Benchmarks Archives - E2E Research Services Pvt. Ltd

By E2E Research | February 7, 2023

To successfully grow your business, people need to know your brand exists. By measuring brand awareness, you can ensure your marketing strategies are doing exactly that. Before wasting a lot of time and money in the wrong places.

There are a variety of ways to measure brand awareness, each with their own purpose, requirements, advantages, and disadvantages. From direct and indirect to individual and group metrics, this list will help you choose the set of metrics that best suits the goals you have for your brand.

Direct Measures

Unaided Awareness: Unaided awareness is a very common metric wherein a targeted sample of people are asked to name any brands they can think of in a certain category. For instance, “Name five brands of computers” or “Name every brand of facial tissue you can think of.”

Pros: If people do name your brand, it’s clear that they are aware of it. This is particularly true if your brand name isn’t common or is difficult to spell.

Cons: People might not remember your brand name in the moment. Or, maybe they assumed that naming several brands was sufficient and they stopped just before naming your brand – which they did know. Just because people didn’t name your brand doesn’t mean they aren’t aware of it. You might consider this metric the lower bound of true awareness.

Binary Aided Awareness: Perhaps the most common and well-known metric is Aided Awareness. It’s usually measured in combination with, and after, unaided awareness by asking a targeted sample of people a simple yes/no question like “Before now, have you heard of E2E Research?”

Pros: It’s direct, clear, and won’t confuse readers. It’s easy to measure among a wide range of target audiences and regions without the need for any special software or technology.

Cons: However, this question suffers from acquiescence bias. Research participants very much want to help researchers achieve positive results and this includes trying to remember things they actually don’t quite remember. Perhaps they feel like they should remember the name or that they’ve probably heard the name, and consequently select “yes” when they shouldn’t. It’s not necessarily done out of malice, but rather poor memory or a conscious or unconscious desire to be helpful.

Multi-Select Aided Awareness: Unlike binary aided awareness, multi-select metrics present 5 to 10 brands for people to react to. People might recognize none, some, or all of the brands. The question usually looks something like “Before now, which of these brands had you heard of?”

Pros: Because people can’t tell what the target brand is, there is less incentive or desire to provide a positive “yes” response to every single brand. It feels natural to leave some brands unselected because people know they haven’t heard of every brand that exists. As such, this technique works well for brands that are uncommon or rare.

Cons: People could still select brands that they’ve never heard of before simply because people are being people. That’s why it’s a great idea to include some fake brand names which serve as a baseline for false memory.

Attribute Awareness: Go beyond simple recognition of your brand name to understand whether people know what your brand is about. It’s certainly not brand awareness if people know your brand has something to do with food but they don’t know if it’s dried soup or soda.

After you have confirmed that people can recognize your brand name, invite them to select or write out a series of words to describe the brand’s main category or key features. The animated gif illustrates the selection of emotions but it could also reflect a set of product categories or features.

Pros: This method ensures that people know when you’re referring to Dove soap vs Dove chocolate, or that Sysco food distributors Is not the same as Cisco technology.

Cons: People may genuinely recognize your brand name but without context, they may be unable to identify the category or key features perhaps because of poor marketing and branding tactics.

Shelf Display Awareness: Another option is to present an image of product packages on a retail shelf. People can then click on all the package images they recognize. You might even wish to include package images from other categories or fake packages as distractors. (“Please click on every cereal package you recognize.”)

Pros: People may find it easier to recognize a brand when it’s presented in a familiar context such as a store shelf. This is particularly helpful for brands that people don’t have a personal connection with, those secondary products that back up their favorite brands.

Cons: Is it really brand awareness if people know what your package looks like but they can’t associate a brand name with it? Rote purchases based on shelf location and package design won’t necessarily turn into repurchase if someone always grabs the first green item on the third shelf.

Logo Awareness: Similar to shelf display awareness, you could present people with a set of product logos and ask them to click on the logos they recognize.

Logos that don’t incorporate the brand name are particularly good for this metric, e.g., Pepsi, Windows, NBC. Some logos that incorporate the brand name could be de-branded, e.g., Chanel, Reebok, Nike.

In cases where the logo is the brand name, you could even try recreating the color, font, shape, and size of the word with nonsensical line art, e.g., FILA, PUMA, Coca-Cola, Prada.

Pros: Many people find it easier to recognize imagery rather than words so this metric could be helpful for them.

Cons: Of course, if people know they’ve seen your logo before but they’re unable to match it with a brand name, you know your marketing needs some work. They could still be very much aware of your brand but not your logo.

Implicit Awareness: One of my favorite metrics for brand awareness is implicit awareness. This method relies on unconscious brain activity as an indicator of awareness. It can be conducted in a variety of ways but the most basic method is as follows.

