A Fast-Changing Consumer-Driven World Demands An Even Faster Consumer-Driven Brand Tracker

In the 1990s, e-commerce exploded - consumers could buy without leaving their homes. In the early 2000s, consumers started communicating with brands via social media. By 2021, there were 7.1 billion mobile device users worldwide.

This means consumers are always engaged - they never sleep. They are constantly influenced by brands, changing their opinions about them, and deciding to purchase (or not) from them.

Digital marketing has scaled consumer attitude and behavior. Data analytics has evolved to keep pace with the dynamic digital world, helping us measure and optimize campaigns and sales funnels.

But amidst this ever-evolving marketing landscape and continuously changing consumer-driven world, one thing hasn’t changed or evolved in decades: brand performance tracking.

While marketing efforts are planned and measured on a weekly or even daily basis, brand performance tracking is still conducted on a monthly or quarterly basis (at best) - not because brand management isn’t important or doesn’t drive real ROI. Quite the opposite.

Did you know a 1-point gain in brand metrics such as awareness and consideration equates to a 1% increase in sales?

The fact is, brand tracking hasn’t evolved because it hasn’t needed to - until recently.

In an always-on consumer-driven world, an always-on brand tracking system that aligns with your marketing and retail operations is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s now a must-have.

As Troy Figgins, Head of Consumer Insights at King's Hawaiian, pointed out in our recent webinar on agile market research (and brand tracking): “Once a month isn’t frequent enough…our media plan is by week. A lot of stuff might happen within a 4-week period.”

A high-frequency brand tracker can keep your brand management and insights team on top of emerging trends as they happen instead of months later. But how is that possible if brand tracking is still measured so infrequently - on a monthly or quarterly basis? Glad you asked.

In this post, we cover:

• · A snapshot of traditional brand tracking
• · Market research & brand tracking - a brief timeline

A Snapshot Of Traditional Brand Tracking

At its core, brand tracking is the process of fielding the same market research study regularly to uncover trends about your brand health and your competitors. The concept is straightforward - ask consumers questions, get responses, and track those responses over time.

The advancement of technology - phone systems, computers, the internet, and mobile phones - has changed the way we collect consumer feedback, but the concept remains the same.

This new technology has contributed to an explosion of online market research and brand tracking platforms. Yet, while most of these platforms come with unique features, what powers them remains the same - paid professional panelists and third-party data.

Let’s take a look at how consumer feedback is solicited to feed brand tracking studies.

Syndicated Research- usually conducted by a third-party market research firm funded by multiple collaborating companies. While there are benefits to syndicated research like cost savings and the ability to identify industry trends, there are significant issues:

• ·The market research firm owns the data
• ·The methodology and direction of the study are dictated by the firm
• ·Competitors can purchase the same data
• ·Very high-level research with little to no granular insights

Of course, syndicated research can be conducted via surveying consumers or survey panels.

Survey Panels - a survey panel is a group of pre-recruited participants who have signed up to participate in online surveys, focus groups, and in-depth interviews. Survey panels have some benefits like improving project feasibility and ease of sampling. However, survey panels have major pitfalls:

• ·Cash-based incentives create “professional panelists” who game the system to make money
• ·Duplicate respondents lead to duplicate data and skewed insights
• ·Over-surveyed panelists get bored and rush through surveys - skipping questions and answering "don’t know"
• ·Typical survey environments are not natural and do not lend themselves to authentic feedback

Many brand tracking surveys average 30 questions, with some including 50+ questions, making them expensive and slow to field.

Consequently, traditional brand tracking studies require significant time and resources to set up, and conducting them regularly is cost-prohibitive. They’re usually done annually, semi-annually, or quarterly - if you're lucky. But even a 3-month brand tracking cadence makes it impossible for marketing and brand insights teams to spot consumer trends and identify business-changing opportunities.

Unfortunately, this is how market research and brand tracking have been done for decades.

Market Research & Brand Tracking - A Brief Timeline

• ·1940s - Focus groups are created
• ·1950s - In-depth interviews are conducted
• ·1970s - Postal surveys & face-to-face interviews become primary qualitative research methods
• ·1970s - Ad & brand tracking is developed by Gordon Brown and Maurice Millward in the UK
• ·1980s - Wide Area Telephone Service (W.A.T.S.) increases capability for research & surveys conducted
• ·1990s - The Internet is created, leading to online focus groups & Computer Aided Web Interviewing (CAWI)
• ·2000s - Insight communities, social media, and big data emerge as the newest forms of market research
• ·2010s - Online and mobile-based market research explode onto the scene
• ·2020s - RelevanceResearch’s Market & Brand Insights solution revolutionizes market research & brand tracking

Since their inception and proliferation in the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s, consumer panels, market research, and brand performance tracking have proven useful. While they’ve evolved from slow, non-scalable focus groups and in-person interviews to more scalable, user-friendly online panel platforms, brand tracking studies still have three significant flaws. They are still:

• Slow
• Inaccurate
• Expensive

That’s why RelevanceResearch set out to turn the market research industry on its head and put traditional brand trackers on notice. With its Market Insights and Brand Insights solutions, a new era of brand tracking was born.