FreshNetworks Blog

Most big brands track what their customers (and also often what their non-customers) think. Brand tracking is a well established and developed market research tool that often feeds directly into performance metrics for the marketing department or the firm as a whole. Typically this brand tracker has been developed over a number of years and measures a small amount of quantitative factors, building a time-series data set that will let the firm show how the attitude towards its brand has changed (or stayed the same) over a period of time.

Brand trackers are incredibly useful. They allow you to identify if and when there is a change in attitudes towards your brand. Are people less trusting of your brand now than they were previously? Do they have a more positive attitude towards you than they did six months ago? A regular and well managed brand tracker can identify these changes in customer and consumer attitude and can highlight these to brands.

What many brand trackers can’t tell you, however, is why or how these changes happen.

Quantitative data, such as brand tracking, is best when accompanied by qualitative data. The quantitative tells you the what and the when; the qualitative tells you the why and the how. One way that you can understand the why and the how of changes in brand perception is to run focus groups. We’ve spoken about the limitations of focus groups before, and the danger with using these in this case is that you investigate a change after it has happen. You notice in the Q2 brand tracker that positive attitudes towards your brand are down on the same period last year and so you launch some focus groups to investigate why. But these groups happen many months after consumers attitudes have change and so real understanding is difficult to gain.

This is where online research communities can really come into their own. They offer real-time qualitative research. You can watch how customers discuss and respond to your brand and detect changes of opinion as they happen. Overlaying this with the quantitative data from a brand tracker will let you see when attitudes change and immediately look at the qualitative conversations and insight to understand why.

If most brands currently dow some form of qualitative brand tracking, I would expect more and more of them to pair this with the kind of real-time qualitative insight you can gain from online research communities. To date brands have had to second guess why attitudes have changed, with online research communities they can really know.

Some more reading

• What do consumers think about your logo?
• How to create brand authenticity
• Brand and Branding – A Fundamental Difference
• one company, ten brands: lessons from retail for tech companies