a price premium? Who are the people that see us in a particular way? Doing both things typically require a close partnership with your tracking agency. Your agency should work hard to get close to your business, to understand your brand’s objectives. But in our experience the greatest value comes through a close collaboration between client and agency. When this is in place, tracking can be tailored, and an ongoing dialogue informs relevant, useful analysis that can help you to address business questions and to help you to make better informed decisions..
