Brand tracking is a way to continuously track the development and progress of your brand or a competitors’ brand.
What is brand tracking?
You do this by consistently monitoring a number of key metrics, like Net Promoter Score (NPS) or levels of brand awareness and brand perception. These metrics help you assess how healthy your brand is.
What do we mean by a ‘healthy brand’? According to brand leaders, healthy brand is one that comes to mind when target consumers think about products in your category. It’s a brand they think highly of and would recommend to others.
By asking target consumers a core set of questions on a regular basis, you can determine whether your brand is becoming more or less healthy over time.
Most brands check in on their brand health once a month or once a quarter. This lets them link the shifts to specific campaigns or actions that moved the needle.
What can brand tracking help you do?
- You can use the insights you collect from brand tracking in loads of ways.
- Help you direct your marketing strategy and spend
- Spot downward (or upward) trends immediately and tackle them quickly
- Measure the effectiveness of ad campaigns
- Benchmark your brand against competitors
- Keep an eye on your brand’s overall health
- Track and inform your brand’s messaging and positioning
- Discover your biggest brand advocates
What metrics does brand tracking give you?
You start your brand tracking by defining a core set of questions to ask consumers.
The first survey you run is designed to take baseline measurements and repeated at regular intervals (often timed around specific actions like ad campaigns) to track changes.
Here are seven core metrics you can measure with brand tracking:
1. Unprompted awareness
What is it?
This helps you understand how deeply your brand is embedded in the consumer psyche. You might sometimes hear this referred to as unprompted recall.
How do you do it?
To gauge unprompted awareness, you ask survey respondents to give open text answers, meaning there is no predefined list to potentially influence their response.
Why should you do it?
Good unprompted awareness is what many brands dream of—it’s a sign that you’re a real leader in your category. It can be very hard for challenger brands to win share of mind from well-established incumbents, but small gains here can be super meaningful.
2. Prompted awareness
What is it?
This is when people recognise your brand name or logo from a list of similar brands. Even if your unprompted recall is low, prompted awareness—sometimes called prompted recall—can help put things into perspective.
How do you do it?
You ask consumers a question such as, ‘Which of the following snack brands have you heard of?’, then provide a list of brands that includes yours and some key competitors.
Why should you do it?
Prompted awareness is a super important indicator of where your brand sits in your category and when placed alongside competitors.
3. Brand perception
What is it?
Brand perception describes insight into what consumers think about a brand or service, rather than what a brand says about itself.
How do you do it?
To learn your brand perception you could ask questions like ‘Which of the following feelings do you associate with [Your Brand]?’ Some brands also include their Net Promoter Score (NPS) question in their brand perception research.
Why should you do it?
Good brand perception projects add a lot of color to your overall brand tracking research. It often goes deeper than more traditional brand awareness research because it gives you a better sense of what consumers feel about your brand—this is super important for working out purchase intent.
4. Logo recognition
What is it?
Is your brand memorable? And how does it compare with your competitors? This is what you’ll find out with a logo recognition question.
How do you do it?
You show consumers a selection of brand logos in one category and ask them to select the ones they recognise.
Why should you do it?
This metric will tell you how memorable your branding is and how likely your products are to be recognised on the shelf alongside other brands.
5. Purchase intent
What is it?
People are aware of your brand—great! And they love your branding—fantastic! All of this is meaningless unless it translates into purchase intent—this is how likely they are to actually buy your product or service.
How do you do it?
Here you’ll ask something like Which of these brands, if any, would you consider purchasing from in the next 12 months?
Why should you do it?
Knowing whether or not positive feelings about your brand translate into sales is super important. If they do, then you’ll have figured out which customer segments are valuable to you. If they don’t, that tells you there are areas you can work on—you can dig into the reasons people don’t buy from you in some follow-up research.
6. Brand loyalty
What is it?
Are customers planning to stick with your brand in the future? That’s what you’ll try to figure out with brand loyalty research.
How do you do it?
This metric comes from combining purchase history with purchase intent. Looking at how likely those who have bought from you before are to buy from you again helps you start to measure brand loyalty
Why should you do it?
Getting customers to the checkout is one thing, getting them to come back to the checkout next time is a different ball game. Working out your brand loyalty helps you on your way to building commercially sustainable customer relationships.
7. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
What is it?
NPS gives you a quick snapshot of the general sentiment towards your brand.
How do you do it?
You ask respondents a single question: On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this brand to a friend. Based on their rating, customers are then classified as either brand detractors (those who rated from 0-6), passives (those who rated a 7 or 8) or promoters (those who rated a 9 or 10).
Your NPS is determined by subtracting the percentage of customers who are detractors from the percentage who are promoters. The results are expressed as a number, which can range from -100 to 100.
Why should you do it?
What qualifies as a ‘good’ NPS score varies according to industry. For example, the education sector has an impressive average of 71, while for financial services the average is 34. Regardless of the number you’re benchmarking against, any uplift in NPS is a good way to know if your marketing, product and sales strategies are having an impact.
Here’s a great example of an NPS question in the wild…
How can brand tracking help my business?
Justify your marketing budgets and prioritize your marketing spend
Where and among which audiences is your brand lagging? Perhaps you have great awareness on the west coast, but you’re unknown to the midwest.
How do you find this out?
If you read the title of this page, you’ll know how—brand tracking!
Finding out where your valuable customers are—geographically, digitally, which life stage etc.—and how your brand resonates with them is crucial to knowing where to spend on marketing.
We’ve recently expanded into the new regions. Through our brand tracking, we discovered we actually had quite high brand awareness in those regions, despite the fact that we weren’t operating there.
Quantify success and ROI of your marketing campaigns
Okay, so you figured out where to reach your perfect customers and how to carry out your marketing strategy—amazing work!
Now’s the time to track the effect your marketing campaigns have on your brand.
You’re looking for brand tracking!
Brand tracking research is a particularly useful way to measure the success of some marketing activities that are otherwise quite hard to quantify. Think about things like PR or out-of-home advertising: your standard metrics—clicks, new users etc.—probably won’t apply. But tracking fluctuations in the perception consumers have about your brand, which can be influenced by things like PR, social issues, and out-of-home ads, is where brand tracking becomes super important.
Getting data points around things like brand awareness and ad recall makes it easier for us to link back to, say, high growth in short-term sales metrics.
If you feel like you’re not sure which consumer segments to run your brand tracking research with, running some consumer profiling research first makes loads of sense.
By running consumer profiling research you’ll identify the clear groups of consumers who’ll give you valuable insights into your brand. And these might not only be your actual customers—don’t discount the value of non customers’ opinions.
Track your position among competitors
Don’t neglect your competitors in your brand tracking!
It will benefit you to run brand tracking on your competitors as well, to make sure you have a full understanding of your market and how your brand fits into it.
Because—here’s a secret—your smartest competitors are probably doing the same thing to make sure they know where your brand sits compared to theirs.
Measuring the NPS of your closest competitors is a fantastic way to get context around your own score. Not only does it let you know the score you should be striving to beat, but it can also tell you things about the state of the market in general.
For example, let’s say your NPS score declines. In isolation, this is worrying information that will have you questioning where your brand has slipped up.
But if you find that NPS has declined across the board in your category, you’ll know it’s a wider industry trend.
“From the brand tracker we can understand some of the emotional drivers from users. Together with our other data sources, the results are used to make both product and business decisions,” says Uwe Hook’s, Chief Marketing Officer at WorldRemit.
We can see how our competitors are doing, which is obviously important for us to understand to see where the opportunities are for us to grow and disrupt the space even more.
Discover your biggest brand advocates
Some customers like what you offer, some are nonplussed, but some REALLY love what you do! And word-of-mouth still counts for a lot when you’re growing a strong brand (and even when you’re a household name).
How do you find out who these people are?
Yup, you guessed it—brand tracking will help you with this!
By asking groups of your ideal customers what they think about your brand you can also find out which segments are the ones most likely to organically promote your brand to their friends and family.
Spot downward trends before they become an issue
This one’s all in the name—brand tracking.
Imagine your Net Promoter Score plummets by 10 percentage points—nightmare! It’s time to start some further investigations and discover the root cause. Finding the source of problems quickly means you can nip them in the bud and prevent any further damage.
