Brand trackers are ways in which a company is able to see in a snapshot how their brand is doing with the rest of market. There’s two ways in which you can assess how a brand is doing compared to the rest of its adversaries in a market. Firstly, there’s looking at the cold hard facts and figures. How a brand is doing in terms of profit, revenue and sales, which are the key figures that make up your bottom line. In this sense, comparing how you are doing with your competitor’s performance is relatively straightforward. It also makes it obvious who your most direct competition is. The second type is a little more complicated. This focuses on the opinions customers and potential customers have about your brand and its place in the market. With the help of a market research agency, you see how you’re doing compared with the competition in a similarly objective way that you can with profit and loss. It can also help to show specific weaknesses, areas being missed out on, that other companies are achieving within that market. In other words, this second type of assessment can help show a company the way forward, while the financial side of things can show how well something has done up to that point. How well something has done up to a certain point should never be seen as a guarantee for companies for how well it will do in the future: the opinions and tastes of customers are changeable and not under your direct control, and they need to be taken into account.

Obviously there’s a large variety of companies that can benefit from brand tracking. A few criteria can be seen as the following: if you’re a company with ample amount of competition, customer information is hard to come by in day to day transactions, or a company that’s looking for a way forward, trying to find that next gap in the market to fill. It’s far rarer for a company to need no consumer insight – the case for injecting data into your decision making process makes itself.

If a company ever feels like they’re out of touch with their market or simply do not know which way to take the business next, then brand tracking can help answer these questions and show a new direction to help gain potential new customers.