A set of extremely well known (e.g., Coca-cola, Nike, Starbucks) brands, unknown brands, competitive brands, and the brand you wish to test is created. Brand names are then presented to people one at a time in random order.

Whether through biometric measurements or physical button clicking, the number of nano/milliseconds it takes to react to the brand name is recorded. A super fast biometric reaction or click of the Z vs M key indicates their level of familiarity with the brand whereas a much slower reaction indicates less awareness.

Pros: Because this metric is unconscious, acquiescence bias is easy to overcome and it’s difficult to fake knowledge or lack thereof. This is particularly good for brands that people might be embarrassed to claim awareness of, e.g., incontinence products, sexual dysfunction products.

Cons: Because everyone has a different baseline for reaction times, you must measure reactions to a large number of brands. And, you’ll need to use for-purpose technology because it’s impossible to measure nano/milliseconds with the necessary degree of accuracy for this technique.

Indirect Measures

As with any metric, corroborating results via multiple methods is the best way to know you’re actually measuring what you think you’re measuring and that your result is reliable. In addition to using 2 or more direct measures, consider adding at least one indirect measure to your toolkit.

Keep in mind that many of the indirect metrics suffer from a common set of disadvantages. For instance, without using a targeted sample of people, rates are easily over/under estimated and rank orders won’t be accurate. Never consider an indirect metric to be your best measure of brand awareness.

Social Media Followers: The number of people following your social media accounts is a helpful indicator of brand awareness. Highly popular and well-known brands like Coca-Cola have thousands or millions of followers on Instagram, Pinterest, Tik-Tok, and other social media sites.

Pros: These metrics are easy and free to gather, and work well for extremely common, consumer-oriented brands.

Cons: Many people either don’t use social media or choose not to follow brands or companies on social media, particularly brands that aren’t personal or consumer focused, e.g., brands of carpets, wiring, paper. While the numbers are a helpful indictor, they will not reveal accurate volumes or rank orders.

Social Media Mentions: If you search for a brand on a social media channel, you will likely see how many times the brand has been mentioned. Obviously, a large number of mentions means a lot of people are aware of the brand.

Pros: Brands with a high number of mentions likely have high brand awareness. This is a helpful metric for personal, consumer focused brands.

Cons: Take care that the mentions you are counting aren’t all coming from the same few people. And, make sure they aren’t refering to something else, e.g., Apple computers vs apple pie. And, as with other indirect measure, having the most mentions does not correspond to having the highest brand awareness. Rankings are impossible to discern from social media mentions.

Google Trends: This website tracks monitors the number of people using specific search terms while using Google browsers.

Pros: Brands that are searched for a lot are more likely to have high awareness. As such, consumer focused brands will be more able to take advantage of this metric.

Cons: Search results can be confounded with a lot of factors. Words with similar sounds or spellings can be confused for your brand. Not everyone uses Google to search for information (remember Bing, Baidu, Yahoo?). People don’t necessarily search for brands even if they are very much aware of those brands and use them everyday. And, searches are often not awareness, but rather an indication that someone isn’t aware of a brand, e.g., “What is Pantene?” As such, it is impossible to trust the rank orders of brands with Google Trends.

Referral Traffic: If you’re lucky enough to have direct access to your website analytics, you might notice where your website traffic is coming from. Perhaps it’s sourced from industry association websites or from competitive companies. Counting inbound clicks coming from industry websites is another interesting indicator of awareness.

Pros: If association websites and competitive websites send links your way, you can be assured that your brand awareness is high. This is definitely a case where competitors want to be associated with the best in class!

Cons: Whereas industry associations are open to linking to any company in their industry, many competitive companies have policies that forbid them from linking to their competitors. They may definitely be aware of you but will also definitely never show up in your referral traffic.

Review Sites: Many product buyers and users take the time to write online reviews. New or rare brands may find they have just a few reviews whereas extremely well-known brands may have thousands or millions of reviews.

Pros: When people take the time to review your brand, you know they have personal experience with your brand name and have connected with you in either a positive or negative way.

Cons: As with other measures, a lack of reviews does not correspond to lack of awareness. Products or services that are generally fine might never receive as many reviews as a tiny brand that produces a horrible product or, conversely, an amazing product.

What’s Next?

Are you ready to identify and monitor brand awareness among your buyers and users? Email your project specifications to our research experts using Projects at E2Eresearch dot com. We’d love to help you turn your enigmas into enlightenment!

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A Brand Manager’s Practical Guide to Brand Tracking

By E2E Research | December 14, 2022

What Is Brand Tracking

Brand tracking is a marketing research technique that takes measurements of a brand at regular intervals of time. The goal is to identify those things having positive or negative impacts on the growth of the brand and to make strategic changes that will improve its chances of success.

