The short answer
Brand tracking measures what people are willing and able to say about a brand: awareness, consideration, ratings and advocacy. Most brand choices are instinctive, so the real reasons sit in memories and associations people can’t put into words. A tracker misses those associations. It reports after the quarter has closed, and it shows that a score moved without showing why. Keep your tracker to keep score, and map the associations that will shape the next choice.
What does brand tracking measure?
A brand tracker surveys a sample of buyers again and again over time. It asks what they know and think about your brand and your competitors, and it reports the answers as scores.
- Awareness: do people know the name?
- Consideration: would they think about buying it?
- Preference and image: which brand do they say they like, and which words do they say fit it?
- Advocacy: would they recommend it? This is often a Net Promoter Score (NPS).
Tracking does real work. It keeps score over time, it shows how you compare with competitors, and it tells you when something has changed. We tell clients to keep their tracker. The limit is what a tracker is built to hear: only what people are willing and able to say.
What brand tracking misses
Most brand choices are instinctive. People reach for a brand in an instant, without weighing it up. The reasons sit in memories and associations they could not put into words if you asked. A survey can only collect the answers people can give, so a tracker misses four things.
1. The associations people can’t put into words
Your brand is the network of memories and associations that has built up around it in people’s minds over years: a pack on a kitchen table, a taste, a sound, a parent who always bought it. We call this network the Brand Connectome®. Most of it is never spoken. In a survey, buyers give the tidy answer that sounds reasonable, not the association that decided the purchase.
2. Why the score moved
A tracker tells you the score moved but leaves your team to infer the cause. Teams fill the gap with guesses: price, the economy, the last campaign. Each guess leads to a different fix, and the wrong fix wastes time and budget.
3. The change, before it reaches sales
Stated scores move slowly. Associations change more rapidly than the attributes people report, so they show a shift first.
“It can take years for the impact of what you do to show up in your brand tracker, and by the time it does, it’s already appearing in your sales results. At that point, it’s too late.”
4. The negative associations behind good scores
A brand can score well and still carry associations that quietly push buyers away: that it is old, artificial, or not for people like them. These rarely show up as a bad rating. They show up as buyers who never switch to you.
“No matter what your brand tracking study says, there are always unconscious negative associations in the Brand Connectome that are holding back your growth.”
Why scores can stay flat while sales fall
Brand leaders bring us this problem often. The tracker says the brand is healthy. Sales say it is not. Both can be true, because they measure different things. The tracker measures what people say about the brand when asked. Sales measure what they reach for when nobody asks.
Advocacy scores show the same gap.
“Businesses have been known to have high Net Promoter Scores, even while their brands are in decline.”
When scores and sales disagree, look at the associations first:
- Which associations are tied to your brand today, and how strongly? Compare them with the brands your buyers switch to.
- Which negative associations have grown, even if no rating has dropped?
- Did you change or drop a cue buyers used to recognize you by, such as a color, a shape, a character or a line?
- Are you still winning buyers who use other brands, or only keeping the ones you have?
The cause is often not the one the team expects. In one private label case on our results page, price wasn’t the reason. The brand had stopped showing the one thing shoppers used to recognize it by.
Which brand measures predict sales?
Measures of what people say do not reliably predict what they buy. In an analysis of 389 real-market TV advertising tests, recall and persuasion scores showed no strong relationship to sales (Lodish and colleagues, Journal of Marketing Research, 1995).
Better signals sit closer to the moment of choice:
- Salience, not awareness. Knowing a name is not the same as coming to mind first when the need comes up. See how people really choose brands.
- Associations, not attributes. Which memories are tied to your brand, how strongly, and whether they are the ones that decide choice in your category.
- Buyers won from other brands. Finding new buyers accelerates growth, so track whether you are winning them.
Use the two together. Instinctive associations work as a leading indicator. The attributes people report work as a lagging one.
How to measure the associations people can’t put into words
Asking people directly does not work, because they don’t know, or they give the answer that sounds sensible. There are two broad routes.
- Implicit tests and neuro measures record fast, automatic responses, such as reaction times or eye movement. They are useful for testing one ad or one pack.
- Memory mapping draws out the memories and associations attached to a brand and measures how strongly each one is tied to it. It shows the whole network, not one response.
The Brand Connectome® is our memory map. We ask your buyers questions built to get past the tidy answers people give to sound reasonable, then measure which associations are genuinely attached to your brand and how strongly. We map your competitors the same way, so you can see what pulls buyers to them and what holds buyers back from you. It takes weeks, not quarters.
Our Brand Instinct® Monitor then follows how those associations shift over time. It is designed to sit alongside your tracker, not to replace it.
Brand tracking and the Brand Connectome®, side by side
| Brand tracking | Brand Connectome® | |
|---|---|---|
| What it measures | What people are willing and able to say | The associations people cannot articulate |
| When you get it | After the quarter has closed | Mapped in weeks |
| What it tells you | That the score moved | The specific cues driving change, ranked by what to do about them |
| What you get | A dashboard showing what happened | A Growth Blueprint showing your team where to act |
| Best for | Keeping score over time | Finding why, and what to change |
What to do when your tracker can’t explain the numbers
- Keep your tracker. It is your score over time.
- Map the associations behind the score, for your brand and your competitors. Map your core buyers and your growth target, the buyers you need to win.
- Decide what to keep, what to stop and what to add.
- Put the new cues into every place buyers meet the brand: the pack, the shelf, the site, the ads and the sales conversation.
- Watch the associations move first. The tracker follows.
“One, keep the positive associations you already have. Two, eliminate your negative associations right away. Three, add new positive associations by piggybacking them onto your brand’s existing positive associations.”
This is how we work: Map, Trigger, Grow.
