Brand Track

Brand Track

Consumer Markets are quite volatile, and the trends change rapidly. While we see a lot of shift in product consumption, understanding the needs of the customers is of utmost importance for any business to sustain.

Product - Brand Track is a continual method approach to measure brand awareness and image, using both recall and recognition measures and moving from general to more specific questions. To conduct the survey, first consumers are usually probed of what brands come to their mind in certain situations, next they are asked for recalling brands based on various product category cues, and then come the tests of brand recognition.

The questionnaire further moves from general questions to product specific questions of brand tracking surveys to measure brand image, especially specific perceptions like what consumers think characterizes the brand, and evaluations such as what the brand means to consumers. A few specific brand associations typically exist for the brand, depending on the richness of consumer knowledge structures, which marketers can track over time.

What is a Brand Tracking Study?

Brand tracking study monitors the health of a brand and its competitive landscape. Each brand faces different issues; thus, it is crucial to measure usage, brand attitudes, perceptions, and purchase intent from time to time with customized tracking surveys. The objective of the brand tracking study is to analyse brand attitudes and perceptions through a series of questions related to consumers’ experience with the brand. This kind of study usually involves the collection of quantitative data from consumers to get a more representative picture of your brand’s position in the minds of consumers.

Besides assisting in enhancing consumer experiences, the brand tracking study helps marketers to get a sense of where they stand in the market, identify purchase trends, and analyze what consumers like most about a product and what more improvements would they like to see in the product. All this market intelligence can help to elevate the brand and customer experiences by optimizing product and marketing campaigns as per the evolving market trends.

Designing a brand tracking study is related to whom to track, where to track, when to track, and how to interpret results.

Whom to Track

Respondents

Tracking should be conducted across Users & Non-Users of a brand, but it can also be rewarding to monitor nonusers of the brand or even of the product category, for example, to suggest potential segmentation strategies. Marketers can track those customers loyal to the brand against those loyal to other brands, or against those who switch brands. Among current customers, marketers can distinguish between heavy and light users of the brand. Dividing the market typically requires different questionnaires (or at least sections of a basic questionnaire) to better capture the specific issues of each segment.

Respondent Profiling basis

It's often useful to closely track other types of customers, too, such as channel members and other intermediaries, to understand their perceptions and actions toward the brand. Of interest is their image of the brand and how they feel they can help or hurt its equity. Retailers can answer direct questions such as, "Do you feel that products in your store sell faster if they have <the brand name> on them? Why or why not?" Marketers might also want to track employees such as salespeople, to better understand their beliefs about the brand and how they feel they're contributing to its equity now or could do so in the future. Such tracking may be especially important with service organizations, where employees play profound roles in affecting brand equity.

Marketers should assess those key brand associations that make up the potential sources of brand equity based on strength, favorability and uniqueness. Unless associations are strong enough for consumers to recall them, their favorability does not matter, and unless they are favorable enough to influence consumers' decisions, their uniqueness does not matter. Ideally, marketers will collect measures of all three dimensions, but perhaps for only certain associations and only some of the times; for example, favorability and uniqueness may be measured only once a year for three to five key associations.

When and Where to Track

One useful approach for monitoring brand associations is continuous tracking studies, which collect information from consumers continually over time. The advantage of continuous tracking is that it equalizes out aberrations or unusual marketing activities or events like a high profile new digital campaign or an unlikely occurrence in the marketing environment to provide a more representative set of baseline measures.

The frequency of such tracking studies, in general, depends on the frequency of product purchase.

Brand Tracking Study Steps

Establish a Target Segment

Before you decide to determine the reputation of a brand in the market, analyze your brand messages, and identify what you want your brand associations to be, and among which consumers.

Decide Competitive Brands to Track

Select competitors against which you want to measure your brand to determine its positioning in the market. Competitive brand tracking is essential to build strategies related to developing new products and marketing strategies.

Select the Method

You need to determine what type of study will provide you the maximum data needed to obtain metrics. With the growing use of digitalization, online surveys have become the preferred choice for performing brand tracking surveys.

Analyse Results

Data analysis can help to provide insights about brand trends, consumer behavior, and brand perception, which could ensure the success of brand-building tactics.