Perspectives
Editor's Note: As brands head into 2026 facing margin pressure, fragmented attention, and rising expectations from finance teams, traditional brand tracking that focuses on performance (but doesn’t guide decisions) simply won’t be enough.
This article explores how brand tracking can evolve from a retrospective reporting tool into a Brand Growth Program, one that links brand equity to P&L outcomes, supports faster decision-making, and earns credibility in the C-suite. Drawing on Hall & Partners’ approach, Josh Shames outlines how marketers can design tracking systems that drive profitable growth, pricing power, and commercial accountability.
Why traditional brand tracking falls short in 2026?
Despite good intentions, most brand tracking systems were built for a different era. As a result, they tend to struggle in three critical ways: they look backward instead of forward, prioritize visibility over choice, and operate on reporting rhythms that lag behind how markets actually move - leaving leadership teams without clear guidance on growth, pricing power, or decision-making.
The three structural limits of traditional brand tracking
1. Lagging Indicators With No Commercial Context
Traditional brand trackers are largely retrospective. They report what has already happened, often weeks or months after market activity, by tracking movements in awareness, consideration, or brand image attributes. While these metrics can be useful for understanding historical performance, they rarely support forward-looking decisions.
The deeper issue is not timing alone, but commercial disconnect. Brand metrics are typically reviewed without explicit links to:
- Revenue growth
- Margin protection
- Retention and loyalty
- Price elasticity
As a result, brand movement is discussed in isolation from business outcomes. Leaders may see a positive shift in consideration, but still be unable to answer the most important question: so what does this mean for growth or pricing power?
Without a clear line of sight to the P&L, brand tracking remains descriptive rather than predictive and struggles to earn credibility beyond the marketing function.
If your brand tracking can’t help you earn permission to sell and charge more, it’s not so much tracking as it is theater.
Managing Director, US, Hall & Partners
2. Channel Vanity Over Choice Mechanics
Another common limitation of traditional brand health trackers is their focus on channel performance rather than choice behavior. Dashboards often prioritize metrics tied to media exposure or campaign execution, because these are easier to measure and map to activity. What gets missed is how brands are actually chosen in real buying moments.
Brand choice is not driven by channels in isolation. It is shaped by:
- Mental availability at the moment of need
- Category entry points and usage occasions
- Ease of choice and habit
- Distinctive assets that cut through clutter
By concentrating on channel-level metrics, many trackers obscure the underlying mechanics of demand creation. They explain where activity ran, but not why a brand was chosen (or not chosen) when it mattered.
This creates a false sense of control. Teams optimize what they can see in dashboards, rather than what actually drives penetration, retention, and pricing power in the market.
3. Meeting Cadence Over Market Cadence
Most tracking programs still operate on a calendar-based cadence. These are typically quarterly or biannual readouts designed around leadership meetings rather than market realities. But brands do not grow in neat reporting cycles. By the time quarterly tracking results are reviewed, the moment to act has often passed. Insights arrive too late to influence decisions. Brand tracking becomes a reporting ritual instead of a decision support system. The opportunity is not just to measure more frequently, but to align readouts to real decision points that enables faster course correction and clearer accountability.
From brand tracking to a brand growth program
To become a true strategic planning tool, brand tracking must be redesigned around how businesses actually grow, not just how brands are measured.
1. Start With the P&L
Effective brand tracking begins by making the link between brand performance and business performance explicit. Rather than treating brand metrics as abstract indicators of “health,” they are designed to connect directly to outcomes that matter to leadership teams, including:
- Revenue growth
- Margin protection
- Retention and loyalty
- Price elasticity and pricing power
When these links are clear, brand tracking becomes a planning input rather than a reporting output. Teams can scenario-plan different levels of brand investment, assess trade-offs, and forecast likely commercial outcomes, instead of simply observing brand score movement after the fact.
2. Diagnose Growth Using See, Feel, Think, Do
A simplified See / Feel / Think / Do framework helps isolate the few brand levers most likely to drive choice and scale, rather than spreading attention across dozens of loosely related metrics.
- See: Mental availability and salience at key category entry points
- Feel: Emotional permission, trust, and a sense of belonging
- Think: Rational value, relevance, and meaningful differentiation
- Do: Ease of choice, habit formation, and behavioral triggers
This structure reflects how brands actually influence behavior (combining memory, emotion, evaluation, and action) rather than assuming a linear funnel.
By focusing on fewer, higher-impact metrics within each stage, organizations gain clarity on where to act and why.
3. Fuse Survey Data with Real-World Behavior
One of the biggest limitations of traditional brand tracking is its dependence on stated attitudes as a proxy for future behaviour. In practice, intention and action often diverge. To understand what truly drives growth, brand tracking must triangulate what consumers say with what they do, connecting perception, behavior, and commercial outcomes in a single, trusted view:
This fusion creates a single, trusted view that marketing and finance can align around.
4. Decision Cadence That Matches How Business Trades
Instead of calendar-based reporting, leading brands adopt event-based readouts, aligned to:
- Product launches
- Trading peaks
- Creative bursts
- Competitive disruption
This replaces “dashboard theatrics” with clear actions, owners, and expected business impact.
5. Governance and AI: Speed Without Risk
AI can dramatically accelerate analysis and creative iteration, but only if governance is designed in from the start.
Best-practice AI governance principles includes:
- Transparent methods and definitions
- A single source of truth
- Finance-approved KPIs
- Guardrails for AI-assisted analysis
When done well, AI enables faster learning without sacrificing trust, brand distinctiveness or IP security.
Key takeaways: What modern brand tracking must deliver in 2026
- Brand tracking must link directly to revenue, margin, and pricing power
- Fusing behavioural and attitudinal data creates stronger decision support
- Event-based cadence beats quarterly reporting
- AI accelerates insight and governance protects trust
Final thought: Why brand tracking must become a decision-making tool for growth in 2026
Brand tracking earns its place at the table when it stops reporting history and starts shaping the future. The shift from scorekeeping to decision support requires rethinking what gets measured, how often insight is delivered, and how clearly brand performance is linked to commercial outcomes.
At Hall & Partners, we work with brands to redesign tracking as a Brand Growth Program: one that connects brand equity to revenue, margin, and pricing power, integrates behavioral and attitudinal data into a single source of truth, and aligns insight delivery to real business decisions rather than reporting calendars. By grounding brand metrics in the P&L and focusing on the levers that actually drive choice, we help marketing teams earn credibility with finance, move faster with confidence, and make better growth trade-offs.
Talk to our team of experts
Learn how we can deliver actionable insights and creativity to drive brand growth.
FAQs
Q: What is the biggest mistake brands make with tracking today?
A: Treating brand tracking as a scorecard instead of a decision system. Too many trackers focus on monitoring brand health metrics without clarifying how those metrics should influence investment, pricing, or go-to-market choices. When tracking doesn’t inform action, it becomes a reporting exercise rather than a strategic asset.
Q: What metrics should brands stop tracking?
A: Metrics that seem impressive but don’t explain choice or commercial impact. If a metric doesn’t inform a brand strategy or investment decision, it’s likely redundant.
Q: What should brands prioritize tracking instead?
A: Measures of mental availability, rational and emotional drivers of connection, ease of choice, and distinctive asset fluency, because these are proven drivers of penetration and pricing power
