Brand Health Tracking: Everything you Need to Know
Market research is critical to all aspects of your business whether it be preparing to launch a new product or service, better understanding your consumers, or measuring the success of your brand as a whole. The use of market research to analyze the performance of your brand over a period of time is called brand tracking or brand health tracking. It is used to continuously track your brand’s health, study perception and awareness of your brand, understand how consumers buy and use your products, measure campaign effectiveness, track competitors, and more.
What is Brand Health Tracking?
Brand Health Tracking is the continuous measurement of the effectiveness of brand-building activities by key metrics such as brand awareness and rating, purchase and usage trends, and customer loyalty. It can help you better understand your competitors, your consumers, and changes in your market.
What is Meant by Brand Health Tracking?
As you can imagine, healthy brands enjoy a variety of benefits over unhealthy brands. They have better awareness, more loyal customers, and greater market share. A healthy brand has clear values that align with its target consumers and drive sales. However, measuring the success of a brand can be more difficult than assessing marketing efforts geared toward a specific product or service. After all, loyalty is not something that can be measured simply through sales conversions. This is where brand health tracking comes in.
Brand health tracking uses metrics like brand awareness, brand rating, brand loyalty, purchase intent, perceived quality, competitor preference, net promoter score, and more. Measuring your brand health regularly allows you to track these metrics over time and gives you insight into what brand-building efforts are driving growth and contributing positively to your brand health. It also helps you better understand your target consumers and where you fall amongst your competitors.
Why Keep Track of Brand Health?
Consistently measuring your brand health can provide critical information for businesses. Understanding your brand and assessing how metrics fluctuate as you introduce new brand-building campaigns empowers you to make informed decisions on marketing efforts in the future. You will know what works and what doesn’t, allowing you to be more confident in your decisions. It also helps you understand changes in the market. If a new competitor enters your space, you will know how their business impacts yours and where your target consumers’ preferences lie. Additionally, as your consumers’ preferences and tastes change, you will be able to anticipate how your brand can meet their needs, dissipating any fear of losing consumers as changes occur.
Brand health tracking also allows you to ask your consumer what they like and disklike about your product, buying experience, and more. Brand health tracking gives you in-depth insights into the behavioral and attitudinal experiences of your consumers.
Benefits of Brand Health Monitoring and Tracking
So, what do you have to gain from brand health tracking?
Brand health tracking has many benefits depending on the questions you ask in your research. When you create a brand that aligns with the values of your consumers, your brand will experience higher customer loyalty and will see less fluctuation regardless of changes in the market. You will also be able to charge premium pricing and have more confidence in new product launches, knowing your consumers are loyal to your brand and messaging.
Brand health tracking allows you to:
- Keep an eye on your competitors and compare the performance of your products
- Identify your target consumers
- Uncover possible new markets
- Highlight areas where your brand might not be a good fit
- Measure the effectiveness and ROI of brand activities
- And more
It’s perfect for actively managing and strengthening your brand, and can be fielded at your time interval, whether that is annually or daily. It’s a great way to gain insight without causing unnecessary headaches or wasting resources.
What is Involved in Brand Health Tracking Research?
Brand health tracking is used to assess the current state of your brand. You’ll want to decide on a set of questions you want to ask your respondents. Remember to include questions regarding awareness, what they like and dislike, and which competitor products they may be purchasing. However, it is crucial to keep your interview length reasonable, so your respondents don’t drop out of your study before completing it. After deciding on your questions, you’ll want to determine the target audience of your respondents. You may screen for existing customers, prospective consumers, or more general audiences. From there, your research partner will help you field your study.
Brand Health Tracking – Important Metrics to Consider
There are plenty of variables to measure in your brand health tracking. Some of them include:
Brand Awareness
A measure of respondents’ ability to recognize your brand either aided or unaided.
Brand Rating
A measure of respondents’ perceptions of your brand usually on a scale of 1-10.
Brand Loyalty
A measure of respondents’ likelihood to buy from or interact with your brand again. Can also include purchase intent.
Brand Preference
A measure of respondents who choose to purchase your product or service over that of a competitor.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
A measure of how likely a respondent is to recommend your brand to family and friends.
Brand Usage
A measure of how often respondents purchase your brand’s product or service.
Brand Purchases
A measure of which of your products or services a respondent has purchased before.
How EMI Can Help with Your Brand Health Tracking
Consistency. It is one of the key factors for any market researcher, especially ones conducting brand health tracking studies. That is why EMI’s approach to brand tracking studies focuses on providing accurate insights, long-term feasibility, and data consistency wave-to-wave. We do this by creating a strategic sample blend customized to your brand tracking study, your needs, and your research goals. By creating a custom, strategic sample blend, EMI can ensure consistency and quality of your study. Did you know…
These are all things that your brand health tracker will measure, so you need to ensure there aren’t huge swings in data like this.
