Are you getting the most out of your Brand Tracker?

Let's face it, Brand Tracking - as it stands today - is getting us nowhere. 

Brand Trackers look back in time, retrospectively studying a brand's health at single points in time.

But monthly, quarterly or yearly dips can only show you how your brand has changed within a specific, fixed time period. 

So, you only ever get half of the story. 

In the dynamic, fast-paced world of today, it's no longer enough to access your brand data on a monthly, weekly or yearly basis. If your data sources aren't live, your relevancy will decline pretty quickly.

In this guide, we’ll be looking into the future of brand tracking to understand: 

• Why tracking your brand is important in the first place
• Why current brand trackers can only take us so far
• What the future of brand tracking looks like

Why we'll always need some form of Brand Tracking 

Understanding what's motivating your consumers to buy, how your competitors are addressing these needs, and how your own brand is perceived, is important for growth. 

To stay ahead of the curve, you need to know how your brand's performance measures up to that of its category and competition. 

That's why brand tracking will always exist in some shape or form. 

Brands are now making the move away from static Brand Trackers - that can only look back at one moment in time -  to real-time Brand Trackers. 

With real-time brand tracking, you have the opportunity to be proactive. Because your data is live, you're always on the pulse of your consumers' needs - and able to see when your brand is heating up so you can make the most of this momentum.  

Tracking your brand in this way will help you to:

• Show how your marketing investments are correlated to uplifts in brand perception and sales
• Secure and protect your brand's funding
• Prove that your marketing investments are achieving the strategic growth goals of your business

Forward-looking technologies are now widely available to us, and marketers have hundreds of different methods to use to ensure the money they spend on media has a guaranteed return on marketing investment.

With all these solutions at our disposal, there’s no need for guesswork anymore. And certainly, no need to waste budget.

That brings us to the next challenge - which solution to go for?

What should you look for in a Brand Tracker?

This will depend on:

• What you are looking to monitor and why
• The size of your marketing budget
• The number of audiences and competitors you’d like to track

But there are some common features you should look for in a tracker, including:

• Live data 
• The ability to track both System 1 and 2 responses
• Competitor and category intelligence 

Live data

Dynamic data gives you the opportunity to be proactive, helping you to identify new opportunities in your environment based off the movements of your category, competitors and consumers.

Imagine creating a campaign that was based off data from a Brand Tracker which had dipped into the market in the previous quarter. Doing so would expose your brand to countless risks, as there’s no telling whether the trend or consumer need you are going after has passed – or if the topic you are broaching has since become sensitive.

Now imagine using a forwards-looking brand monitoring solution, that can tell you instantly how your brand actions are being perceived by your audience, and what to do with that information.

Which would you pick?

System 1 and 2 data 

Neuroscientific research on System 1 and 2 has proven that most people make decisions based on their feelings (System 1) and then confirm these decisions with their thoughts (System 2). This is also known as ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ thinking, where consumers rely on their gut instincts to quickly determine how they feel about something and then justify this feeling with rational thinking.

Traditional methods are only capable of gathering System 2 responses. But modern science tells us that we should be accessing the sub-conscious to understand the "why" behind our data.

Category and competitor intelligence  

Brand Trackers should help us to make moves more quickly, to optimize and test on the fly and to form hypotheses on a more accurate scale. 

Most modern tracking solutions neglect the context surrounding a brand and are overly focused on risk management.

The result of this is brand strategies that don’t account for competitor and category movements and are too slanted towards problems rather than opportunities. 

Some Brand Trackers are now accounting for the context that surrounds brands - providing a lens on not just the brand's own performance but a daily read on their competitors and categories too.  

How can you get all of this in one Brand Tracker? 

ProQuo is a brand tracking platform which gives you real-time competitor, category and consumer insights.

We take a dual systems approach, using IRT methods and open-ended questions to capture both System 1 (feelings) and System 2 (thoughts).

Think of us like a Brand Tracker... but on steroids.

The platform provides everything you'd expect from a traditional Brand Tracker but also goes beyond this.

With ProQuo you get:

• The ability to interact directly with your consumers at any moment in time - asking questions to uncover nuances in their thinking.
• The opportunity to track your emotional connection with your audience - understanding how well you're connecting with your consumers.  
• Live creative testing services - so you can optimize ads and assets on the go. 
• Regular check-ins with a dedicated Customer Success team to support your progress and help you to deep dive into your data.
• A team of expert consultants who can deep dive into any business challenge you need solving.

What next?

Marketing today is much faster and more creative than the research that serves it. 

There are new solutions and changes that have been made, which you can embrace today to supercharge your growth.

If you want to see how ProQuo AI's brand tracking can help your brand, chat to us here.

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