Measuring what matters – exponentially growing your tracking insights
By Todd Trautz and Brent Snider Maru/Matchbox | April 2023
The Marketing Department has been spending money on your brand’s new campaign, and sales are up, but your brand tracking metrics are not significantly improving. Or even worse, trending in the opposite direction vs. sales. While your tracking program is one of the biggest line items in your budget, it hasn’t helped drive effective brand decision-making in years. You might ask yourself, now what? It’s not your tracker; it’s what you’re measuring. Your tracking metrics are out of line with how consumers make purchase decisions.
Brand health or equity tracking is vital to a brand’s growth and understanding the true impact of marketing efforts. However, to do so effectively, it is critical to capture why the consumers choose your brand. David Ogilvy’s infamous quote highlights what we are missing in tracking “A brand is the intangible sum of emotions and product attributes,” which succinctly points to the consumer’s brand heuristic. The brand is a mental shortcut that directs behavior. As Ogilvy explained, it is comprised of two things:
1. What do consumers, in a fast, implicit, and associative manner, believe the brand functionally or rationally delivers? (The jobs to be done).
2. How do consumers emotionally connect and feel about the brand (Emotional equity).
Traditional brand tracking captures attitudes and what consumers think, which is a very post-rationalized view of the brand. We’ve known for decades that what consumers think and tell us doesn’t align with how they behave. This Say/Do gap is a result of the bluntness of attitudinal data and its inability to capture the “intangibles” that better predict a brand’s health.
This raises the question, what if you could exponentially grow your insights without giving up your traditional view from the past? What if you could align your tracker with the pathway to human decision-making, that we Feel, then Behave, and lastly, Think?
At Maru, using the world’s first Implicit Response Testing platform, we passively capture the alignment and misalignment of metrics and attributes that comprise the consumer heuristic. This uncovers the true strength of the brand’s equity. We automatically and passively capture a consumer’s fast, implicit, and associative responses and their slow, explicit, rationalized responses. This is in addition to the traditional data you’re used to!
Your current survey and metrics on our platform will exponentially grow your data set. No loss of historical data, no change to survey flow, and no methodology change that requires alignment. Everything you have measured in your tracker can be unlocked to drive deeper insight and more confident actions.
Resulting in an understanding of the impact of your marketing efforts and data that aligns with consumers’ heuristics and behavior, opening the door to better business outcomes.
We reveal the Say/Do gap and help brands make meaningful decisions based on how consumers’ heuristics are evolving. Measuring brand health by observing the ‘intangible sum” that comprises how consumers shape the brand in their subconscious instead of relying only on post-rationalized attitudes that are full of bias.
Brand tracking doesn’t need to be a quarterly exercise of trying to “triangulate” insight to explain or align with marketing and sales. With Maru’s behavioral economics lens, you will be able to identify advantages and alignment as well as barriers and misalignment, all driven by how consumers choose your brand. Brand health and equity are inextricably intertwined with the consumer heuristic. To capture and act on the “intangible sum of emotions and product attributes,” you need to unlock your tracker’s value today. You have nothing to lose but insight.
To learn more about Maru’s Implicit Response Platform (IRT) read our whitepaper:
