Want to build a strong brand that resonates with your target audience and drives long-term business growth? It all starts with understanding the right brand metrics to track.
This blog explores how to optimize your brand tracking strategy for data-driven decisions, leading to stronger brand performance and growth. It also highlights how quantilope's automated, advanced methodologies and brand health tracking solutions help you to do so.
Table of Contents:
- The importance of brand tracking metrics
- Tracking the right metrics for your brand
- Better Brand Health Tracking
- Brand Health Tracking with quantilope
The importance of brand tracking metrics
Consumer preferences and competitive landscapes are constantly shifting. The brands that invest in tracking key brand health metrics over time are the ones that stay relevant and ahead of fierce competition in today’s saturated markets.
With effective brand tracking efforts, you can...
- Understand brand perceptions: Gauge how your target audience perceives your brand, including brand awareness, brand associations, and brand sentiment.
- Measure brand performance: Track key performance indicators (KPIs) such as market share, customer satisfaction, and brand loyalty to assess the effectiveness of your branding efforts.
- Optimize marketing strategies: Identify which marketing efforts and initiatives are resonating with your audience and driving desired outcomes. This can help you further invest in what’s working, or pivot on what’s not.
- Strengthen brand strategy: Make data-driven decisions about brand positioning, marketing campaigns, and new product development.
Keep in mind, these examples highlight just a few of the insights brand tracking can uncover. Your specific business objectives, brand size, and industry will further shape your unique tracking strategy. By consistently monitoring relevant brand metrics, you gain a comprehensive understanding of your brand's strengths and weaknesses, identify areas for improvement, and drive brand growth.
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Tracking the right metrics for your brand
While there are numerous metrics you could track over time for your particular brand, focusing on the most relevant ones for your specific business goals is crucial.
Let's dive deeper into brand health categories and their associated metrics. We'll start by highlighting the more familiar 'brand funnel' metrics like awareness, consideration, and usage, before moving on to the more advanced approach of Better Brand Health Tracking, grounded in marketing science.
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Brand awareness | The extent to which consumers recognize and remember your brand, its products, and its services.
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Key metrics for brand awareness include:
- Top-of-mind awareness: Whether your brand is the first one that comes to mind for consumers in your category.
- Brand recognition: How well consumers can recognize your brand name or logo when presented with it.
- Brand recall: How easily consumers can recall your brand name when prompted with a product category or need (unaided/aided brand recall) - common in ad testing tracking studies.
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Brand health | The overall perception and strength of your brand in the market, accounting for factors like awareness, reputation, customer loyalty, and perceived brand value.
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Brand health metrics include:
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- Brand associations: The thoughts, feelings, and attributes consumers associate with your brand.
- Brand equity: Your overall brand value, including its quality, loyalty, and customer perception.
- Brand sentiment: The overall sentiment towards your brand (positive, negative, neutral), often gauged through social media, social listening tools, and online consumer reviews.
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Brand performance | How effectively your brand is achieving its business objectives.
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Consider the following for brand performance:
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- Market share: Your brand's share of the market, relative to competitors. This is typically a sales data metric, but can be measured in a brand health tracker through Mental Market Share (a Better Brand Health Tracking key metric - more on that below!).
- Customer satisfaction: How satisfied customers are with your brand and its offerings, often measured in brand health surveys through a Net Promoter Score (NPS) which calculates ‘promoters’ and ‘detractors’ of your brand.
- Brand loyalty: The level of loyalty among your customer base (e.g., repeat purchase rate, customer referrals, loyal customer retention, and so on).
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Customer Behavior | The actions, decisions, and preferences individuals exhibit when interacting with your brand, products, and/or services.
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Customer behavior metrics may include:
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- Brand usage: How consumers use your products or services (frequency, quantity, occasions).
- Brand attitudes: How consumers feel about using your brand and its offerings.
- Purchase intent: The likelihood of consumers purchasing your brand in the future (whether as a first-time-buyer or a repeat customer).
- Customer journey: How customers interact with your brand across various touchpoints (website, social media, in-store) - from initial awareness, to shopping, to purchase decision.
