Before we dive into the details of conducting a brand tracking survey, it’s useful to take a moment to define what brand tracking is, exactly. In short, the brand tracking definition encompasses any activity undertaken to measure the impact of your brand. Brand tracking is an ongoing measure of brand-building efforts against key metrics allowing companies to keep a real-time pulse on their customers and prospects. Important key metrics include brand health, awareness, associations, sentiment, and loyalty.
If done consistently, brand tracking is a way to monitor the performance of your brand over time—and flag potential issues based on past performance. Another important aspect of this process is your ability to measure not only how your brand is doing, but how your competitors are performing. Armed with this knowledge, you can make data-based business decisions to help your brand succeed. Of course, all of this relies on your ability to reach the right people, gather high quality data, and analyze the findings.
PureSpectrum was born out of this pain point—engineered to make researchers’ jobs easier, you’ll find a complete end-to-end market research and insights platform built for accurate, agile research.
What Are the Different Types of Tracking Studies for Brands?
There are many different types of brand tracking that companies use, like brand impact surveys or panels. In general, most brand tracking efforts are survey-based, as the information that is valuable to you is mainly inside of your customers’ heads. Some common tracking studies are:
- Brand Tracking
- Market/Industry Tracking
- Ad Effectiveness
- Competitive Intelligence
Accurate survey design and high respondent quality is imperative to any successful tracking study. That’s where PureSpectrum comes in to make your life easier; our expertly designed survey templates within the Insights platforms coupled with high-quality respondents from our Marketplace platform powered by PureScoreTM make the difference. PureScore is a proprietary, comprehensive, advanced machine learning scoring system that measures individual survey respondent quality, ensuring that your data is proactively protected.
Why Conduct Brand Tracking?
Simply put, frequent brand tracking is essential for making the best decisions possible. The importance of brand tracking cannot be overstated—in today’s fast-paced world with volatile economies and unprecedented global events like COVID-19, market conditions shift quickly. “Frequent” is the key differentiating factor to remember. Think of brand tracking as a faster feedback loop—while it’s possible to rely on sales data, that information is delayed. Brand tracking provides real-time measurement and monitoring of your brand’s positioning directly from the consumers and shoppers of not only your brands, but also of the competition
“Surveying with regular cadence is key to monitoring your brand’s health, studying consumers, and getting feedback quickly. Regularly collecting important analytics helps a brand pivot before sales decrease.” – Brynn Gasparino, Senior Insights Account Manager
How To Conduct Brand Tracking Studies
The first step in conducting a brand tracking study is to determine the parameters of your tracker. Some of the questions you’ll need to answer first are:
- What are the key brand metrics you’d like tracked?
- Who would you like to answer these questions? Most likely your current customers and prospects
- How frequently should you run the study to gauge market changes (Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly)?
- Are there external industry-affecting considerations to include?
Once you’ve determined these answers, you’ll need to decide on how you’ll deliver the survey, where the respondents will come from, and what the individual questions will be.
What Is an Example of a Brand Tracking Survey Question?
Unaided and aided awareness questions are excellent brand tracking examples. The design of the brand tracking study is key to understanding the depth of awareness as well as overall brand health. One approach would be unaided awareness questions which ask the respondent to identify a brand for a specific question. Another approach is to ask aided questions which instead give the respondent additional information to help them answer.
Unaided Awareness
Unaided awareness questions are typically the first option on a survey. The purpose of these open-ended questions is to establish respondents’ baseline knowledge about the market segment and your brand. With unaided awareness questions, respondents are asked to give the first idea or brand that surfaces when prompted with your topic. For example, you might ask “which brands come to mind when you think about cleaning?”
Aided Awareness
Aided awareness questions often follow unaided at the beginning of surveys to help narrow down the focus of the conversation. Aided awareness questions are structured by giving respondents a list of brands to select from. For example, you might follow up your cleaning question with a list of common household cleaning brands and ask respondents which ones they are familiar with. With this list to choose from, this query helps researchers understand which brands to continue surveying. After all, if consumers are unaware of a brand, then there is minimal value in further study. Aided awareness is essential for understanding the impact of your brand and its competitors.
These are just a few examples of the many different types of questions that can be asked in a brand tracking survey. To learn more, download PureSpectrum’s Top 10 Brand KPIs You Should Be Tracking & Why.
Other examples of question types include Brand Health metrics, competitive intelligence, and industry trends.
- Brand Health metrics include questions like the net promoter score and are intended for gauging how well your brand is performing.
- Competitive intelligence questions are designed to gather information about competitors so that you can outmaneuver your competitors with your marketing efforts.
- Industry trends questions help you understand the overall market and how to futureproof your business.
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PureSpectrum: Agile Brand Tracking at Your Fingertips
Your time is valuable; stop wasting it on market research solutions that don’t solve your problems. The results you’ll get with the PureSpectrum platform? Better quality and better data.
With access to the industry’s most innovative fielding dashboard, you’ll be connected to a marketplace of integrated panels through our Insights Platform. You can create, launch, manage surveys, and analyze your results anytime in minutes, easily reaching your target markets and audiences—all of which are given a PureScore™, the industry’s leading respondent-level quality scoring system.
The PureSpectrum Sample Marketplace Platform provides unique data quality measures, an intuitive interface, and extensive field management features for market researchers in need of efficient and effective market research tools. Our Insights Platform empowers those users to analyze the data, with an agile system enabling efficient and effective marketing decisions.
Ready to see what PureSpectrum can do for you? Schedule a demo today.
About PureSpectrum
PureSpectrum offers a complete end-to-end market research and insights platform, helping insights professionals make decisions more efficiently, and faster than ever before. Awarded MR Supplier of the Year at the 2021 Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Awards, PureSpectrum is recognized for industry-leading data quality. PureSpectrum developed the respondent-level scoring system, PureScore™, and believes their continued success stems from their talent density and dedication to simplicity and quality.
In the few years since its inception, PureSpectrum has been named one of the Fastest Growing Companies in North America on Deloitte’s Fast 500 since 2020, and ranked for three years in a row on the GRIT Top 50 Most Innovative List and the Inc. 5000 lists.