Brand tracking should be enjoying something of a golden age. The technology is more sophisticated, the data is available faster and businesses can monitor brand performance with a level of frequency and granularity that would have been difficult to imagine 20 years ago. Modern tracking systems promise continuous measurement, interactive dashboards, predictive analytics and immediate access to a vast range of competitive benchmarks, all designed to help marketing teams make faster and better-informed decisions.
Yet, over the past couple of years, we have found ourselves having a surprisingly similar conversation with a growing number of clients. On paper, their tracking programmes are doing exactly what they are supposed to do. The fieldwork is completed on time; the dashboards are updated regularly and there is no shortage of data available to anyone who wants to explore it. Yet something is off…
Maybe the data doesn’t instinctively feel right, perhaps they’re getting information not insight, or possibly it feels like the business and the tracker have simply grown apart.
The key question to be answered is: What decisions does this tracker actually drive?
The growth of subscription-based tracking has brought clear advantages. It has made regular brand measurement accessible to more organisations, reduced the time required to set up a programme and given users the ability to access their data whenever they need it. Standardisation can improve consistency, while automation can free insight teams from the laborious task of manually updating charts every month or quarter.
These are meaningful improvements and it would be wrong to dismiss them. Nobody wants to return to a world in which every question requires a new data request and every presentation takes days to produce.
The problem arises when the efficiencies of the delivery model begin to define the research itself. A standard framework might be convenient or cost effective, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it reflects the realities of a particular brand, market or business challenge. A dashboard can make information easier to access, but it can’t guarantee that the information is relevant, properly interpreted or capable of influencing a decision.
This concern is not unique to the clients approaching us. The wider research industry is increasingly discussing the need to move tracking away from passive KPI reporting and towards strategic decision support. A recent ESOMAR Research World feature on the redesign of IKEA’s global tracking programme described a familiar problem: many organisations have more data than ever before but continue to struggle to turn that data into better decisions. The article argued that trackers too often become reporting machines that generate dashboards without meaningfully changing business action.
That distinction between a reporting system and a decision system is becoming increasingly important. A reporting system tells you where the numbers are. A decision system helps you understand what those numbers mean for the choices in front of you.
The value question is becoming harder to avoid
Alongside these questions about usefulness, there is a more immediate commercial factor driving many tracking reviews: budgets are under greater scrutiny.
Marketing and insight teams are increasingly expected to demonstrate the return on every significant investment, whether that investment is in media, technology, consultancy or research. Long-standing programmes are no longer protected simply because they have always existed, and recurring subscriptions are being examined particularly closely because their costs can become embedded in a budget without their value being reconsidered with the same regularity.
Brand tracking is no exception. When a programme represents a substantial annual commitment, it is reasonable for a business to ask whether the tracker is still answering the right questions, whether stakeholders are using it and whether the resulting insight is influencing strategy or investment.
However, that review should not become a race to the lowest price.
The truth is that the relationship between price and value is not straightforward. The cheapest tracker is not good value if the output is generic, the competitive context is irrelevant and nobody in the organisation uses it. The most expensive tracker is not good value simply because it includes an impressive dashboard, a large normative database and an extensive suite of analytics. The cost of the programme matters, but the contribution it makes to the business matters more.
This means the evaluation of return on investment needs to move beyond a comparison of research prices. It should consider whether the tracker is helping the organisation reduce uncertainty, confidently prioritise its resources and improve the quality of decisions being made.
More benchmarks do not necessarily create more clarity
Benchmarking is often seen as a hallmark of a robust tracking programme. Whether through syndicated studies, subscription services or bespoke benchmarks, organisations are frequently offered the opportunity to compare their performance against wider datasets and industry norms.
While this can provide useful context, more benchmarks do not automatically lead to better decisions. The most meaningful benchmark is often the tracking programme itself. A well-designed tracker measures performance against the competitors, occasions and attitudes that genuinely matter to a brand. It should already provide a clear view of where the organisation sits within its competitive landscape and how that position is changing over time.
The challenge with many external benchmarks is relevance. Knowing that consideration, awareness or reputation scores are above or below an industry average may be interesting, but it does not necessarily help answer the questions that matter most. Why should a benchmark derived from organisations with different audiences, purchase journeys or competitive dynamics carry more weight than direct comparisons against the brands that consumers are actually choosing between?
A strong tracking programme should not simply identify whether a score is high or low. It should reveal where a brand stands relative to the competitors that genuinely matter, where it is gaining or losing ground, and where opportunities for growth exist.
