Is your brand tracking fit for purpose?
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.
7. Keep it short
This point should apply to any research survey, but tracking studies are perhaps worse than most other surveys in terms of expecting people to answer long, repetitive, dull questionnaires.
Keep it simple
Follow a simple logic through your questions. Spontaneous measures of awareness are valuable but once you have established which brands people are aware of, use this knowledge in your routing to simplify the task for respondents on later questions with answer lists of brands they’ve already told you they are aware of. This makes the task simpler and less repetitive for respondents, resulting in better quality of data. Academic research also shows that the data will be more stable using closed brand questions than open ones.
Remove redundancy
Build in at a minimum annual reviews of your tracking questionnaire to see what can be removed. And be ruthless. Too many tracking studies have a long tail of questions that are kept just in case. This potentially harms survey response rates and means you have less space to ask more relevant and useful questions.
