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April 11, 2023 at 5:00 am ET
In the competitive world of business, understanding your brand’s performance is crucial for crafting effective marketing strategies and staying ahead of the competition. However, determining which type of brand tracking methodology is right for your company can be tricky.
Below we’ll explore the differences between syndicated brand tracking and custom brand tracking to help you determine which approach best suits your business needs.
Morning Consult’s Brand Tracking Guide
Discover how rigorous brand tracking research enables insights-led decision-making in our Guide to Brand Tracking.
What is syndicated brand tracking?
Syndicated brand tracking is a standardized research methodology that collects and analyzes data on multiple brands within a specific industry or market.
By providing comparative data on brand performance across various metrics, such as brand awareness, reputation, loyalty and trust, syndicated brand tracking enables businesses to gain competitive intelligence and strategic insights into their industry.
The benefits of syndicated brand tracking
Syndicated brand tracking offers several advantages that can help businesses optimize their brand reputation management, monitor brand loyalty, measure brand awareness and gain insights into industry trends.
Optimize brand reputation management
By providing a comprehensive overview of how various brands are perceived in the market, syndicated brand tracking enables businesses to monitor and compare their brand reputation against their competitors. Brand favorability metrics, for example, are used to assess consumers’ perceptions of a brand and the likelihood that they will choose it over others. Some common brand favorability metrics include brand preference, net promoter score, customer satisfaction and brand trust.
This information can be used to identify areas for improvement and inform marketing strategies to strengthen brand image.
Monitor brand loyalty
Syndicated brand tracking allows businesses to track the level of loyalty customers have toward their brand, as well as toward their competitors. Understanding customer loyalty can inform businesses’ customer retention strategies and help them identify potential opportunities to attract new clientele.
Measure brand awareness
An essential element of any marketing strategy is building brand awareness. Syndicated brand tracking provides valuable insights into how well-known a brand is among target customers compared with its competitors. These insights can help organizations determine the effectiveness of their marketing efforts and make data-driven decisions to increase brand visibility.
Measure brand trust
Trust is a vital component of any successful brand, and syndicated brand tracking provides insights into how much consumers trust different brands in the market. By understanding the level of trust associated with their brand, businesses can develop targeted marketing strategies to maintain or improve their trustworthiness among customers.
Benchmark your competitors
Gaining a competitive advantage requires understanding the competitive landscape. Syndicated brand tracking enables businesses to benchmark their performance against competitors, identify key industry trends and uncover areas where they can differentiate themselves to gain a competitive edge.
What is custom brand tracking?
Custom brand tracking is a tailored research methodology designed to answer specific questions unique to a particular business or brand. This type of research allows businesses to access more granular brand insights and perform in-depth competitive analyses.
The benefits of custom brand tracking
Custom brand tracking offers several advantages that can help organizations gain more targeted and relevant insights about their brand performance. These benefits include:
- Accessing more granular brand insights
- Answering questions unique to your business objectives
- Performing competitive analyses
- Adapting to changing market conditions
- Aligning research with your target audience
Utilizing custom brand tracking gives companies more specific, tailored insights that can help inform their overall business strategy.
Access more granular insights
Custom brand tracking allows businesses to dive deeper into the factors that influence their brand performance, such as customer preferences, pain points and unmet needs. This level of detail can help businesses uncover actionable insights to drive product innovation, improve customer experience and inform marketing strategies.
Answer questions unique to your business objectives
One of the primary benefits of custom brand tracking is its ability to answer specific questions relevant to a business’s unique objectives. For example:
- Syndicated question: How does our brand awareness compare with our competitors?
- Custom expansion: What factors contribute to our brand awareness among our target audiences, and how do these factors differ from our competitors?
While syndicated brand tracking provides an overall comparison of brand awareness between a brand and its competitors, custom brand tracking allows for a deeper exploration of the factors driving awareness among specific target audiences. Another example:
- Syndicated question: How loyal are our customers compared with our competitors’ customers?
- Custom expansion: What are the key drivers of customer loyalty for our brand, and how do they differ from those of our competitors?
Syndicated brand tracking can provide a high-level comparison of customer loyalty between your brand and its competitors. Custom brand tracking, however, enables you to examine the underlying drivers of loyalty, such as product quality, customer service and brand values.
By understanding these drivers, brands can create targeted initiatives to strengthen customer loyalty and differentiate from competitors.
Perform competitive analyses
While syndicated brand tracking provides a high-level overview of the competitive landscape, custom brand tracking allows businesses to conduct in-depth competitive analyses tailored to their specific needs and objectives. This detailed analysis can provide valuable insights into competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, enabling businesses to identify opportunities for differentiation and improvement.
Adapt to changing market conditions
Custom brand tracking is flexible, allowing businesses to adapt their research as market conditions change or as new questions and priorities emerge. This adaptability ensures that businesses can continue to gather relevant insights that can inform their decision making and business strategy.
Align research with your target audiences
Custom brand tracking allows businesses to focus their research on specific target audiences, ensuring that the insights gathered are directly relevant to their customer base. This targeted approach can help businesses better understand the preferences and behaviors of their most important customers and make more informed decisions about marketing and product development.
Invest in a brand tracking tool with Morning Consult
Both syndicated and custom brand tracking methodologies offer valuable insights for businesses looking to monitor and improve their brand performance. Syndicated brand tracking provides a cost-effective way to gain a high-level understanding of the competitive landscape, while custom brand tracking offers the opportunity for more targeted, in-depth research. Choosing the right brand tracking approach depends on your business objectives, budget and the level of detail you need.
Morning Consult offers a range of brand tracking tools and services designed to help businesses of all sizes make data-driven decisions and optimize their marketing strategies. By investing in a brand tracking tool with Morning Consult, you can gain access to the insights you need to stay ahead of the competition and grow your brand in today’s fast-paced business environment.
To learn which approach is best suited for your specific business objectives, get in touch with one of our experts today.