This is particularly important when tracking mental availability. Research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute suggests that brands grow when they are easily thought of in relevant buying situations. The question is therefore not how a brand performs against a broad industry benchmark, but how it performs against the brands competing for attention, consideration and choice in those moments.
For this reason, competitor selection is one of the most important design choices in any tracking programme. The goal is not to benchmark against as many organisations as possible. It is to benchmark against the right ones.
The dashboard is not the insight
The industry has made enormous progress in improving access to data. Interactive dashboards allow users to filter results, examine different audiences and monitor movement without waiting for a scheduled report. These capabilities can be valuable, particularly for experienced insight teams that know which questions they want to investigate.
The danger is assuming that access and interpretation are the same thing – a well-designed dashboard can help somebody find a result but it can’t, on its own, determine which result matters most. It can’t fully understand the history of the brand, the commercial pressures facing the organisation or the decisions being debated behind closed doors. It may be able to identify an unusual pattern, but understanding whether that pattern is a temporary fluctuation, a developing risk or an important opportunity still requires context and judgement.
This is why the role of the researcher has become more important, not less, as technology has improved. When businesses have access to hundreds of measures, more frequent data and numerous ways of cutting the results, somebody still needs to identify the signal, challenge the obvious explanation and form a considered point of view.
Clients tell us that this is often the element they feel is missing. They may receive a polished presentation and a thorough account of which measures have risen or fallen, but little evidence that the senior people in the room have spent enough time interrogating the data, connecting it to the wider business context or considering what it means.
Good tracking requires more than somebody presenting the charts. It needs people who understand the business well enough to recognise why a result matters and who are prepared to recommend what should happen as a consequence.
Consistency should not become rigidity
Brand tracking relies on consistency. If the measures, methodology and sample change constantly, it becomes difficult to distinguish a real movement in performance from a change created by the research design. However, consistency is not the same as immovability.
Some trackers contain questions that were added years ago to support a decision that has long since been made. Others continue to monitor competitors, propositions and customer journeys that no longer reflect the market. New questions are added as priorities emerge, but very little is removed, meaning the questionnaire becomes longer while the purpose of the programme becomes less clear.
The best programmes preserve the measures that matter while incorporating flexibility. In the real world, markets change, competitors enter and leave, business strategies evolve and new purchasing behaviours emerge. A useful tracker should be capable of evolving alongside them.
What should businesses expect from a tracker?
A good tracker should provide a stable and reliable view of brand performance, but that is only the starting point. Its broader purpose should be to help the organisation understand what is changing, why that change is occurring and what the business should do next.
That means focusing on the measures most relevant to brand growth rather than collecting every metric that could potentially be tracked. It means comparing the brand with competitors that genuinely matter, while recognising that the appropriate competitive set may vary by audience, buying occasion or category need.
It also means looking beyond movement in headline scores. The programme should help the business understand where its brand holds an advantage, where competitors overlap with its position and which parts of the market present a credible opportunity for growth. Where quantitative evidence raises a question that the tracker cannot answer, the programme should have ways of exploring the human explanations behind the result rather than leaving the client with an unexplained movement on a chart.
Most importantly, a good tracker should earn attention within the business. Teams should want to engage with it because it provides information they can use, not because the quarterly debrief has appeared in the calendar again.
This does not mean every wave needs to produce a dramatic revelation. Stable results can be strategically important, and not every fluctuation requires action. The value lies in helping decision-makers distinguish between the movements that matter and those that do not, while giving them confidence about where to focus their time and investment.
Time to start asking more questions about the real value you’re getting
Whether a programme is syndicated or bespoke, inexpensive or premium, continuous or periodic, its worth ultimately depends on the role it plays in the organisation. If it helps people see their market more clearly, make better decisions and act with greater confidence, it is doing something valuable. If it produces regular information without changing understanding or behaviour, the business is right to question it.
Businesses are not turning away from brand tracking. They are asking it to work harder. They want the rigour of consistent measurement, but they also want interpretation. They want efficient access to data, but not at the expense of thoughtful consultancy. They want to understand how they compare, but only where that comparison helps them compete. They want flexibility without losing robustness, and senior expertise that is present throughout the relationship rather than appearing only for the final debrief.
Above all, they want to see a return on their investment, not simply in the form of more data, but through better choices and clearer action.
It all boils down to one simple question – if your tracker went away tomorrow, what impact would that actually have?
If your tracker has been on your mind recently and you’re thinking about a change, give us a shout at hello@sparkmr.com. Our team have extensive experience with managing and delivering tracking both agency side and client side and happy to have a chat, no matter how early you are in your process.
