How to Measure your Brand’s Performance with Brand Tracking
Designing a brand is a hugely important first step for any new business. The second step is putting the brand to work and measuring its performance in the market. Brand tracking allows us to monitor a brand’s health over time from the market’s point of view.
An organisation’s brand is possibly one of its most lucrative assets. According to Interbrand, roughly a third of the financial value of stock markets can be accounted for by brands. Stronger brands also increase the probability a shopper will buy your product, and reduces price sensitivity, yielding larger profits. It’s in a marketer’s best interests to measure and strengthen their brand’s performance in the market.
Brand tracking measures two generic aspects of a brand’s health: awareness and image. We measure a brand’s performance by using primary research, typically using surveys with unbiased randomised sampling and a statistically significant sample size.
Brand awareness, simply put, is the number of people in your category or target segment that knows your brand. It can be measured in various ways. Firstly, unprompted awareness measures salience levels. We may use research questions such as “when thinking of supermarkets, which brands come to mind?”. The respondent may say:
Tesco
Sainsbury’s
Morecroft’s Supermarket
The answers allow us to measure the number of respondents recall our brand. We can also measure who was ‘top-of-mind’ – the brand the respondent first entered. Unprompted awareness uncovers which brands are most salient to consumers.
Prompted awareness offers respondents a checklist and asks them to tick all the brands they have heard of. Similarly, we can see the percentage of people who have checked our brand name.
Brand image can be measured using a Likert scale asking participants how strongly they agree or disagree with certain positive and negative attributes of a brand. If Morecroft’s Supermarket are trying to position themselves as the supermarket with the freshest fruit and vegetables, but feedback customer feedback a stressful shopping experience, survey questions may include:
How strongly do you agree or disagree that the following supermarkets (list brands)…:
Has the freshest fruit and vegetables
Is a stressful shopping experience
Consistently monitoring these responses over several years allows brands to carefully position themselves correctly in the mind of the customer. It’s wise to design the questionnaire so that competitor responses are also measured, to flag early warning signs of homogenisation, lack of differentiation/distinctiveness or becoming outcompeted in certain brand attributes.
Measuring brand awareness and brand image allows managers to better understand how effective their marketing communications are, and if brand activities are working. It also provides a market-oriented view of the brand where customers inform you of your true and current brand image.
About BrandWerks —
BrandWerks is a design resource company focused on advancing the practice of brand strategy.
We know that brand strategy can be a difficult beast to master. We create brand strategy templates and resources that help designers, agencies, and brand strategists master brand strategy.
Our tools are actionable and fully customizable and founded in a commercial approach that helps guide you and your clients through the process.