How better brand tracking achieves brand health

It’s estimated that a whopping £1bn is spent on brand tracking every year, and that’s in the UK alone. This puts brand tracking up there as one of the biggest areas of research investment for businesses, second only to large-scale Customer Experience/Voice of the Customer programmes and continuous data.

Despite this, it seems that brand tracking is the one area of research spend that businesses are least satisfied with, and have the most doubts over. This is not surprising given the multitude of choices businesses are faced with when deciding on how best to track the health of their brand. 

Options range from low cost, off the shelf, self-serve models to larger ‘always on’ bespoke brand health tracking programs, and everything else in between. Plus, there’s a myriad of choices to make, including factors like how frequently to track, who to sample (and how robustly), and how to get the best value for money, when you’ve got a set budget. 

Is it any wonder that businesses have doubts over whether their brand trackers are fit for purpose, given the distinct lack of innovation in this space since brand awareness metrics were first introduced in the 1950s?

Thankfully, this has all changed with the work of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, who released the 4th book in their ‘greatest hits’ catalogue in 2023 entitled ‘Better Brand Health’. In this seminal book, professor Jenni Romaniuk brings together decades of research into how the brain, memory and buyer behaviour works, and therefore identifies what really matters when it comes to measuring brand equity.

One of the key reasons brand trackers have been failing to hit the mark for so long is that — ironically — they’ve been too brand focused, and not focused enough on category buyers, or understanding how brands fit into their lives and needs. They’ve honed in on what people think about the brand, instead of questioning what causes a brand to be thought of in the first place.

Typically, a brand tracker will include image statements that ask respondents to assess a brand for qualities like reliability, trustworthiness, and value for money. Worse still — they might ask respondents dubious image statements such as ‘is a brand for me?’. But the missing piece of the jigsaw we’ve all seemingly forgotten about is understanding the situations, usage contexts and needs that category buyers experience in real life, where brands do come to mind and could be gaining mental advantage. 

The official term that Ehrenberg-Bass has coined for these situations, usage contexts and needs is ‘Category Entry Points’, and these are incredibly important in the context of understanding a brand’s true brand health and mental availability. 

But fear not! No one is suggesting throwing the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to brand tracking. Just as focus groups persist in qualitative research (for good reason), so too will brand funnels and brand image statements persist with brand tracking. After all, it’s no use if people don’t know the brand in the first place, or if the brand is failing to meet basic category competences — such as being seen as trustworthy or reliable. 

To understand a brand’s true mental availability (which, alongside physical availability, is one of the two key ingredients for brand growth), then it’s necessary to incorporate category entry point thinking into your brand health tracking.

Spoiler alert: mental availability is not the same as brand awareness, or even top of mind brand awareness! That’s because it relies on a single cue against which people retrieve brands from memory. In real life, different subsets of brands come to mind depending on the purchase need or situational context people find themselves in. For instance, a different list of car insurance brands will come to mind if you’re thinking about car insurance for a young driver vs. car insurance for classic cars.

This is where Category Entry Point (CEP) associations come in. In taking the time to understand these, brands can gain a true understanding of their mental market share against competitors. Coming to mind more often, in more usage contexts and amongst a greater number of category buyers is what drives penetration, which is key to long-term brand growth.

We we believe mental availability tracking has been the missing ingredient in brand health tracking for far too long. It’s time to change that. 

Ultimately, the battle for market share is fought first in the mind, and so an approach which aligns how the mind, buyer memory and purchase behaviour come together is key. 

For more information about brand tracking at Trinity McQueen and how you can take your brand on a journey to better brand health, please get in touch.