150,000 DATA POINTS TO A REAL, ACTIONABLE PLAN

A major player in the food industry wanted to understand how to improve awareness of their brand and understand people’s perceptions of the products they offer. We conducted an online survey targeting B2C and B2B buyers. At the end of data collection, we had 1,500 respondents and about 100 pieces of data per respondent. Whew! That’s a lot of data to work through!

Yet, by using advanced analyses, we prioritized the data and gave the client three key insights that they could act on to improve brand awareness and perception.

THREE actionable insights? From 150,000 pieces of data? To some, that might not seem like very much, but, that’s the most common complaint we hear from clients. Too much data, not enough action.  

The most valuable outcome brand tracking can provide to clients is a clear, focused plan to drive market behaviors instead of a data dump of every single piece of data with no path forward.

THE FIRST MEASUREMENT IS NOT ENOUGH

Customers want to tell you what is working and what is not – it's up to brands to give them the opportunity. Repeating a brand-tracking survey on a regular cadence helps our clients be able to determine how their initiatives affect brand awareness and perception over time – a very easy way to let customers tell you what is working and what it not.

The key to brand tracking is it needs to be done more than once. It is a continuous measurement which allows a company to see the impact their decisions are having on their brand in “real-time”.  

Key metrics all great brand-tracking surveys should include:

• NPS (Net Promoter Score)

• Brand Loyalty

• Brand Awareness

• Brand Associations

• Brand Preference

• Brand Usage

• Brand Purchase

• Brand Perceptions

IF YOU BUILD IT RIGHT, THEY WILL COME

When designing a brand tracking survey, it is important to get the foundations right the first time. Taking the time to craft a well-thought-out and well-worded tool will allow you to use the same survey over time, which in turn, allows you to see how metrics are changing over time.  

Thoroughly Think About Each Question  

• Good brand trackers don’t ask questions simply because they are interesting; they focus on questions that are going to drive action. Each question in your brand tracker should provide impactful insights to the company as a whole or to a specific department. If the data provided by a question is not informative to someone in the company, then you don’t need that question.   

• Your survey real estate is precious because we only have one shot to get someone’s answers. Treat it that way. A person should be able to answer your brand tracking survey in under 8 minutes. Depending on the questions you ask, this typically means your survey should include no more than 25 questions.  

Choose Your Words Carefully  

• The best brand trackers are easy to understand.  According to the Literacy Project Foundation, the average American has a reading level of a 7th/8th grader. This is important to understand when writing questions for your brand tracker. To have a successful brand tracker, you want to achieve a representative sample of your current, former, and potential customers. This means people will vary in age, income, education level, etc.    

• Good insights come from good data. Your questions need to be clear, leave no room for interpretation, include no biasing language, and be easy to understand. If you have a complex scale or ask multiple questions in one statement, people will not know how to respond, and you will end up with bad data.

Pilot Your Survey 

• No brand tracker survives the first test. Send the survey to a small group of customers (10-15 people) to get their feedback on the questions.  

• Iterate before you launch. Set up online or in-person focus groups to discuss the questions, get feedback, and adjust the survey questions to fit what people said. Focus groups are great for iterating the language of the survey to match your target customers’ language. For example, do they say “pop”, “soda”, or “cola”? 

BRAND COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE IS FINDING YOUR NEEDLES IN A HAYSTACK 

A great brand tracker can help you keep a pulse on your customers’ needs, wants, likes and dislikes. Be sure to have a strong analysis team who can find those three needles in the data haystack. Having focused steps forward will allow your business to action on the survey insights quickly. This will not only improve your business in the eyes of your customers, but it will also show your customers that you are listening.  

Our food industry client continues to monitor how business decisions are affecting their brand through continuous brand tracking. So far, they have successfully created a new marketing campaign, know where to best display that campaign to reach their target audiences, and have focused their efforts on the product lines most important to their customers. A solid plan, based on 150,000 data points, boiled down to three actionable insights.