When you’re continuously tracking your brand’s performance over time, you’re able to see which direction you’re heading in and take action to make sure the downward trend doesn’t continue.
We came from a place where we had no brand research. Now we run a quarterly brand tracker, with added monthly dips into brand awareness.
Benchmark your performance in different markets
Don’t assume your brand has the same clout in all markets. Consumers might have different general perceptions of your brand from market to market.
It makes sense to run your brand tracking in different markets to make sure you have a truly competitive picture of what people think about your brand.
“One of the biggest surprises was discovering that there was awareness amongst personas that we maybe didn’t want or need to be targeting. What that insight has led to is a more careful look at how we truly target exactly the right people.”
There’s been lots of things that we’ve learned from doing brand tracking where we can extract a single question and ask specific groups of people, or we can take it as the whole picture.
What you need to know before you create your brand tracker
We totally get it—you’re itching to get your brand tracker up and running so that you can start to see what people really think about your brand.
But hold your horses. There are a few things that it’s helpful to nail down before you start writing your surveys.
Know your target consumer segments
While brand trackers come in all shapes and sizes, you’ll likely want to target yours at specific types of people. These will probably be people who have similar profiles to your current customers, or it might be a group you hope will become your customers.
It also makes sense to run your brand tracking to people who aren’t necessarily your actual target customers—what people think about your brand matters, whether they’re paying customers or not.
To make sure you know who to send your brand tracking research to, you should know which consumer segments matter to you.
Many brands find they need to run consumer profiling research before their brand tracking.
By doing this you’ll identify those key consumer segments and profiles that you’ll want to target for your brand tracking (and for other types of research too!).
By doing this you’ll identify those key consumer segments and profiles that you’ll want to target for your brand tracking (and for other types of research too!).
Articulate your goals
It can be easy to think you need to get your research live ASAP, then work on your goals afterwards because surely the data will just slot right in, right?
Wrong!
Before you start creating your research, you need to know why you’re running research in the first place. What are you trying to achieve as a business? What brand tracking metrics matter to help you achieve this?
Ask yourself these questions and draw up a plan for how your brand tracking project will inform and tie into your organization’s overall goals.
Plan with key reporting dates in mind
The most useful brand trackers run in waves, usually every 3 or 6 months. This setup gives you an up-to-date picture of your brand’s position and helps you identify downward trends you might need to address (or upward trends you can capitalize on!).
When planning your brand tracking project, find out what dates are key to your organization and which people need to see the insights. Then plan your research waves around those.
Your key dates might be around things like a new marketing campaign, a product launch, a board meeting or a fundraising round. Make sure you know who might need the latest brand tracking data and sure you can provide them with the most up-to-date insights in good time.
Don’t forget about seasonality! People’s perceptions change based on external factors too, so always bear this in mind when planning your brand tracking.
For example, if you sell snacks that are particularly popular over the Christmas season, it’s highly likely that people will be more attracted to your brand over this period compared to summer. Seasonality is fine, as long as your business plans around those peaks and valleys in demand.
For example, if you sell snacks that are particularly popular over the Christmas season, it’s highly likely that people will be more attracted to your brand over this period compared to summer. Seasonality is fine, as long as your business plans around those peaks and valleys in demand.
Bring existing hypotheses and data
Although this might be your business’s first foray into proper brand tracking, there’ll probably be some old data lying around that previous projects relied upon.
Make sure you know what data already exists in your organization. The fresh data you gather through your upcoming brand tracking might be different and (hopefully) better, but even old data gives you useful context.
This can help you understand your recent and current position in the market. And it can help you draw up new hypotheses about what your new brand tracking will reveal.
Coming up with some hypotheses about your brand’s position will help you when you come to craft your new research.
It doesn’t matter at all if your hypotheses turn out to be wrong. What matters is that, either way, you’ll be more well-informed about your brand’s position than you were before.
Define the scope of your brand tracking
There’s an almost infinite amount of research you can do into what consumers think about your brand.
To make sure you don’t go down a research rabbit hole, it’s super important to define the scope of your brand tracking research.
This will involve asking yourself questions like:
- Which markets are important to the business?
- What attributes do we want the brand to be known for?
- How often do we need fresh brand tracking data?
