What is Brand Tracking?
Brand tracking gives you an opportunity to quantify key brand health metrics, such as brand awareness (prompted, unprompted and logo), purchase intent and the Net Promoter Score (NPS) of your target consumers. Put simply, brand tracking illuminates whether your brand is becoming more or less healthy over time, by checking in with important groups of consumers on a regular basis.
Let us define what some of the key brand health metrics are (for more information and examples, read the 10 Key Brand Health Metrics You Need to Know):
Measuring unprompted awareness allows you to ask your consumers an open ended question to which they can reply with a free-text answer. For example, you can ask “What brands come to mind when thinking about fashion?” This gives your consumers an opportunity to name the brands which are top of mind, so those which catch their eye when browsing in-store or the ones they’re likely to type into Google. If your name pops up on free text answers, this indicates that you have built a strong awareness amongst consumers and have a highly memorable brand.
When measuring prompted awareness you use a multiple choice question and ask people to select all brands that they recognise in the list. This means that consumers might not recall your brand automatically but do recognise it when prompted. This metric is often more useful for smaller brands which are trying to build a memorable brand in competitive markets.
Logo recognition is the easiest form of awareness to achieve. Consumers have seen your logo before and would recognise it in an advert for your brand or on the supermarket shelves. This type of recall is often used when your brand isn’t as well established in the marketplace but you still want a measure of success compared to your main competitors.
Brand tracking is further used for measuring purchase history and purchase intent, from which you can calculate brand loyalty from your consumers. Once you’ve established that the consumer recognises your brand, and has bought one of your products before, many brand trackers then ask consumers how likely they are to recommend the brand to a friend (NPS questions).
Why should I do brand tracking?
Whether you have a dedicated brand team or not, there are activities your company will be carrying out that affect how your brand is perceived by consumers. Without brand tracking, there’s (almost) no way to know if those efforts are helping or hindering the perception of your brand. Unless you wait for things to go wrong - but that’s too late to make any changes. Imagine you could prevent the damage a month before by asking your consumers what they think.
Key things to consider
When running a brand tracker there are a few guidelines that you should bear in mind:
Free text questions allow your respondents to voice their objective thoughts without being prompted to pick an option or a score. Use these questions for the purest responses and the most representative view of whether consumers freely recall your brand.
The respondents that you send your survey to should be broad. Measuring your brand health metrics amongst the general public will allow you to spot unlikely demographics who have an interest in your brand, and might identify potential markets for you to move into.
Lastly, consistency is key. Brand tracking is most insightful when run regularly so you can track your progress over time. The data means very little in isolation, the value comes in tracking the change in results over time and in comparison to your competitors. You can easily compare your data over time on the Trends page in your results dashboard.
How to start Brand Tracking with Attest?
Simply log in to the platform and start asking!
Attest makes running brand trackers very easy! Once you’ve drafted your brand tracker you can set it to recur every 1, 3 or 6 months by selecting from the dropdown list in the Review stage of the survey editor. This will copy the survey into new drafts, which you can edit before they go live if you want to add extra questions or make tweaks.
If you need your brand tracker to run on another cadence or at irregular intervals, you can duplicate each survey and schedule surveys up to 6 months in advance. You can even set up exclusive audiences, so the same respondents won’t be able to answer two (or more) of your brand trackers in a row to avoid respondent fatigue. If you use the recurring surveys feature we automatically apply an exclusive audience so no respondent will see two consecutive trackers.
If you need a little more inspiration before getting started, have a look at our example brand tracking survey, and don’t hesitate to get in touch with our Client Experience team!