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Better Brand Health Tracking:
The brand health categories highlighted above are central to most traditional brand tracking studies. Seasoned researchers likely default to these types of questions when drafting their brand health studies, simply out of familiarity or habit.
However, these metrics don’t always tell the full story that brands need to generate actionable, long-term growth. They capture the ‘what’ of consumer behavior but not necessarily the ‘why’ or ‘how’. Many brands using traditional means of tracking spend a lot of time and money on their trackers, but then can’t actually act on them.
Today, researchers can leverage Better Brand Health Tracking (BBHT), a comprehensive tracking approach developed by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science. BBHT addresses the limitations of traditional tracking by considering the following key aspects:
- Category Entry Points: Also known as CEPs, these are the specific situations or needs that prompt consumers to think about shopping in a product category in the first place (e.g., 'going to college' for buying a computer, or, 'hosting a party' for buying potato chips)
- Mental Availability: In specific buying situations (CEPs), Mental Availability describes how easily a brand comes to mind. Continuing the example from the bullet point above, it's the specific computer or potato chip brands consumers are thinking about. Within Mental Availability, there are four key metrics that further specify how consumers are thinking about a brand:
- Mental Market Share (MMS): How ‘present’ a brand is in consumers’ minds. As mentioned in the section above, MMS is often compared to actual sales market share as a benchmark. Higher MMS than sales market share suggests potential barriers to purchase (availability, price, etc.). Lower MMS may indicate a limited brand network - and thus, missed opportunities.
- Mental Penetration (MPen): The percentage of consumers with at least some Mental Availability of a brand. Building MPen among non-buyers is crucial for brand growth, as even a single new connection among potential customers can increase the likelihood of future purchases.
- Network Size (NS): This is the average number of CEPs consumers associate with a brand. The goal for most brands should be to expand their NS as much as possible. The reason for this is simple: the more situations that consumers are thinking of a brand, the greater chances that brand has of making a sale. Expanding NS is most often done through marketing/communication/positioning efforts.
- Share of Mind (SoM): This metric represents the proportion of mental space your brand occupies compared to competitors, among consumers who are already aware of your brand. A higher SoM suggests stronger brand preference and a greater likelihood of purchase. When this metric drops, it provides an early warning sign indicating eroding brand memories among a very crucial audience (those who have already built up some Mental Availability for a brand).
- Mental Advantage: Mental Advantage analysis is another unique concept in BBHT studies, revealing how a brand performs relative to expectations, considering both its size and the typicality of the attributes measured. It provides a clear path forward for brands, highlighting specific areas where they might want to maintain an advantage or grow an attribute that’s underperforming (but is important within the category). With Mental Advantage analysis, brands aren’t left guessing where to focus their priorities. Instead, they have a clear, data-backed analysis highlighting where they stand in their category for specific attributes.
Through these above-mentioned concepts and metrics, BBHT provides a more accurate and actionable understanding of brand health than traditional brand health tracking studies that have been set up and analyzed the same way for decades. Brands that shift their tracking efforts to a BBHT approach benefit from:
- Hidden opportunities for differentiation, thanks to an intuitive Mental Advantage analysis that accounts for specific brand criteria.
- Optimized brand positioning, based on a deep understanding of how a target audience is thinking about your brand (and competitive brands).
- More effective marketing campaigns, driven by insights into key brand associations and how diversified those associations are.
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Brand Health Tracking with quantilope
Move beyond the bounds of traditional market research brand trackers by leveraging quantilope’s Consumer Intelligence Platform. quantilope not only automates usage and attitude (U&A) tracking metrics for those that wish to use these types of metrics in their studies - it also offers platform users the power of Better Brand Health Tracking (BBHT) with a templated setup and access to real-time analysis.
With BBHT, brands access advanced tracking concepts like Category Entry Points, Mental Availability, and Mental Advantage analysis, revealing the "why" behind consumer behavior and brand performance. Like all other methods and solutions, BBHT is fully automated so that researchers of any skillset have the ability to benefit from BBHT’s actionable brand insights.
quantilope’s brand tracking options provide brands with whatever option works best for them to make the data-driven decisions they need for an optimized brand strategy and sustainable growth.
To learn more about tracking brand health with quantilope (including quantilope’s BBHT solution!) get in touch below:
