What is a Brand Tracker?

A brand tracker provides a regular, detailed snapshot of how your brand is performing with your target consumers, relative to the whole market and key competitors. A good brand tracker should:

• Unlock the future, not visualise the past
• Provide answers to your biggest questions
• Uncover new insights you didn’t explicitly ask
• Facilitate faster, confident decision making
• Add context and deeper understanding; explain ‘why’

Why is Brand Tracking important?

When you’re working in a business, it’s very easy to have a distorted view of your brand. Of course you love it, and everyone you know has heard of it (because you’ve told them about it!), but is this representative of the population as a whole? Or your target consumer segment?

It’s vital you have an independent validation of your brand’s strengths or weaknesses, otherwise you may miss warning signs that it is weaker than competitors in some areas; or opportunities where competitors have lagged and your brand could capitalise. 

When do you need Brand Tracking?

Some businesses run brand tracking quite infrequently - once a year (occasionally even less) - while others only run trackers sporadically, around major campaigns (pre- and post- tracking).

We believe that you need brand tracking more frequently than this. Our recommendation is to run it quarterly at a minimum, and if you’re in a fast-moving market, with agile competitors or where consumer tastes change often then you should aim to run a brand tracker every month.

One of the major benefits of brand tracking is that it helps you spot trends over time. And it takes at least 3 data points to indicate trend - so if you only run it once a year, it will take you three years until you spot a trend - probably too late to do much about it then!

Where should you use Brand Tracking?

Brand Tracking is typically owned by the brand or marketing team, though it’s output could be useful to many other departments, from the CEO to product to sales.