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.  

5. Evaluate your activations​

Perhaps this is an obvious use of a tracking study, but you can only measure the contribution of your different activations if you include the right questions on your tracking study – and the right analysis of the resulting data. As we will elaborate on further in tip no 7 & 8, keeping the core of the study short and to the point will allow you to add on modules to evaluate your advertising, your sponsorships, partnerships or promotions.  ​

In order to attribute any kind of effect from your activations to your brand, the first step is to establish whether people have seen or experienced it. Once you’ve identified these people, you can then go on to ask them what they made of it.  This kind of diagnostic information is vital in understanding how or why something worked – or if it doesn’t work, to help you understand and learn from what went wrong.   ​

But ultimately, if we are evaluating effectiveness of a brand initiative, we need to identify evidence of impact on your brand.  If you have continuous tracking in place, then part of the analysis should focus on whether you see uplifts on targeted brand metrics over time.  But sometimes, for market leaders, maintaining your position in the face of competition can be a success. Or even if there are lifts over time, how do we know for sure that it is our activation that is driving these?  ​

To fully understand the brand impact of your activations you need to employ more sophisticated analysis of the tracking data that can derive whether the activation is supporting your brand. It’s not quite as simple as comparing those who have seen your activation against those who haven’t. Those that recognise your activations are more likely to be closer to your brand or category in the first place. It’s just the way our brains work. We notice things that are relevant to us – and users of a brand for example, are far more likely to notice advertising for it than non-users. That’s also by the way, at least partly how good advertising typically works – by catching our attention, and by showing or telling us something we see as relevant. But it is possible through clever analysis of the data to control for these factors that influence recognition and then to identify whether and to what extent your activations impact on your brand. Crucial information to inform decision making and help improve activation impact over time.​

← 4. Market effects

6. Easy to access and explore →