Brand trackers typically fall into three categories. Some focus on financial metrics such as customer, sales, market share, or price data and rely on business intelligence and data analytics. These studies typically use pre-existing, internal business data. Other trackers use behavior data such as website page clicks or search volumes.

Finally, some brand trackers rely on consumer metrics such as perception, opinion, and behavior data. These studies typically use questionnaires or user-generated social media listening data. Here, we will focus mainly on brand tracking using consumer metrics as measured by questionnaire data.

What are the Benefits of Brand Tracking

Brand tracking has many benefits for brand managers, marketers, and business leaders.

Trackers help brand managers:

Understand the perceptions a variety of target audiences or personas have about the brand in terms of what they think, feel, and do
Understand the pain points of each target audience
Identify the product features, messages, and channels that matter to their audience
Improve products and services in keeping with the needs and wants of their audience

Decorative image

Understand how customers position the brand within the competitive space based on product capabilities, pricing, and channels, etc.
Monitor the performance of competitors in terms of which ones to pay attention to because they are gaining or losing ground over their brand

Trackers help marketers

Understand how various target audiences as identified through segmentation research perceive and react to a variety of branding and messaging strategies
Identify and optimize under and over-performing marketing and brand strategies
Identify under and over-performing marketing channels that deserve or don’t deserve additional funding

Trackers help business leaders

Identify whether a brand is meeting, beating, or missing growth expectations
Identify concerns about a product, channel, or competitive brand before they escalate into problems
Discover opportunities for innovation

Key Metrics for Brand Tracking

Theoretically, there are unlimited questions that could be asked as part of a brand tracker. However, to ensure research participants remain engaged and can generate quality data, it’s important to focus on just a few key metrics. Here are some example questions to consider.

Brand Purchase: Brand purchase is one of the most important metrics to track as it reflects recalled behavior over perceptions. This is particularly important when you understand that people regularly buy things they don’t personally like because of cost or availability, or because those items are for other people. Keep in mind that, for some people, purchase could be more accurately described as trial – a one time purchase that they don’t plan to make again.

In just the last 7 days, what brands of product category have you bought? (Unaided)
In just the last 7 days, which of these brands of product category have you bought? (Aided)

Brand Repurchase: Like purchase, this metric reflects recalled behavior. In this case, it measures purchase of the brand on multiple occasions. Similar to brand purchase, repurchase could be an artifact of cost or availability rather than loyalty or brand love. However, repeat purchase is the goal of most brands.

The next time you go shopping, which brand of product category will you buy? (Unaided)
The next time you go shopping, which of these brands will you buy? (Aided)
Which of these brands do you buy most often?
Which of these brands do you buy at least once per month?

Brand Loyalty: Most brands are keen to create brand loyalty. People who are truly brand loyal are much less likely to switch to competitive brands even when they are more readily available or have more favorable pricing. This makes premium pricing a possibility.

If your preferred brand was not available in your usual store, would you buy a different brand, wait until your brand was available in your store, or go to another store?

Brand Preference: Brand preference indicates which brand people would choose if the appropriate situation arose. Remember that even though people may prefer a brand, they might never buy it if it’s not the right price, not available at their store, or disliked by other household members.

When you think of this product category, which brand do you most prefer? (Unaided)
From this list of brands, which one do you most prefer? (Aided)

Brand Consideration: When retailers offer a large number of brand choices, people may focus their attention on just a few of those brands. Your brand needs to be strong enough to stand out amongst all the competitive offerings to remain in that final consideration set. Again, consideration is not the same as purchase – someone could always keep a well-respected brand in their consideration set but never actually buy it.

When you think of this product category, which brands would you consider buying? (Unaided)
From this list of brands, which ones would you considering buying? (Aided)

Unaided and Aided Brand Awareness: Unaided awareness occurs when people are asked about brands in the category and they choose to name your brand. Aided (prompted) awareness is typically higher and reflects the percentage of people who recognize your brand in a list of competitive brand names or logos.

When you think of this product category, which brands come to mind first? (Unaided)
From this list of brands, which ones have you heard of? (Aided)

Brand Recall: Hours, days, or weeks after seeing your brand in a campaign or in the news, do people remember seeing it? High recall occurs when messaging is intriguing or relevant enough to generate notice and retention.

In just the last 7 days, what brands of product category have you seen advertised on TV? (Unaided)
In just the last 7 days, which of these brands of product category have you seen advertised on TV? (Aided)

Brand Perceptions: Brand perception metrics are far more nebulous than the previous metrics discussed. They generally reflect opinions, attitudes, and emotions people have about the brand, whether conscious or unconscious, and are typically measured via attribute batteries or lists of ideas. These metrics are most helpful at supporting or driving the other metrics.

Which of these words reflect your opinions about this brand?
What 3 things do you like about this brand?
Please explain the differences between Brand A and Brand B.
Which of these brands is most innovative? Fun? Likeable? Effective? Different?

