We live in a world where people don’t just buy products or services; they buy solutions to their problems. They seek not just any solutions, but those that enhance their self-esteem and provide a memorable experience.

To ensure that the solution you offer becomes the preferred choice for as many people as possible, you need to create a relationship with your existing consumers and make your brand evident to potential consumers.

A business needs to understand its consumers and their needs. To measure how well you’re known, to become a brand that stays top of mind for consumers.

But what exactly is a brand? Marty Neumeier says that it’s not just a logo, a slogan, a promise, or a product, but…

A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or organization.

— Marty Neumeier

A brand is not what you say about your business, but what your customers believe about you.

Globally, for cola lovers, the world is divided between Pepsi and Coca Cola. Other brands are not a choice, but rather an alternative in their absence. Each camp insists their brand is the stronger one. That’s how strong the brand sentiment built within the minds of consumers is! A phone by Apple has functions similar to those of Samsung or Huawei. Yet, there are people with strong preferences for one brand over another, regardless of features like price, included accessories, camera quality, or sound.

Likewise, a Nike customer would never purchase an Adidas tracksuit or Puma shoes.

How to Know If You Have a Brand and Not Just a Product or Service

Similarly, if we stop 10 people on the street and ask them to name 5 laundry detergent companies, they might name 5 detergent brands instead.

A brand is more present in the consumer’s mind than the company itself. Ariel and Tide are products of the same company, Procter & Gamble, yet people think of these brands, not the company name.

If you’ve been on the market for more than three years, you already know that the way customers view your brand differs from what you as an entrepreneur or marketer believe about that business.

Often, you may make decisions based on intuition, which can be as good as any, but it’s always best to base decisions on data, on numbers, on well-documented information.

And the information about your business isn’t something you can just pull from online news or social media, but directly from the consumers, by asking for their opinions and experiences with your brand.

The most important part of market studies is that they give you access to a general population, which offers a consumer perspective about more competitor brands in the market.

If you do an in-house study with only your consumers, the results are limited to the experience they have with your brand.

How Brand Awareness Measurement Works – An Introduction to Brand Tracking

Measuring brand awareness and brand tracking are two essential components of effective marketing and business strategies. The goal of these analyses is to continually evaluate how consumer perceptions of a brand evolve over time. Additionally, brand tracking looks at other indicators such as purchase intent or consumer loyalty.

Brand awareness measurement can be defined as:

The process of analysis in which a brand is recognized (or not) and perceived by the public.

This could involve measuring spontaneous awareness, that is, when people are asked to name brands within a certain category without any suggestions, or prompted awareness, when they are offered a list of brands and asked which they recognize.

To understand what it means to evaluate brand awareness, you can learn more from the brand tracking study conducted for TBI Bank. The objectives of the study were quite complex and covered aspects such as:

• Identifying characteristics of the financial products and services market in Romania;
• Perception of the brand among consumers in the target market;
• Benchmarking the competition;
• Measuring the brand awareness of products;
• The effectiveness of marketing communication.

When you decide that you need to monitor brand awareness, you must be very clear about what interests you to find out, namely, what the objectives of your company are.

That’s where we, as a specialized market research agency, step in to create a research methodology tailored to your needs. More precisely, we formulate questions from which we extract information relevant to your brand and we collect data on the consumer typology visited by you.

In general, the most important aspects related to brand tracking include:

• The mention rate of a brand and its associated products/services. It’s important to know how well-positioned your brand is in the minds of the consumer public.
• How consumers perceive your brand in the market, how they perceive your products and existing services. In this way, you can position yourself as a problem-solving brand, an innovative brand, a consumer-oriented brand, or a brand that elicits a significant reaction no matter what you’re compared to, making you stand out in the market and remain memorable in the mind of the consumer.
• Emotions associated with your brand by consumers. People associate brands with positive, negative, or neutral terms. Are people happy / sad / anxious / enthusiastic about your brand? How do they feel about it? Could fear be replaced with other brands if they found a more appropriate, more attractive, or a variant with improved characteristics?

All these aspects help you make better business decisions and grow your business.

Every brand faces its own set of challenges, and these necessitate customized market research studies. MKOR, in pursuing a complete brand tracking analysis, recommends to our clients to include key brand awareness metrics (such as brand awareness levels, brand characteristics recall, usage, consumer attitudes and emotions towards the brand, and purchase intent) as well as competitive benchmarking analyses.

The Benefits of Brand Tracking

The consumers’ perception of the brand connects it as much to the product as to the services offered.

Perception becomes reality.

The way your product or service makes your customers feel determines their behaviors, including their likelihood to recommend it to others.

A public brand displays a range of reactions in consumer behavior: comparative reactions to products, the influx of information before and after using a product/service.

From MKOR’s perspective, the primary benefits of brand tracking include:

1. It offers a comprehensive overview of the degree to which the brand has been received in the market and how it is perceived compared to the competition. This means conducting benchmarking with current data specifically collected for your company and the product or service offered. In this way, you can find out what consumers think about your brand, what issues or expectations they have, and whether they are satisfied with the products or services offered.
2. It helps you identify trends related to your brand’s notoriety, enabling you to make the best marketing decisions.
3. It assists you in evaluating the impact of your marketing strategies and campaigns, in relation to the evolution of brand awareness and marketing budget. The fact that having 10,000 followers on Instagram doesn’t necessarily reflect an accurate image of your brand’s awareness or how it is perceived by your consumers.

Thus, through brand tracking tools, MKOR can assist you with:

• Initial evaluation and positioning of the brand;
• Monitoring the brand’s evolution;
• Evaluating the effectiveness of marketing strategies.

Brand monitoring represents an efficient way to highlight and address the problematic situations encountered by customers in relation to your brand. For instance, if you have data regarding the purchase experiences of your consumers, you could implement remedial actions to improve the purchase journey.

Essentially, every stage of the acquisition experience should be analyzed from the standpoint of the consumer’s obstacles:

1. Awareness;
2. Consideration;
3. Purchase decision;
4. Retention – returning to purchase from you;
5. Recommendation – becoming an advocate for your brand.

Methods and Tools for Brand Tracking

Methods for measuring brand awareness include market research, opinion polls, or online data analysis (such as mentions on social networks or internet searches). At MKOR, depending on the needs of your business, we can combine many research methods:

• Opinion surveys;
• Focus groups;
• In-depth interviews;
• Semiotic research;
• Sentiment analysis;
• Social media monitoring.

To obtain a holistic and complex picture of your brand’s notoriety. The research report or dashboard you receive after analyzing the brand tracking results will help you calibrate your business strategy and the marketing tailored to how your brand is perceived by your audience.

Let’s Work Together!

Your sales strategies are facilitated by the fact that you invest in having a strong brand. But how do you know or affirm if you have a strong brand? Or what do consumers think about your brand? Well, for this you need numbers, data, concrete analyses. Business intuition takes you up to a point. Beyond that, you need market data in the field you are active in.

We’ve detailed how brand awareness evaluation can help elevate your business to the next level. If you’re ready to advance your business, we invite you to schedule a meeting with the MKOR team to uncover together the emotional attributes your brand possesses and how it’s perceived by consumers in the Romanian market.

You need brand tracking if you want to:

• Have a clearer picture of the way your brand is perceived by consumers in the industry you operate in.
• Make better marketing decisions based on trends related to your brand’s notoriety.
• Maximize the success of your strategies and marketing campaigns, as related to the investment budget and how your brand has been perceived by your consumers, respectively the sales made.

Read about how we do brand tracking at MKOR and schedule a free consultation with MKOR. If you want different results, you need to do things differently. Business as usual doesn’t cut it in 2023.

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