Brand tracking - a one minute briefing

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Question - How should you track your brand?

Answer - Little and often. Use a very simple survey which is very low cost, so you can track your brand on a regular basis, and make the results a regular part of your business process

Key Points

In brand tracking, you can go from the very simple to the very complex. At the simplest, you have Total Research’s Equitrend relative perceived quality approach – one question (“how do you perceive the quality of……?”) – which measures salience (informed awareness), brand stature and customer loyalty. Given that the key issue in brand tracking is cost, this is very cheap – so long as you take the leap of faith that the measure means something. Total Research have lots of data to show that their RPQ scores correlate well to price premium, stock market behaviour, and propensity to purchase most often, and the published support of David Aaaker, the global branding guru.

At the opposite end of the scale, a very detailed approach comes from Research International’s Equity Engine that measures brand performance (rational factors) and 18 affinity (emotional) factors. This will also give a quick view on price/value, and they have a new add-on which predicts future sales by comparing your equity to your reputation – more equity than reputation = sales growth; more reputation than equity = sales decline. However, this is a very expensive tracking tool.

Going beyond brand equity, you can track brand valuation. Interbrand has the highest profile system – a topline measurement of the world’s leading brands which they publish every year, and a thorough value assessment base on sales/profit data, brand profile data, risk factors etc. (at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars for a global brand). Alternative sources of this type of work are KPMG, Brand Finance, and Intangible Business.

Lots of people have standard advertising tracking research, measuring awareness, familiarity and favorability, which you would then plot against your and competitive investment, and sales data. One of the leading companies in this area is Millward Brown.

However, there are some new techniques, based on neural network systems, that claim to be able to isolate the independent and inter-dependent effects of advertising (in fact all comms) on sales/profits. One of the leaders in this field is The Blackbird Partnership.

If you find this approach difficult to swallow, and you happen to be marketing an FMCG product, AC Nielsen will offer advertising tracking data right through the supply chain from the usual advertising tracking research, to trade audit data, to home audit data.

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