Brand Tracking

Norstat specialises in high-quality data collection for brand tracking. Our quantitative and qualitative research methods ensure reliable data gathering about any desired topic or target group, helping you understand every aspect of your brand’s performance, including awareness, market share, associations, personality, positioning, and loyalty.

Why is brand tracking important?

“A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.”

Jeff Bezos – Amazon

In a highly competitive and polarised environment, a strong brand strategy is not only valuable, it’s also essential (Gartner). To monitor your brand’s strength, and demonstrate the effectiveness of your marketing activity and media spend, surveys with your target audience on metrics such as brand awareness and consideration are essential. Long-term longitudinal studies can track brand changes over time, measure the ROI of brand-building campaigns, and provide benchmark comparisons with competitors, allowing you to refine marketing strategies and tactics.

Tailored tracking solutions for your brand

Our flexible tracking services adapt as your brand evolves. Whether you need focused, fast research for a few KPIs or an in-depth monthly multi-market tracker, we create bespoke solutions to fit various needs and budgets. We ensure a robust sample at your required frequency and can incorporate ad-hoc questions for deeper insights into specific themes.

Key metrics in brand tracking

A standard brand tracker measure includes:

• Demographics and profile  – Age, gender, social grade etc./Media usage and behaviour.
• Awareness and Usage:

• • Spontaneous brand awareness – Open question asking respondents to name the first brands that come to mind
  • Prompted brand awareness – This question prompts the respondent with a brand list including key competitors
  • Usage frequency

• Ad awareness:

• • Spontaneous ad awareness – Open question asking respondents to name any brands they have seen advertising for
  • Prompted ad awareness – This question prompts the respondent with a brand list including key competitors
  • Ad attribution – If a respondent states they have seen/heard advertising for the client brand, we ask which format from a prompted list of TV, radio, out-of-home, print, train advertising, etc.

• Ad recall and perceptions – Respondents are prompted with creative executions – asking if they have seen the ad. We then ask about their thoughts on the campaign – what do they feel are the main messages, does it promote key brand attributes effectively
• Brand consideration – How likely are they to consider interacting with the respective brand in the future? (Propensity to purchase)
• Brand advocacy – How likely would they be to recommend the respective brand to friends or family members? (Net Promoter Score)

An extended full tracker measure would include questions to elicit information on brand perceptions, personality, call to action and competitor analysis.

Understand what drives those metrics

Key driver analysis (Bain) can be used to understand what truly affects your key performance indicators, e.g. sales, brand recommendation, brand satisfaction, likelihood to purchase, what causes customers to switch brands. And what drives brand loyalty? If we find that brand trust is highly influential on a customer’s likelihood to purchase, KDA can visualise that if we increase brand trust by ‘x’ the effect this will have on a customer’s likelihood to purchase will be ‘y’. Then, track how those measures change over time. Our full-service team can advise on survey design, script surveys, providing professional support every step of the way.

High-quality data from our online panel

The majority of our brand trackers involve data collection via our online research panel of over 4 million registered members across 19 European countries. Online data collection allows quick, efficient targeting of specific audiences and is often more cost-effective than offline methods. Our proprietary, invite-only panel integrates extensive data quality checks, giving us full control over data quality.

Data quality is a critical factor in brand trackers, as even small changes are important, especially when associated marketing activity is taken into account. We apply screeners to match target demographics, consistent survey administration to avoid bias, and rigorous data validation processes to maintain integrity. Our clients back up our claims for panel quality, scoring us:

• 5.1/6 for panel quality
• 5.3/6 on the ability to deliver
• 5.3/6 on client satisfaction
• 49 net promoter score

 Read more about our extensive data quality practices here.

Reaching your audience

When it comes to sample composition, we make sure the audience for your tracking study is as representative as possible; targeting can include demographics, locations, interests, purchasing habits and much more. Specific audience segmentation can also be incorporated if needed.

Sample sizes that fit your requirements

Our data collection for brand tracking can be tailored in terms of the robustness of sample sizes and frequency of tracking. We will work with you to understand how you will use the data and then survey the optimal sample size for your analysis. Frequency is largely dependent on client need and budget but typical frequencies are monthly, quarterly or bi-annual data collections.

Data delivery tailored for brand tracking

Like all aspects of our brand tracker offer, deliverables are entirely tailored to your needs. Basic outputs include raw data or data tables after each wave of the tracker, but clients can also opt for bespoke automated reporting solutions, such as Norstat Dashboards.