Brand tracking is a way in which you can see regular snapshots of how your brand is performing within its market. This might look at how your brand is doing compared to direct competitors, while looking at your brand’s impact on the market on a larger scale. Here we go through a few of the criteria needed to run it successfully.
Firstly, you need to establish what you want your brand tracker to measure. You may wish to put an emphasis on brand loyalty for example, if this is a particularly important component of your marketing strategy. Or it might be a case of wanting to have precise information on brand awareness, so you know how well you are penetrating the market.
Once you have established what it is exactly you want to track, the next step is to create or use a research platform. This will involve everything from designing questions, distributing those questions, to analysis of the answers. It is important that your platform should be able to give you the flexibility to be able to change your answers. This allows for necessary changes to questions to be made on a quarterly basis that might have to occur due to market changes, or changes within the company itself. To match the ease of question changing, you also want to make sure you’ve established a way in which that analysis of the data produced is simple, robust, yet detailed enough to give you the necessary insights needed.
The next step is to assemble a panel of respondents. As there’s no point writing a survey if you have no one to send it to. For brand tracking it is good to have a strong mix of people to survey. You want a strong mix of demographics alongside a mix of existing and potential customers. This will give depth to your brand tracking, as it allows you to see how your brand is performing amongst different target groups. For example, a brand tracker might show your overall brand awareness to have gone up, but for it to have gone down in a specific target group.
If this seems like quite a large task, it might be worth outsourcing your brand tracking. Market research companies will already have well-established research platforms. These platforms can then be individually optimised for your company. They will also have a much larger, and diverse panel of respondents than you can expect to produce yourself in a given timeframe. This allows resources to remain focused on the brand itself. While the brand itself is supported by more detailed and substantial information from the brand tracking process.