DOI: 10.2501/JAR-53-1-011-013 March 2013 JOURNAL OF ADVERTISING RESEARCH 11

How Healthy is Your Brand-Health Tracker?A Five-Point Checklist to Build Returns

on a Critical Research Investment

JENNI ROMANIuKEhrenberg-Bass InstituteJenni.Romaniuk@

Marketingscience.info

Marketing

Matters

With research budgets under ever-increasing

scrutiny, the spotlight is on brand-health trackers.

These projects are a considerable investment for

most firms, but some are questioning the value this

research provides.

In truth, many brand-health trackers have

become fat, bloated, and generally unhealthy. With

long histories, trackers are prone to become a toxic

mix of legacy metrics that no one has the courage

to remove; fad metrics, added to give the illusion

of currency, only add to the inefficiency.

The disillusionment of marketing/insights man-

agers with brand-health tracking is not surprising,

and I have had discussions with some who want to

stop tracking altogether. Brand-health tracking is,

however, the only mechanism available to under-

stand how a brand competes in consumer memory.

This knowledge is vital to explaining or predicting

changes in behavior.

Current practice can be improved quite dramati-

cally if the legacy factors and wooly thinking that

currently inform brand-health measurement are let

go. To this end, a brief review of the architecture of

the brand-health tracker quickly highlights some

common mistakes and areas for improvement.

DATA COLLECTIONThe day of continuously interviewing a small

number of people every week to collect data

should be over. This type of tracking hails back to a

time when data were collected via intercepts or tel-

ephone; interviewer availability limited the num-

ber of surveys that could be completed at any point

in time. Therefore, to get a decent sample size,

it made sense to spread the interviews out over

the year.

It is important, however, to give customers a

chance to be exposed to marketing activity before

measuring the consequent effects on consumer

memory. Distributing interviews over an extended

period of time means there will be some people

who are interviewed before they have any chance

to see the campaign. This failing, in turn, reduces

the trackers’ sensitivity to marketing activities.

Online panels eliminate such point-in-time

volume constraints and make it feasible to get a

large sample in a short time period. This means

everyone surveyed has had the opportunity to be

reached and influenced by marketing activities

before the survey, which strengthens the capacity

to link marketing activity exposure with changes

in brand equity.

With a single-point-in-time sampling approach,

it is also possible to generate valid results while

interviewing fewer people—saving money and

getting better quality data. The result: a leaner, fit-

ter tracker.

THE CONCEPTSEach question in a brand-health survey should

have a defined purpose (See Table 1).

This framework is useful to categorize tracker

questions. Some questions may not fit nicely into

any category. In such cases, what is the value of

these questions? If you, as the client, are unclear of

the purpose of the question, chances are respond-

ents will be confused—a circumstance that is

unlikely to lead to meaningful results. In every

tracker I review, there also are legacy questions, the

origin of which no one can explain.

In the process of categorizing questions, it is

usual to identify duplicate measures. For exam-

ple: “Which brand is your favorite?” and “Which

brand would you recommend?” give predictably

similar results. Asking both costs money and the

respondents’ time.

Be skeptical of fads. The recent fascination with

“brand love” demonstrates the flaw of embrac-

ing the shiniest, newest toy: scratching the surface

of the concept reveals it is nothing new, only a

rebadge of the old brand-relationship idea that ran

out of steam. When you suspect a fad, ask for evi-

dence before you add new measures to your brand

tracking.

12 JOURNAL OF ADVERTISING RESEARCH March 2013

HOW HEALTHY IS YOUR BRAnD-HEALTH TRACkER?

THE SAMPLEWhen packaged-goods brands grow,

both penetration and loyalty increase, but

penetration grows two or three times

more than loyalty. This translates to

more new customers coming from non-

buyers who become light brand buyers.

This highlights the need for a tracker to

capture movements in the brand equity

of light and non-brand buyers. And not

all metrics are equally effective in this

process.

For example, take top-of-mind brand

awareness. An Ehrenberg-Bass Institute

study examined 82 brands over 10 cate-

gories and found that top-of-mind scores

were heavily dominated by brand users,

with 80 percent of the scores coming

from this segment. Top-of-mind aware-

ness, therefore, is highly biased to brand

users (and particularly heavy users) and

will favor larger share brands. For the

same reason, it is a poor metric choice for

tracking a small (potentially growing)

brand.

Just as the best exercise plan works all

parts of your body, a best practice tracker

should draw insights from all brand and

category buyers. Therefore, check whether

non-buyers or light buyers can easily

answer each question. Ensure there are at

least some measures for the different types

of buyers.

THE quESTIONSIt is all too easy to (even unconsciously)

frame the question so respondents give

a desired answer. This blurs the line

between actual and manufactured results.

