Recently, and with more frequency, clients have been letting off steam about their brand tracking. These are the top 4 complaints we hear:
- Our tracker doesn’t help
- It is costing us a small fortune
- It is difficult to change anything
- It is even harder to stop
We accept that some tracking studies may be useful, but we tend to agree with many of these complaints. We have a lot of sympathy with clients who feel stuck with a long term contract that churns out continuously unchanging readings of measures and metrics with the metronomic regularity of a Swiss railway timetable through the darkness of the Gotthard Base Tunnel.
On a good day marketing teams can zoom in on a tiny flicker of the dial hoping to be able to use it to highlight that their activity has hit the target. On a bad day it’s another report that contributes little, absorbs resource and leaves them feeling worse off.
Brand owners need to know from time to time whether what they are doing is keeping the business on track: is their brand strong, do people think of it when they want to buy something similar, do they know what it does and can they tell it apart from the competition? This is not complicated.
So when we are asked for advice we typically have two recommendations to avoid trackers becoming a runaway train:
- Conduct (very) small occasional dipsticks when you want to monitor your brand Fame and Force
- Focus the resources this releases on getting on with the things that encourage people to buy your brand
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