Do you know how healthy your brand is right now? When was the last time you could check? Historically, tracking brand performance hasn’t been easy. However today, with the growth of online research, gathering daily customer insight is just a few clicks away.
YouGov’s flagship brand tracker, BrandIndex, is the only daily online brand tracking tool, interviewing over 300 people a day about brands in India for the past four years. Here, our Global CEO of BrandIndex, Ted Marzilli, delves into the power of daily brand tracking and how to utilize it to its full potential in India.
In your experience, why is it important to track your brand?
Your brand is your business. A brand is a critical factor in consumer purchase choices across all products and services. In some cases, it is the most important factor, and as a result, brands of Fortune 500 companies are valued at billions of dollars.
It is, therefore, becoming increasingly fundamental for businesses to understand the impact of their brand on a daily basis, in addition to executing their long-term brand strategy, so that they can prepare to take decisive action when necessary and stay ahead of the curve.
In every sector, micro and macro implications of daily life affect people’s perception of brands and their near-term and long-term prospects. Whether it’s a new product and advertising campaign launches, crisis management or consumer experience, be it positive or negative, your brand is continuously impacted by the wider world.
With a daily brand tracker, you’ll never be caught off-guard. You can immediately observe how events affect not just your own brand, but those of your competitors as well. In turn, this gives you powerful insight to continuously inform your brand strategy and assess what action (if any) should be taken and when.
Why should I track my brand on a daily basis?
Perception of your brand changes every day. A quarterly snapshot of brand tracking data masks the fluctuations that occur every day due to a brand’s planned and unplanned advertising, marketing, media, and promotional activities. This is precisely what any brand manager needs to be able to see to effectively build a brand. Daily brand tracking gives you a real-time picture of your brand’s health and that of your competitors and entire sectors.
This live stream of data makes it easy for you to keep a constant eye on the public’s perception of your brand every single day. Rather than waiting for data to be collated and reported which takes time, a daily online tracker allows you to spot and act on any changes in perception, not tomorrow, not even later today, but immediately.
How can brand tracking add value to my business?
Business decisions are best informed by consumer insight. Through continuous brand tracking, you can monitor how the media (paid and earned) and the news impacts consumer brand perception and intended purchase behaviors. You can track current customers, former customers, and prospects, observing how each group’s perceptions change over time and then use that intelligence to inform strategies to win in the market place.
Ongoing brand tracking also provides valuable insight into your brand’s performance against your competitors allowing you to watch how specific events, strategies, and tactics impact brand perception as they unfold, as well as evaluate the performance of any marketing suppliers. All this is invaluable information which allows you to tailor your consumer marketing and communications strategies which are informed by the very consumers you set out to engage every day.
Should I use a syndicated tracker or a custom tracker?
Syndicated trackers drive down the price of brand tracking. YouGov’s large proprietary online panels enable continuous tracking of a large number of brands, effectively minimizing the blind spots for a brand manager. That said, many brands find that maintaining a custom tracker to periodically dive into product level or category-specific issues makes sense.
Choose a syndicated tracker that allows you to add any brand or category you like, create custom filters and add additional questions to ensure that the survey is relevant to your industry and the implications of your own brand strategy. The benefits of syndicated trackers are that they are quick to set up and can also provide historical data which will be instrumental in tracking performance over defined periods of time.
Aside from tracking a brand, what else can a brand tracker be used for?
Brand tracking adds value in more ways than one. Clients leverage the breadth and depth of information daily brand tracking provides in many facets of their business. A few examples:
CEOs report the independently verified results to credibly demonstrate business results to investors and other industry watchers.
Marketing teams mine the demographic data to uncover growth opportunities and to develop advertising messages that effectively target the relevant consumer segments.
Brand performance can be used to drive public interest in your brand.
Competitor tracking can discover vulnerabilities that can be exploited for business advantage.
You can use the data to discover your own vulnerabilities before your competitors do.