Should You Include Negative Brand Associations In A Brand Tracker?
Written by Rebecca Szew, Executive Vice President, Research & Insights, GBK Collective
Brand trackers are a critical business intelligence tool - providing key stakeholders with foundational insights they can use to inform decisions. They also serve as a key source of truth when it comes to informing research design for other projects. And yet, not all brand trackers are created equal. Without the right rigor and custom approach, brand trackers results can have limited utility for companies, or worse, end up being used as a passive monitoring tool. When planned and designed well, brand trackers can deliver insights that no other research vehicle can.
As GBK Collective has grown over the past several years, we’ve had the honor of working with a number of major brands to evolve and modernize their brand tracking programs to deliver thoughtful strategic analysis and actionable insights that can be applied by senior leaders and teams across the company.
At the heart of any brand tracking program are two essential questions:
What is the long-term health of your brand relative to competitors?
What does your brand stand for in the eyes of your target customers? And how is this perception trending over the long term, and relative to competitors?
A successful tracker must be designed to answer these questions with statistical rigor. And, a successful tracking partner must transform the data into clear, compelling stories, leveraging a range of tools and techniques that draw out the “ah-ha” insights and accompanying strategic implications.
As we’ve worked with clients to evolve their brand tracking programs, we’ve experimented with a number of new approaches. While many companies have traditionally used net promoter score (NPS) as one of their primary metrics, NPS can be polarizing and limited. This has led many companies to focus more heavily on other metrics to identify what matters most to customers, how they buy and use specific products or services, and what they think and feel about the brand.
“By designing a custom brand tracker for clients across each of their desired metrics, we’re able to deliver more precise data and reliable insights.”
By designing a custom brand tracker for clients across each of their desired metrics, we’re able to deliver more precise data and reliable insights to track how the brand is performing and how they stack up against the competition in key areas. Through custom research in parallel with brand trackers, we’re also able to uncover new insights that can be used to inform everything from product, service and marketing offers to messaging.
For example, for a client in the technology space, we recently undertook an extensive consumer research project to identify and prioritize the attributes customers value across their product categories. In this workstream, we quantified the relative importance of different positive brand attributes to bring into their modernized brand tracker by leveraging an anchored MaxDiff methodology. In a parallel workstream, we also explored whether there are any negative brand attributes (e.g., “Are difficult to do business with” or “Only cares about new customers”) that may be strong predictors of outcomes such as likelihood to switch brands and/or brand consideration (with the idea being the more a brand reduces a negative perception, the higher consideration will be). The goal of this exploration was to A) understand the strength of relationship between negative perceptions and brand outcomes and B) use this insight to decide whether negative attributes warrant a place in the client’s modernized brand tracker - keeping in mind the importance of prioritizing survey real estate for the most important metrics.
“The results of this exploration were fascinating. Negative perceptions did indeed have a relationship to brand consideration.”
The results of this exploration were fascinating. Negative perceptions did indeed have a relationship to brand consideration - but not consistently across brands, and not always in the direction we might expect. As one example, for smaller, less established brands, we observed that the greater the association with “Only cares about new customers,” the more likely consumers were to consider it. This could signal that a relationship for only caring about new customers is attractive to prospective new customers (but clearly would be problematic as the brand matures and its customer base expands).
The findings for likelihood to switch brands were much more straightforward and consistent - across brands and categories, we observed that stronger negative attribute associations had a significant, meaningful positive driver relationship with likelihood to switch. Put another way, negative attributes may be a more reliable predictor of churn than acquisition.
For this client, the learnings from our exploration suggested that negative attributes may be better leveraged in their ongoing C-SAT study to provide some early-warning signals that a customer is at risk. And, this informed our prioritization decisions for their brand tracker, ensuring that we made the best use of the survey real estate instead of throwing the kitchen sink at it.
This is just one example of GBK’s bespoke method of designing brand trackers, rather than using a templated approach and applying it across categories and brands. And this method pays off. By up-leveling the depth of insights, providing fresh points of view and best practices, companies have the opportunity to modernize their brand trackers and ultimately draw even more value for stakeholders across the business.