Just because someone can answer a ques-

tion, does not make the question (or the

answer) important.

For example, the use of strong adjec-

tives or calling on a direct comparison

with competitors when designing brand

attributes may lead to different underly-

ing response patterns compared with gen-

eral attributes. Asking which brands offer

good value for money might result in four

brands mentioned; however, asking which

brands offer better value than other brands—

or are excellent value—may lead to only

two brands being elicited. The other two

brands do have links to value, but these

links are not as strong as other brands at

the point of interview.

The omission of the links to these brands

is concerning: it is the light and non-users

that are omitted. Remember: light and

non-users are most likely to show the posi-

tive impact of advertising, and such con-

sumers are the major source of customer

base growth. Not tracking associations

from this audience dilutes insight into the

brand’s growth potential and its ability to

keep track of small, growing competitors.

Another common tracker error is over-

looking short yes/no variables in favor

of Likert scales that give the illusion of

sensitivity. The assumption that a multi-

point scale must be more sensitive has two

flaws.

First, all brands and attributes gain a

similar distributional shape of people say-

ing “strongly agree,” “agree,” and so on.

Scales that score higher overall have more

people who “strongly agree” and even

more people who “agree.” Extra scale

points, therefore, add no value.

Second, scales blunt sensitivity, as

those with no opinion (usually non-users)

default to the mid-point, which has a value

of 3 on a 5-point scale. This comparatively

high value for “no opinion” blunts the

mean score and reduces variation across

brands.

Finally, although there is still a great

deal to learn about how consumer mem-

ory works, researchers are pretty confident

that memory is not in the form of a series

of 7-point Likert scales!

THE METRICSThe best brand-health data will be under-

utilized if researchers do not apply the

appropriate context when interpreting the

data. For instance, raw scores fail to take

into account the underlying influences on

consumer responses to brand equity ques-

tions. This is particularly important when

tracking metrics over time.

TABLE 1key Brand Health Tracking AreasConcept Reason

Brand Awareness

Captures the degree to which consumers know a brand is a member of the category, so you can pick up when new entrants are gaining traction.

Brand Positioning

Captures the degree to which a brand is known for its promoted qualities, so you can identify the impact of advertising messages.

Brand Salience

Captures the propensity for the brand to come to mind in buying situations, so you can predict the chance the brand will be considered.

Brand Attitude

Captures whether consumers have strong positive or negative opinions about the brand, so you can identify any strong emotional attachments or barriers to purchase.

Distinctive assets

Captures the strength of key brand identification devices (logos, colors, taglines), so you can determine if the last campaign has helped build these.

Brand Usage

Captures how many customers the brand has so you can identify heavy, medium, and light buyers. This helps set the context for other metrics, as well as providing insight into market structure.

March 2013 JOURNAL OF ADVERTISING RESEARCH 13

HOW HEALTHY IS YOUR BRAnD-HEALTH TRACkER?

Factoring in these influences (such as

past brand usage) makes analysis a bit

more arduous, but the extra work delivers

a more powerful context for interpreting

brand equity score changes. For example,

splitting out brand users and non-users

and/or controlling for brand size are cru-

cial when interpreting brand-awareness

scores. Failure to do this reduces the sensi-

tivity of the overall metrics package.

Moreover, the type of brand matters

when selecting the appropriate brand-

awareness metric. For example, unaided

awareness measures bias against private

labels and brand variants. Relying solely

on unaided measures hampers a tracker’s

capacity to identify when brands enter

consumer consciousness and potentially

become viable options to buy.

Do avoid combination indices that

reduce a brand’s health down to a single

number. If all metrics move in the same

way, you do not need to measure them all.

If these metrics move in different direc-

tions—or at different rates—combining

them loses valuable information.

FINAL THOuGHTSThere is comfort in the status quo, but

marketing-research R&D consistently rede-

fines best practices. Do not be held back by

the past. And, if you can let go of the leg-

acy aspects of your brand-health tracker, I

doubt that you will lose very much.

Instead, design a brand-health tracker

that incorporates the latest knowledge

about how buyers think, how buyers buy,

how brands grow, and how advertising

(and other marketing activity) works.

Jenni Romaniuk is associate professor of brand equity

and associate director (international) at the Ehrenberg-

Bass Institute for Marketing Science. Her research

focuses on brand equity, advertising effectiveness, and

word-of-mouth marketing. In addition to the Journal of

Advertising Research, where she writes the quarterly

“Marketing Matters” column, her work has been featured

in the pages of the Journal of Business Research,

the Journal of Marketing Management, Marketing

Theory, the European Journal of Marketing, and the

International Journal of Market Research.

Copyright of Journal of Advertising Research is the property of Warc LTD and its content may not be copied or

emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission.

However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.