When you’re running a business, you need to know about all the tools you have at your disposal to help you make the good decisions that drive your business to success and profitability. If you don’t understand one of these tools and can’t get the best out of it – or even don’t know how to use it at all – you’re placing yourself at a potentially fatal disadvantage.

Today we’re taking a look at brand tracking – a market research tool that could give you the vital insight you need to drive your business toward success.

What is it?

Brand Trackers are a specific kind of market research survey. Respondents are asked to compare the target brand (yours!) with others, ranking them to show how they are rated for different qualities.

Your brand might show as leading for the quality of your products, but falling behind your competitors when considered for value. The important thing is not to be best in every category, in fact for many businesses that would be a mistake! If you’re trying to market your goods as an exclusive, luxurious status symbol, then high scores across the board including ‘good value for money’ show you’re not creating a unique identity for yourself.

Why do you need it?

The insights this kind of survey can deliver are invaluable. Marketing is a significant chunk of your spend, and you need to know it’s delivering the sort of brand awareness you’re paying for. If your marketing effort is targeting a particular group, and trying to deliver a particular image of your company, then measuring the results of those efforts is important.

The key with brand tracking surveys is to continue the research over time, so you can get a picture of how customers are responding to your decisions. How they understand your brand changes with the decisions you take, marketing and in all other areas of your business (if you move your customer service department out of the country, are you likely to experience a drop in consumer loyalty? Fortunately, your brand tracking records cover a period when one of your competitors did just that!) and even the time of year. Keeping brand tracking research running long term gives you not just an easy to access ‘temperature check’ for your business when you want to know how you’re doing right now, it also gives you an archive of data you can use to inform all your decisions going forward.