- Which competitors do I want to track?
You can (and should!) run brand tracking research into your competitors!
Running brand tracking to find out what people think about your products and services only gives you half of the story. Your brand’s insights might imply that people love what you do and that’s great news!
But what if people love what your competitor is doing even more, and buy with them instead?? You won’t know this unless you run competitor brand tracking too.
Running brand tracking to find out what people think about your products and services only gives you half of the story. Your brand’s insights might imply that people love what you do and that’s great news!
But what if people love what your competitor is doing even more, and buy with them instead?? You won’t know this unless you run competitor brand tracking too.
Real-life survey results examples
To help you visualize the kind of insights you’ll get from these brand tracking templates, here are some example surveys we’ve sent to real respondents from our audience of consumers.
And here’s brand research in our Tracker format. This is really what you’re looking for from a brand tracker—regular surveys sent out over time to identify shifts in how consumers judge your brand.
Example survey questions
Here’s a list of example questions that can help you uncover the brand insights you need.
Wouldn’t it be useful if there was a bank of survey questions and ready-made surveys to inspire your brand tracking project?
YES—that would be so useful!
And here it is!
And with that, let’s get stuck into the brand tracking questions!
Qualifying questions
It’s important to make sure you are asking the right people too. You’ll probably need to know if your respondents are active customers in your particular sector or market before you can know if they’ll support your brand health.
To reach the right respondents for your research
To find out which of your respondents you need to complete your survey, you could ask them a qualifying question.
In the example question below, imagine your brand offers Allergy aids.
- Which of the following, if any, have you purchased in the past 12 months? Select ‘None’ if none apply.
- Eye care (e.g. eye drops or glasses)
- Painkillers (e.g. aspirin)
- Flu and cold remedies
- Vitamins, minerals or supplements
- Allergy aids
- Heartburn or indigestion products
- None
You should include the product or service type you offer in this list—in this example, you offer allergy ads—along with a selection of other related items. You’ll either want to hear from people who’ve used your products, or you’ll want to hear from people who haven’t but might in the future.
You don’t want your respondents to know who or what they’re being asked about straight away, to avoid any potential bias. Because of this, you shouldn’t make your product or service stand out from the other list items. If you looked at the list above you wouldn’t know that ‘allergy ads’ is the answer that will qualify respondents in—that’s exactly what you want so you avoid dishonest responses.
Once you’ve established that you’re asking the right people you can move onto drawing up your list of questions. In general, brand tracking questions can be broadly separated into four areas: what people think; how people feel; what people say; and what people do.
Cognitive questions
Cognitive questions will help you establish what people think about when they think of your brand (or your competitors’…). Things like the concepts and words they associate with your brand, and the values they think your brand has.
The answers will help you establish where your brand sits in the wider market, as well as the qualities that your target audience is looking for in your product category.
Pro tip: You should avoid using pronouns in your questions that might identify your brand as the one asking the questions. Ideally you want neutral answers from your respondents, and if they have a preconceived opinion of your brand, they might answer differently when they know you’re asking the questions.
To find out what people think about your brand
Thinking about [product/service], what brands, if any, are you aware of? Please type in all the brands that you can think of.
- Open-text
This question gives you a good sense of the unprompted awareness of you or your competitors’ brands.
You can then follow it up with a prompted list of brands to understand your position among specific competitors…
- Which of the following brands in [product category] are you aware of?
- Brand A
- Brand B
- Brand C
- When you think of [brand], which of the following words come to mind?
- Luxury
- Value
- Expensive
- Quality
- Eco-friendly
It can sometimes be useful to use open-text responses for this kind of question. That way you’ll get feedback directly from consumers in their own language.
- What was your first impression of [brand]?
- Easy to use
- Effective
- Competitive price
- Eco-friendly
- Well made
- Rank the following brands on price/quality/relatability on a scale from 1-10.
- Brand A
- Brand B
- Brand C
- What would you say is the biggest difference between [brand] and [competitor brand]?
- Value for money
- Effectiveness
- Quality
- Eco credentials
- Design
Emotional questions
Emotional questions will give you a closer insight into how people feel about your brand. They’ll uncover the subconscious connections consumers have with your product or service.
