Is your brand tracker showing strong scores… but weak sales? Mustard’s Claire Borthwick explores how to refresh tired brand tracking studies with thinking from Ehrenberg-Bass, including CEPs, mental availability, and smart segmentation.
Is your brand tracker a bit tired? Is it not giving you much back despite a hefty chunk of your budget being spent here? ….Or, worse is your brand tracking showing consistent positivity, but your sales data tells a different story?
Don’t worry…you’ve come to the right place. We can change that!
We’re always reading and most recently we’ve been diving deep into the latest thinking from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. We’re HUGE fans more broadly, but most recently we’ve been pouring over Better Brand Health and the opportunities it outlines for improving brand tracking programmes, taking them from boardroom boredom to a decision-driving tool! Below are three key themes that have really stuck with us and which we’re already incorporating into our current programmes.
1. Ensure Your Brand Tracker is Surveying the Right People
Are you speaking to the right people? Your tracking sample needs to reflect the category buyer profile, not your brand buyer profile. According to the Duplication of Purchase Law (stick with us) new brand buyers are most likely to come from your biggest competitors. You’re also most likely to lose buyers to these same competitors. As such your profiling needs to be at the category level, i.e. those who have purchased in the category in the last month / 3 months etc. Furthermore, the sample also needs to incorporate buying frequency as well as engagement. Brands grow by penetration, so focusing on ‘heavy’ (or the most loyal) buyers is not going to drive brand growth. This ‘heavy’ buyer cohort are still important – we need to keep them engaged – but ‘light’ brand buyers and non-brand buyers (who are category engaged) are key for brand growth. Tracking metrics among these light and non-brand buyers reveals whether your brand is growing or declining.
2. Ask Better Brand Questions Using Category Entry Points (CEPs)
Are you asking the right questions? There are many tips in the Better Brand Health book (give us a call / send us an email – we’d genuinely love to chat to someone, anyone about this!) but the biggest takeaway for us is definitely that broad awareness metrics – yes we’re coming for you ‘spontaneous awareness’ and ‘prompted awareness’ – don’t reflect how people think about brands. For example, if you wanted a healthy lunch would the same set of brands come to mind vs if you fancied a treat for lunch? So why are we asking about brand awareness in such a generic way, when that’s not actually how we think about brands…? A better metric and one heavily touted by the Ehrenberg Bass Institute is the use of Category Entry Points (CEPs) – these are moments when someone mentally enters your category, i.e. they are thinking about that healthy / treat lunch (yes we were a bit hungry writing this, but it’s much broader than lunch!). Your tracker should include a relevant range of CEPs across the category and then ask about associations with your brand and your competitors at these key entryways into the category. We can then conduct advanced analysis (see point 3) with this data to help you understand where you can best target your marketing, communications and product strategy according to CEPS.
3. Analyse Your Brand Tracker Data the Smart Way
Are you analysing the data in the “right” way? Ok, so now we’re talking to the right people and asking the right questions, so the final stage is analysing the data in the way that most benefits the brand and the decisions that the marketing / brand / research teams are making every day. This involves analysing the data split by brand buyers (both heavy and light) and non-buyers. It also incorporates CEPs to calculate a wide range of mental availability metrics. These include Mental Market Share, Mental Penetration, Network Size and Share of Mind, factored and adjusted according to brand size. Calculating these different metrics and cutting them by brand buying behaviour allows us to diagnose where your brand is most effective, where it is least effective, why this is the case and how we can shift the dial to support brand growth. This isn’t going to be death by PowerPoint, it will be a consolidated and strategic plan of attack for a more effective brand.
Together, these three fixes offer a smarter, more strategic way to track brand health. It’s an approach that’s grounded in behavioural science, rooted in relevance, and ready to drive real commercial impact. Whether your tracker needs a total overhaul or a few smart upgrades, we can help you get more from your data.
Interested…? You should be. Drop us a line, we’re here when you’re ready to get started.