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.
4. Market effects
While perhaps the main focus of brand tracking is to understand your brand’s attitudinal equity, tracking can also be employed to understand how what we call market effects are influencing sales and market share. Understanding this can identify a whole raft of new insights and opportunities to grow your brand.
Market effects can include things such as physical availability, pack format and size, promotions, the role of sales staff in retail, contracts and many other things. All are things that potentially mean that people don’t buy the brand that they desire the most. So, for example, people choose an alternative because the brand they desire most is not available where they shop, or in the right pack format, or because something else is on promotion at the purchase moment. They can work both for your brand and against you. For market leaders they often play a positive role, for challengers they usually work against you. For all brands they are important to understand so that you can develop plans to effectively manage them. They are not something you need to monitor continuously but are definitely worth including periodically through a module on your tracking.
