What’s a Brand Tracker Survey?
Brand tracking is one of the most useful metrics by which you can measure the success of the decisions you are taking for your business. It tells you how customers feel about your business, and lets you see, over time, whether their opinion is going up or down.
What is Your Brand?
If you’re going to invest in brand tracking you need to understand just what it is you’re tracking. Your brand is more than (and more important than) the branding you design. Your brand is the identity customers construct for your business that allows them to relate to it on a personal level: to like it, dislike it, feel loyalty or disappointment and to recommend it to their friends.
Customers build a brand from every time they interact with a company – whether that’s buying a product, calling a helpline or simply seeing a poster in a train station. This means that potentially every decision you make can affect your brand: if a back-office decision about pay structure or holiday time affects the mood and commitment of your front line staff, they will deliver a different service to customers and this will modify how they feel about your brand.
How Do Brand Trackers Work?
Brand tracking surveys are most valuable when they reach a wide audience: not just customers who’ve already chosen to shop with you, but a cross-section of the market for your industry whether they’re spending money with you already or not. This helps you understand not just why people have chosen your brand but also why they haven’t (and by extension, what you can do to change that).
Respondents are asked to rate your business for important qualities: do they recognise the brand? Are they planning to shop with it? Do they think of it as reliable; relatable; providing value for money, or whatever the most important characteristics are in your niche?
This gives you both an overall measure of your brand’s health, but also lets you see the fine-grained details in comparison with your competitors, revealing opportunities to expand your brand more aggressively, and where you have to work hard to make up ground.
Where You Can Get Brand Tracking?
Because of the nature of the research – that’s it’s most valuable when it draws from a wide audience and that it gives you more insights when it’s conducted over time, rather than as a one off – it makes sense for you to reach out to a dedicated market research firm for brand tracking. Even large businesses find it difficult to justify employing the necessary full time, specialist staff. Market research firms have the reach to get data from the whole market, not just your existing customers, and the expertise to turn that data into insight and analysis that can help you make successful decisions!
