Perspectives
Brand trackers, by definition, look backwards, often giving you insights on how many people are aware of your products or services, who is using them, and how they compare to the competition’s.
But is it enough to do this? And is there an alternative approach that can offer a better view of the future? In this article, we will explain how brand growth programs differ from retrospective brand trackers - and why it’s better to trust the former.
The issue with backward-looking trackers
Brand trackers are tools used by brand owners to measure efforts against metrics like awareness and perception and make better-informed marketing decisions.
Most trackers are configured to be backwards-looking, containing out-of-date insights from static, metric-heavy and complex programmes. The result is data on regression or progress, something that creates a retrospective review of the brand.
In other words, traditional brand tracking will tell you what you already know rather than uncover any uncommon insights to help you drive action and future growth. When you can build a brand using rich context, real-time data, retrospective brand trackers… should stay in the past.
The unique features of brand growth programs
Traditional tracking is not just ineffective as it looks only backwards; it can also be time-consuming, cost-inefficient, and take away your competitive advantage – as many other businesses are using the same models.
The alternative to retrospective brand trackers are connected data ecosystems capable of bringing together the power of surveys, business, syndicated, and other important data sources. More importantly, they also use dynamic simulators to test out different scenarios and help decide which strategic direction to take.
Ultimately, data is useless if it doesn’t drive actions. That's why Hall & Partners works with clients to understand their brand and business goals. We then tailor our analysis to address your most pressing opportunities. We deliver this through interactive and collaborative workshops where we agree on key actions.
Plus, we often use cross-category behaviours and usage, brand health core metrics, drivers and diagnostics, shopping and customer experience data, performance metrics, media spend, and industry data – giving you a complete view of people, culture, and brand.
Testing your strategy with simulations
Unlike other brand tracking approaches, our brand growth program is also designed to help you test the impact of your strategic decisions before you take action.
For example, you can see how increases and decreases in different brand drivers affect your KPIs and sales, compare various solutions, and identify the best courses of action by reviewing distinct potential alternatives.
For instance, you can visualise different values, emotional connections, brand performance, choice, and brand equity components and change them in real-time to understand how they can all impact your KPIs and sales.
Once your strategy is made clear, you can also set brand measurement targets that correspond to your business objectives.
Using visuals and storytelling
All of these decision-making considerations are more impactful through the use of beautiful and informative deliverables, including engaging presentations and thorough graphic representations that tell a story.
Gathering it all in a knowledge management platform
Lastly, we make sure all of your findings are easily accessible through the use of a robust knowledge management platform capable of handling large amounts of data: The Hub. This includes:
- An easy-to-use and visually appealing interactive tracking data dashboard.
- Automated data loading and checking for all your sets.
- Auto sig testing and low base suppression.
- A searchable library containing all generated files and reports.
- AI-powered summaries for all data types and findings.
- A simple yet powerful navigation to get to where you need quickly.
- A custom theme with your logo and colours.
- Presentation quality downloads.
- Editable export to company PPT/XL.
- Integrated survey and non-survey data.
- Different access control to determine what users can see and/or do.
Advantages and benefits of our bespoke brand growth program
We firmly believe that behavioural economics and social science can (and should) help you develop and optimise your marketing investment. We care about how customers engage with your brand and trust the power of uncommon insights – or insights that tell our clients something they don’t already know.
Our bespoke brand growth programme uses a blend of core and custom metrics (aligned to your strategy) that, when combined with our data ecosystem and dynamic simulators, can help you turn insights into action and make better decisions based on accurate, up-to-date metrics.
Our Brand Growth Program helps you:
- Get a complete view of the relationship between your target audience, your brand and the cultural context.
- Access an uncommonly rich context for making effective marketing decisions that grow your business.
- Create an engaging environment to facilitate insights activation across your teams.
- Become more customer-centric.
- Continually optimise your targeting and media planning.
- Link your brand to your business performance.
We use a unique strategic planning cycle to help us understand your business and the lifecycle of your brand. Starting with where you are now (for instance, the cultural and social context of your business, key categories, and market trends) and where you want to be (your goals, purposes, objectives, and optimum targets), we are able to determine how you can get there and track your progress towards sustainable growth.
In other words, you will be able to access a one-stop-insight-shop and strategic tool for business decisions. Our Brand Growth Program is designed to make insights more visible, inspiring customer-centric business decisions based on what you need to do next, and not what has happened before.
