Why Brand Tracking is an Essential Investment in Your Overall Brand Health

We’re all invested in our own personal health – without our health, what else matters? The same should be true for any business’s brand health. Much like a blood test can tell if you have high cholesterol or a scale can tell if you’ve gained weight, there are several ways a business can understand how well it’s faring, how it can improve and how it can identify potential obstacles or unmet needs.

That’s why any business that cares about its future should have a comprehensive brand tracking program.

Think of a brand tracker as an exam to understand the impact of brand-building activities on your business in the context of competitive actions and market trends.

What is Brand Tracking?

Brand tracking is a program that engages with real consumers about if and how they view and engage with your brand and its competitors. The brand tracker captures responses to these questions over time and delivers real insights to help you make educated, confident decisions about your marketing, product development, and other crucial initiatives.

By systematically monitoring how consumers buy and use your products and what they think and feel about your brand, brand tracking enables businesses to measure performance over time, optimize marketing ROI and make informed decisions that improve sales and increase market share.

The Benefits of Brand Tracking

A brand health tracking program is an essential component for any business or organization that wants to grow and succeed.

A brand tracker can help you:

• Spot opportunities, threats and changes in the marketplace before your competitors do.

• Assess the impact of marketing activities and how those activities resonate with consumers.

• Improve your financial performance by identifying areas and activities that deliver meaningful ROI.

Brand tracking should be a decision engine used to investigate the “how,” the “why,” the “who” and the “so what?” It should test hypotheses and uncover actions to be taken, rather than simply providing a report card and a log of known historical facts.

The best brand tracking programs can help get to the bottom of some of your business’s most critical questions, such as:

• If your brand is struggling, then why is it struggling?

• Where are the opportunities and vulnerabilities in the market?

• What marketing and business actions could navigate around obstacles?

• How are your brand’s actions likely to impact the brand?

• If a brand is succeeding, why is it succeeding?

• What actions can you take to protect and preserve your brand’s success?

• How are your customers’ experiences and needs changing over time, and how much of that change is due to brand changes, culture changes or life experience?

Key Metrics to Consider in Brand Health Tracking

Brand health tracking measures how real consumers view and engage with your brand and its competitors over time. These metrics deliver insights that help you make educated and confident decisions about your marketing, product development and other crucial initiatives.

Core Brand Health Metrics:

• Brand Awareness: Whether consumers know your brand exists. Track both aided awareness (recognition when prompted) and unaided awareness (top-of-mind recall without prompts).

• Brand Sentiment & Perception: How consumers feel about your brand: positive, negative, or neutral. What associations do they attach to your brand compared to competitors?

• Customer Loyalty & Advocacy: How likely consumers are to repurchase from your brand and recommend it to others. Track repeat engagement frequency over time.

• Brand Preference & Usage: Whether consumers choose your brand over competitors in their consideration and purchase decisions.

• Brand Engagement: How often and how deeply consumers interact with your brand across touchpoints, and how those engagement patterns shift over time.

• Brand Equity: The total value and strength of your brand based on the combined impact of awareness, loyalty, preference, and sentiment.

A comprehensive brand tracker captures responses to these metrics through surveys and data collection methods tailored to your specific business circumstances and the strategic questions you need answered.

Brand Tracking Methods

Any brand tracking program should collect and incorporate data from multiple sources – relying too heavily on only one data collection method can skew the results and undermine the value of the tracker.

One common method for collecting data for a brand health tracker is through market research surveys. These surveys can be a snapshot of how consumers perceive your brand at a discrete moment in time, and then survey results can be compared over time to assess the performance of specific brand actions and their impacts on brand perception.

Media monitoring can also be an invaluable data collection method. By scanning various channels – websites, videos, podcasts, newsletters and social media, among others – for mentions, both positive and negative, of your brand, you can keep your finger on the pulse of how consumers are perceiving, interacting and sharing about your brand.

There are also internally collected metrics that can paint a useful picture of a brand’s health. Google Analytics and other tools for online analytics generate various metrics to measure how consumers are engaging with your brand’s website and online content in a way that can illuminate your strengths and areas for improvement. Sales data can also show how consumer perception is impacting your brand’s bottom line.

Ultimately, quality data comes from an unbiased and representative sample of your intended population. It’s especially important to design your tracking system so that it keeps up with the marketplace.

How Often Should You Track Your Brand Health?

A brand tracking program should be both continuous and long-term.

In order for a brand tracker to adequately and accurately represent a brand’s health, it needs to have enough data to be able to see trends over time while also being updated regularly enough to not become an outdated snapshot that doesn’t reflect the current moment.

Each brand needs to find the equilibrium point where the brand tracking program is collecting the data it needs to while optimizing resources and ensuring it has the agility to take meaningful actions that move the brand forward.

How can Brand Tracking Help Stakeholders Understand Shifts in Brand Perception Over Time?

With comparable data from a long period of time, the decision-makers at your brand can see – not with gut feelings but with measurable, scientific data – how healthy your brand is and whether or not the key vital signs are trending in the right direction.

Material’s Proven Expertise in Brand Tracking

Material has decades of brand tracking expertise in partnership with some of the world’s largest and most recognizable brands to help them unlock a complete view of where their brand is, where it’s heading and where it needs to go. Our brand health tracking experts deliver actionable insights that illuminate opportunities and unlock meaningful business outcomes.

Want to learn more about how Material’s brand health tracking services can make a meaningful impact for your organization? Reach out today.