How Often Should You Run a Brand Tracker

The key differentiator of trackers is that they are run at regular intervals over time, perhaps daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually. Here are a few key criteria to keep in mind as you decide.

How active is your brand? Think about whether you launch new campaigns, run webinars, make major announcements, or change product features daily, weekly, monthly or less often. If people see new and different activity from you on a regular basis, you may need to conduct your trackers more regularly so you can identify which items have hit or missed the mark.

How active is your category? If your category experiences rapid innovation, news headlines that constantly change, or new competitors constantly entering the arena, you might need to track more frequently. Consumer opinions could quickly and easily change based on any of those and you’ll need to identify and act on external risks to your brand as quickly as possible.

What is your measurement tool? Social media data, sales data, online purchase ratings, and consumer generated reviews are easily tracked on a daily basis, even an hourly basis. In rare cases, questionnaires have been used for daily tracking but they’re more often used for weekly or less frequent tracking. If your metrics are best measured by social media data, you could choose more frequent intervals as long as they don’t eat up someone’s time unnecessarily, (e.g., manual preparation or analysis).

Remember, just because you can track and measure something more often doesn’t mean you should. Track your metrics as often as is necessary to be proactive and reactive in your category environment.

How to Conduct a Brand Tracker Study

Identify your brand purpose, mission, and vision. In order to know what to track, you first need to know what your brand stands for, and what you want your consumers to think, feel, and do about your brand. With this information, you can ensure your data collection tool addresses key concepts and can generate relevant results.

Identify your target audience. It’s easy to think only about your own customers but that will generate an incomplete picture of your brand. Also consider people who might eventually purchase your product whether for themselves or for a friend or family member. With this information in hand, you can ensure the questions you write will make sense to both users of the product and buyers of the product.

Identify the key brands. You might be tempted to include every product your company makes in your tracker but that will lead to an unfocused and disorganized questionnaire that people can’t answer accurately. Focus on one brand in one category. Then, identify the key competitors of that brand, including the brands you admire, are jealous of, and worried about. This will give you a baseline metric to understand whether you’re over or under-performing in your category, and to identify which brands you’re taking share from – or which brands are taking share from you!

Identify the key metrics. As previously described, there are literally hundreds of potential metrics to choose from. Identify the ones that are most relevant in identifying the success and failure of your brand. Don’t let your ego or chasing KPIs prevent you from seeing the negatives. Without those, you won’t know what needs to be fixed in order to achieve huge growth.

Identify what success looks like. You need a clear definition of success to prevent confused interpretations of the data and to keep yourself honest. For struggling brands, status quo might be success. For huge brands, 3% growth might be success. But, fresh brands might only find success with growth higher than 35%. Decide on the success requirement for each key metric prior to data collection.

Identify the sample size. Once you know what your metrics and your success measures are, calculate the sample size required to accommodate them. For example, if success for you is an increase in purchase rates from 5% to 25%, you might only need a sample size of 100. But, if success is an increase from 5% to 8%, you’ll need a much larger sample size to be able to reliably detect it, perhaps up to 1000.

Build the tool. Now that you know what your metrics are, build the tool to measure them. That could be a questionnaire, social media listening data, click stream data, or sales data. Using a combination of two or more methods will allow you to cross-validate your findings so your conclusions and recommendations are more trustworthy. As you build the tool, make sure to measure both positive and negative aspects of the brand. Chasing positive KPIs rather than understanding your brand means you won’t be able to prevent or fix problems and the brand will suffer in the longer term. And, take the time to create an interesting tool that will help participants remain engaged and pay close attention.

Collect data. Take care to not add bias to your data by insisting on extremely short field times. Collecting data over 2 weeks ensures that shift workers, weekend and evening workers, technology avoiders, and people traveling all have the opportunity to participate. Without these people, your data could be biased towards people who are at their keyboards at the moment you launch the survey, a small minority of people.

Analyze the results. When brands take small or few actions throughout the year, tracker results can be stable and minimally useful. As a result, in addition to basic frequencies and averages for the total sample and subsamples, use dashboards to search for unexpected or unusual results. Those serendipitous results could be random chance never to be seen again, but they could also be an amazing discovery. Be prepared to conduct ad hoc research to confirm or deny those discoveries.

Act on the results. Based on your data analysis, change your branding, messaging, advertising, marketing, or business processes to improve negative aspects and leverage positive aspects. Remember that consumers need adequate time to notice, remember, and truly internalize the messages you’re sharing so don’t worry if you don’t see the numbers you hoped for after the first wave. And, if you notice issues or flaws in the data collection tool, improve those as well. Remember, you CAN change a tracker.

Repeat. You won’t need to completely repeat each stage each time, but you should at least review and consider whether any stages need to be updated or improved.