Through our research-on-research, we have been able to study panels and their differences so that we can select sample sources that complement each other, while reducing overall sample bias and any potential behavioral and attitudinal impacts a panel can have. This ensures not only the accuracy of your brand tracker’s data, but that it is truly representational of demographics, behaviors, and attitudes of your target audience.
Strategic Sample Blending
Sample blending is the process of using multiple sample suppliers, using three or more different panels, and setting limits on the number of completes each panel can get, so no one panel gets more than 50%.
EMI is unique in that we don’t just blend sample for the sake of blending. We do it with quality and consistency in mind, understanding that not all techniques for combining multiple panel providers are created equal. In other methods of combining sample like stacking or aggregating, no care is given to panel makeup, respondents’ attitudes and behaviors, or panel bias, and is often done in a final effort to reach feasibility goals. EMI is different. We know that customizing a strategic blend based on clients’ unique needs will ensure the best results possible. So, what does strategic sample blending entail?
Strategic sample blending takes sample blending a step further. Not only do you use three or more sample providers, but the selection and blending of the selected providers is done in an intentional and controlled manner. Sample sources are selected to complement one another, while reducing the overall sample bias and any potential behavioral or attitudinal impacts a panel can have. This ensures not only the accuracy of your tracker’s data, but that it is truly representational of demographics, behavior, and attitudes of your target audience.
Additionally, by strategically selecting your providers and managing their allocation, you can increase your overall feasibility for the life of your tracker, avoiding the dreaded “top-up” situation that can skew your data. By strategically blending sample, you can ensure the consistency and reliability of your tracker and the data it provides, allowing you and your organization to make the best business decisions possible.
So, how do we do this? We start with a typical blend formula, then customize it based on a variety of criteria so that the strategic blend ensures you will meet the goals of your study. After taking all the factors into account, we develop your strategic blend by plotting out all the partners on the factors we discussed and by identifying panel partners that fit into the sweet spot to meet all the criteria, while providing consistency and feasibility for the life of the tracker. We also balance the partners on attitudes and behaviors to eliminate bias.
Strategic Sample Blending Advantages:
Improved Feasibility
Improved Consistency
Reduced Risky
Reduced Field Time
IntelliBlend®
IntelliBlend® is EMI’s premier strategic sample blending methodology where we blend sample sources in an intentional and controlled approach to deliver the most representative and accurate demographic, behavioral, and attitudinal data. This approach includes double opt-in research panels but may also include non-traditional sources such as social media, which is utilized in a limited and controlled manner.
IntelliBlend can vary from project-to-project based on the needs of the research and the client. The unique blend is developed by leveraging proprietary research-on-research data as well as over 20 years of sample experience. For ongoing work, the custom sample plan is replicated from wave-to-wave utilizing EMI’s sample management platform, SWIFT, which enforces sample source quotas, thus ensuring data consistency.
EMI’s Sample Industry Expertise
EMI has been the leader in online sample and strategic sample blending since our founding in 1999. We have been a sample consultancy since not only our inception, but since the infancy of online sample.
Over the years, we have developed knowledge on the sample industry that is unrivalled when combined with our unbiased sample blending approach. We have built this knowledge by not only working with panel partners throughout the industry but also conducting research-on-research for more than a decade into the online sample industry to understand the differences between consumer panels and how they change over time.
Research-On-Research
We have been conducting research-on-research for over a decade to gain a better understanding of the panel landscape. Through this research on the sample industry, we can determine similarities and differences in attitudes and behaviors between sample providers to create the best, most strategic blends for your studies. Our findings provide in-depth insights into the online sample industry, giving us unique expertise and industry knowledge.
To see our findings, download our annual report on the online sample industry, The Sample Landscape, here.
EMI’s Premier Partner Network
EMI has built a global network of sample partners that gives you access to one of the highest-quality pools of respondents of varying demographic, socio-economic, geographical, behavioral, and psychographic characteristics. This gives EMI the ability to create strategic sample blends that best fit your study and provide you high-quality, deep insights that you need to make better business decisions.
Every market research sample panel in our network has passed our rigorous Partner Assessment Process so we can best understand the recruiting methods, validation process, and other data quality measures they have in place, as well as the ins-and-outs of their panel. Our strict vetting process ensures we only allow the best sample providers into our network, and that we maintain a high-level of data quality for our clients.
Our network, along with our research-on-research, provides the backbone of our ability to craft strategically blended sample plans for your studies that provide you the highest quality, unbiased insights in the industry.