Purpose and Benefits

An organization can have the best brand identity in the world, but if customers don’t know who they are, all of the brand identity development work and expenditure is wasted.

The starting point for a competitive brand is brand awareness.  If the awareness is low, all the brand identity development in the world won’t do you any good.  Organizations that have successful brands achieved that success by spending the money to generate brand awareness.  Along the way, these successful organizations typically spent money in the form of market research to keep track of the return on their awareness-generating investment, and made adjustments on awareness-generating tactics and strategies as needed.

This is where brand awareness tracking comes in: without knowing how your awareness is tracking your awareness-building expenditures, you’re flying blind and have no metrics for correlating your awareness-building efforts to actual results.  Brand awareness tracking research, then, is critical to any company’s success in building their brand and generating sales and profits.

Going hand-in-hand with this awareness tracking research is brand perception tracking.  These two metrics (brand awareness and brand perception) are typically done together, in the same brand tracking study.  Thus, in addition to measuring its own and competitor brand awareness, organizations will also track their and their competitors’ brand perception.  Questions such as, “When you think of [brand x], what comes to mind?” are asked to assess perception.

Any organization that is serious about building their brand should implement a brand awareness and perception tracking study.  Not having this feedback is like a pilot without their gauges.

Key Questions Answered

  • What is the awareness of our and our competitors’ brand?
  • How is this awareness changing over time, and how is it correlating with our advertising and marketing expenditures (i.e., what is our ROI)?
  • What is the perception of our and competitors’ brands?  What are the top-of-mind associations customers/potential customers think of when they think of our brand and competitor brands?  Is this where we want to be/where we should be?
  • How are these perceptions correlated with our messaging efforts, i.e., is our messaging working, or not?

Research Techniques

  • Web and/or phone surveys