Key principles of brand tracking

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Key points

1. The basic rule of a measurement/tracking program should be to keep things as simple as possible, but no simpler. There are several reasons for this:

• Customer measures drawn from your own computer systems, such as purchasing patterns, are powerful and can even be short-term predictive. However, there is strong evidence that customer opinion measurements, drawn directly from the customer, are not only predictive of their future behavior, but can predict defection by between eighteen months and two years
• Customer opinion measurements will inevitably to be less frequent and on a smaller scale than, say, quality control measures in manufacturing. Nonetheless they must be on a sufficient scale to allow for statistically significant early warning - they, therefore, need to be affordable
• Complex measures are difficult to explain to people who are not experts in marketing research - and the tracking data should be made available to everyone associated with the brand
• Too much data is difficult for most people to take in at one time.
• However much detail you encompass in one survey, it will never be enough
• It is generally more motivating for your people to be personally involved in the whole process of tracking your brand and in investigating any issues arising from the results

2. There is a progression of measures, from the simplest ones to track the temperature of the brand, to more detailed ones for next day operational improvement. It is always worth considering who is the audience for the tracking program.

3. As well as measuring your brand performance from a customer perspective, you should also try to categorise the customer and track trends between categories. A typical customer categorisation will run something like:

• suspect - does not currently purchase the product/service category, but could, & has the right segmentation profile for your brand
• prospect - purchases the product/service category, but is not aware of your brand & has the right segmentation profile for your brand
• potential - purchases the product/service category, is favorable towards you, but does not buy your brand currently
• lost customer - someone who used to buy your product/service, but no longer does so

• customer - buys your products, but is not committed to you
• advocate - buys your products & is committed to you

4. Measures should be of importance to everyone across the entire business, & should ultimately include:

• an assessment of the value of the brand, if it were to be sold/licensed - a good discipline, even if you have no intention of selling/licensing it
• linkages to operational processes within the organisation

5. Measures should be predictive. Different research studies conducted in Sweden, the UK and the USA suggest that brand loyalty measures are predictive of actual customer behavior 12-18 months later.

6. An element of the measurement program should be reserved for identifying changing needs amongst your selected customer segments. Your brand may be well designed for today, but could it benefit from some evolutionary adjustment for tomorrow?

7. You should track the performance of your brand within a competitive context. How do your competitors perform against the same issues? Do they deliver your brand better than you do?

8. The most immediate way to build value into a measurement/tracking process is to incorporate a customer feedback loop, which is to say that whenever you ask for feedback from a customer (or receive it unsolicited), you immediately:

• acknowledge the feedback, with thanks, even if the comment is unfair and inaccurate
• tell the customer what you are planning to do with the feedback
• resolve any problems which the customer has raised insofar as that is possible/desirable - many issues will have already been resolved (without the customer having heard), most can be resolved immediately or within a short space of time, & a very few involve major strategic decisions
• tell the customer what you will do differently in a way which will give her/him confidence that the problem will not arise again
• check that the customer was happy with the way the issue was addressed
• remind the customer from time to time that you are always keen to receive feedback so that you can do something about it (as you did the last time)

Having a rigorous process for responding to customer feedback is one of the simplest & most powerful progams you can implement in your organisation, not least because very few companies have one. Most customers do not complain but, if they do, they are usually giving you another chance. If you take it, and show a determination to keep the customer's business, this demonstrates a clear commitment to the customer which s/he is likely to reciprocate.

Research shows that customers who have complained and had that complaint addressed quickly and effectively are often more loyal to that supplier than if they had not experienced the problem in the first place. If the customer does not complain to you, or if you do not respond impressively to the complaint, the customer will probably tell 10-12 people about the experience.

A complaint is also an easy and immediate piece of information for your people to understand, certainly relative to standard customer research survey data where the immediate response is often "Who said it and what did they mean exactly?". With a complaint you usually know!

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