The data generated by these questions will help you to find the right tone in your marketing messages and content.
To understand how people feel about your brand
- How does buying/using [brand] make you feel?
- Frugal
- Energized
- Proud
- Extravagant
- [open-ended answer]
- How would you feel if you could no longer use [product]?
- Devastated
- Sad, but I’d get over it
- Indifferent
- How have your feelings towards [brand] changed over time?
- I like it a lot more
- I like it a bit more
- My feelings haven’t changed
- I like it a bit less
- I like it a lot less
- Thinking about [brand], which of these statements applies to you?
- Using [brand] is fundamental to my self-image
- I share the same values as [brand]
- I associate [brand] with a healthy lifestyle
- I believe that other users of [brand] have similar values to me
- I trust [brand] to make products that have a positive effect on my life
- I am not especially attached to [brand]
- Which of the following statements applies to you when you think about how proud you are to use [brand]?
- I am proud to be a user of [brand]
- I have no strong feelings of pride when using [brand]’s products
- I could just as easily use [rival brand] as [brand]
- I like people to know that I use [brand]
- What three words come to mind when thinking about [brand]?
- [open-ended answer]
Action questions
How your target customer acts—or interacts with your product or service—is key to understanding their purchasing behaviour.
These questions can relate to how people discovered your brand in the first place as well as the most recent interaction they had with your customer service team.
To find out how people act
- When did you last purchase a product from [brand]?
- Within the past week
- Within the past month
- Within the past six months
- Within the past year
- More than one year ago
- How did you become aware of [brand] and the products/services they offer?
- Online advertising
- Social media
- TV advertising
- Supermarket/shop
- Recommended by a friend/family member
- Which other brands did you consider?
- Competitor A
- Competitor B
- Competitor C
- Why did you choose [brand] over [competitor brand]?
- Price
- Wanted a change
- Availability
- Recommendation
- Advertising
- Preferred design/packaging
- Other (please specify)
- What elements do you consider when shopping for [product category]?
- Value for money
- Brand values
- Quality
- Design
- Availability
- Which of the following events/actions would influence you to switch brands?
- No availability of product
- Price increase
- Change of design/packaging
- Change of ingredients
- Special offer for competitor product
- From the following list, where do you tend to buy [product] from?
- Supermarket
- High Street Store
- [Brand]’s bricks-and-mortar store
- Online marketplace
- Direct from [brand]’s website
Scale questions like these, including the common Net Promoter Score (NPS), can also be really good ways to gauge consumer opinion about your brand.
- On a scale from 1-10, how likely are you to recommend [product] to a friend?
- On a scale from 1-10, how satisfied were you with your last purchase of [product]?
- On a scale from 1-10, how happy were you with your last interaction with [brand]?
What if your brand tracking reveals a weak brand?
If you don’t get the glowing results you hoped for, don’t be disappointed.
The whole point of brand tracking is to provide a framework for improving brand health and pushing those metrics up. And what might initially look discouraging can actually be an opportunity in disguise.
Let’s say you discover low levels of overall brand awareness, but the consumers who do know about your brand demonstrate strong purchase intent. That means there’s every chance a brand awareness campaign would translate into sales growth.
If you see that consumers are more likely to buy from a competitor, you can carry out further research to find out why and change your offering or messaging to make sure you address the pain points of your customers.
Likewise, if customer satisfaction is low, it represents a great opportunity to improve and prosper.
This is especially true if you’re scoring low because of one or two consistent reasons. Perhaps people are peeved with your customer service or maybe your product doesn’t quite match preconceived expectations?
Find out what it is that’s not working and fix it. Promote these positive changes and you’ll be on your way to winning back wavering customers.
How top brands have used brand tracking
Knowing your brand’s position in the market and identifying upward or downward trends is a must for brands of all sizes.
Here’s how some strong brands have used brand tracking research with incredible results.
We sometimes get asked about the effect that the Trademark has on shoppers – for example, could it put non-vegans off purchasing a product? This research has shown that this is absolutely not the case – all kinds of shoppers recognise, trust, and actively seek out the Vegan Trademark.
It actually had quite a significant impact on our overall campaign costs. And I think it enabled us to plan a much more efficient campaign.
