Brand tracking is the continuous measurement of how people perceive a brand, including whether they know it, consider it and buy it, and what they associate with it. Repeated over time and compared with competitors, it shows how a brand is developing and how marketing affects it.
What is brand tracking?
Brand tracking means asking a representative sample of people the same questions at regular intervals, about your brand and its competitors. The answers show how awareness, consideration, preference and associations change over time.
The aim is to understand which brand-building efforts work, which do not, and why, both for the brand on its own and compared with competitors.
How does brand tracking work?
A brand exists in people's minds, as the sum of what they think and feel about it. Understanding how a brand performs therefore starts with asking people about it.
A brand tracker typically asks:
whether people know the brand, both unprompted and from a list
whether they would consider it, and whether they have bought it
what they associate with it, compared with competitors
whether they have noticed its advertising
The questions themselves are simple. Reliable results depend on asking the right people in a consistent way, weighting the answers to the population and reading changes against the margin of error.
Why brand tracking matters for your business
Brand tracking helps a company to:
measure how the brand performs over time
evaluate brand strategy and campaigns
find new opportunities, such as groups or needs where the brand is weaker than its competitors
follow competitors on the same measures
Brand effects are hard to measure because they build up slowly and do not show in sales data in the short term. A tracker makes them measurable, so brand investments can be followed up in the same way as other marketing.
Regular measurement also shows changes in perception early, which gives time to adjust before a problem appears in sales.
