It’s rare to find a category dominated by just one brand. From the outset, you’ll consistently be questioning the strength of your brand. Brand health tracking studies provide the answer to this question. By exploring various aspects such as awareness, perceptions, and usage, these studies offer an impartial assessment of how your brand compares to the competition.
Why Track Brand Health
When monitoring brand health, you’re not just assessing your brand’s current status but also gaining insights into its potential future standing. Since brand health serves as a predictive indicator of future performance, it guides organisations in deciding whether to maintain their current strategies or explore new approaches.
Specifically, brand health tracking provides information on:
– The level of brand awareness among people
– The relevance of your brand
– How your brand is perceived
– The occasions and reasons for people to use your brand
Incorporating other brands into your brand health tracking reveals:
– Whether competitors are gaining or losing advantages
– The impact of campaign or advertising spending on market behaviour
– Any shifts in product or brand use cases over time.
Top Metrics To Capture In A Brand Health Study
Brand health tracking studies can’t adopt a one-size-fits-all approach. What’s pertinent for a consumer goods brand significantly differs from what matters for an enterprise software brand. Consequently, studies need some level of customisation to suit the business context.
However, certain metrics are commonly found in all brand health studies.
Brand Awareness
Awareness of a brand significantly influences the likelihood of it being considered for a purchase. Therefore, it’s a metric we regularly monitor in brand health assessments. Typically, this involves two types of measures: unaided and aided awareness. Unaided awareness gauges spontaneous recall, while aided awareness delves into general recognition of the brand name.
In the example presented, we have a visual representation featuring different fruit brands. By monitoring awareness across two distinct time frames, it becomes evident that awareness sharply declined for Apple. Understanding the reasons behind this decline is crucial. However, it’s through brand tracking that brand managers detect this decrease initially, marking a crucial step for any subsequent investigation.
Brand Perception
At their core, brands are designed to represent a distinct identity. This fundamental aspect enables brands to command a premium compared to store brands or private labels. Consequently, studies tracking brand health frequently encompass evaluations of brand perceptions.
For numerous brands, this involves fundamental attributes such as trust and relevance. Nevertheless, the depth of exploration might vary based on the specific category. Taking the instance of fruit brands, it would be pertinent to investigate how consumers perceive each fruit in terms of taste, health benefits, and convenience. By charting out these perceptions relative to each fruit brand, we can identify strengths and weaknesses across key attributes.
Brand Usage
Products often find diverse applications beyond their initially intended use. Recognising how a brand is utilised reveals its adaptability, durability, and capacity to address distinct market requirements.
Once more, we aligned our fruit brands with the various applications they could cater to. Through this comparative analysis, we promptly discern which fruits are perceived as more versatile and which ones are inclined toward more specific use cases.
Brand Health Score
A potential concluding aspect of a brand health tracker is a health score, a consolidated representation of various measures gathered throughout the entire brand health study.
It’s crucial to recognise that there isn’t a universal method for constructing a brand health score. Preliminary work is essential to identify the diverse measures included in the score, and equally important is determining the weight assigned to each measure. For example, there may be a decision to prioritise brand awareness over product usage or vice versa. Once the methodology is established, the outcome is a straightforward, quick-reference method to assess how brands compare with each other.
Who To Survey In Your Brand Health & Awareness Tracking
Once you’ve determined what aspects to incorporate into your brand health and awareness tracking, the next step is to initiate data collection to assess your standing. This involves gathering responses from relevant individuals.
In practical terms, when moving into the data collection phase, keep two critical considerations in mind:
- Surveying The Right People
It’s essential to survey individuals who are likely to be aware of your brand and or competitors. Therefore, consider demographic, psychographic, and product usage criteria that define a potential customer. For B2B brands, also include firmographics. Your study should include only individuals with these backgrounds.
2. Respondent Sample Size
Brand tracking aims to capture changes in health and perceptions over time. To attribute changes accurately to the market or customer shifts, having a sufficiently large sample size is crucial. This minimises the inherent sampling error that arises when surveying a portion of a given population.
In essence, strategise your data collection to ensure an adequate representation of the right people in your study, providing confidence in both point-in-time and longitudinal data.
What To Do With Your Brand Health Data
Consider brand health data as the springboard for shaping your upcoming product, marketing, and business strategies. The insights you gather form the bedrock for comprehending the robustness of your brand and the relevance of your product, signalling what adjustments are necessary to foster or sustain progress.
For instance, if you discover that your brand’s awareness is trailing behind competitors, it might be time to contemplate marketing and advertising initiatives. On the other hand, if you notice a misalignment between product use cases and your product’s full potential, there likely exists an opportunity for product marketing.
In essence, brand health studies not only provide a snapshot of your brand’s current strength but also serve as a guide for business and product roadmap planning. This ensures that you allocate your resources to activities that yield the most impact.
