Do You Need Brand Tracking?

& a Q&A with Tracksuit's head of marketing

Happy New Year, readers! What’s on your mind going into 2025? Send a reply or a comment and I’ll slate it into the editorial calendar. 😙

‘Tis the season for budgeting, planning, and maybe kicking off brand tracking—so here’s my long-time-coming breakdown on brand tracking and who actually needs it, featuring an interview with Mikayla Hopkins, Head of Marketing at Tracksuit.

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For growth-stage brands, measuring brand impact often feels like trying to catch smoke. While enterprise companies can afford to spend millions on brand health trackers, most of us are trying to prove impact with a fraction of those resources.

I’ve been on both sides of this—building fairly comprehensive brand trackers at companies like Brex and Notion with Qualtrics and Merkle B2Bi, and also advocating for brand investment without them. The truth is, most growth-stage companies don’t need formal brand tracking yet. What they need is a pragmatic approach to measurement that aligns with their stage and resources.

It can be a fine line, and whether you’re formally tracking or not, there are certain metrics to pay closer attention to. To dig into all of the above, I chatted with Mikayla Hopkins, Head of Marketing at Tracksuit—yes, that adorably gum-drop-adorned startup making B2C brand measurement more accessible (a space that desperately needs disruption; the B2B side even more badly). But before we get into the Q&A, let’s break down when you actually need brand tracking—and what to do before you get there.

When you don't need brand tracking (yet)

At the growth stage (you’ve reached market fit and are focused on rapid acquisition, maybe Series C+), your brand metrics should completely align with your business metrics. If you’re just beginning to scale (let alone still developing product-market fit), you probably don’t need a formal brand tracker because:

• Your immediate business needs will dictate planning cycles

• The cost (usually 6-figures and up) rarely justifies the insights at this stage (that’s money that could be spent on actual ads or brand media)

• Traditional brand metrics like awareness generally move too slowly to be actionable at your stage

• You likely lack the baseline data and near-term metric growth to make tracking meaningful (or the baseline will be very low)

In other words, your survey results will almost definitely say “You have low awareness and consideration! 🤡”—you don’t need tracking to confirm that (although it can be helpful for buy-in if it’s the only way execs will listen).

Instead, focus on metrics that directly tie to revenue and growth: site visits, signup rates, email engagement, and customer feedback. These give you more actionable insights to improve brand outcomes in the near term.

Many metrics you might think of as “growth” metrics are actually brand metrics in disguise. I broke this down in detail in a previous post:

The truth is, almost every business metric is influenced by brand strength—from customer acquisition costs to pricing power to retention rates. Good brand measurement isn’t about creating new or separate metrics, but understanding how your brand influences the numbers the business is already tracking.

When you do need brand tracking

Standalone brand tracking—the quarterly, bi-annual, or annual survey you run with a third-party analytics partner, and not just brand lift studies with YouTube or Meta—becomes valuable when:

• You’re spending a lot on brand campaigns (~$20M+ annually)

• You’re running several campaigns simultaneously

• You need to measure impact across multiple products or regions

• You need to justify larger brand investments to the board or leadership

• Your competition is heating up and you need market intelligence (though there are other types of research that also support this)

At Brex, we initially experimented with a DIY brand tracker with YouGov (before their more interesting BrandIndex offering was available), but only invested in more formal brand tracking (with Qualtrics) once we started expanding upmarket and needed to understand how different segments perceived us. In both cases (one costing $25-50k and the other well over $100k), the analysis process was tedious and the picture not as complete as we’d have liked.

In B2B, unless you’re prepared to pay huge amounts for robust panels (a greater number of respondents; more qualifiers like location, title, seniority, decision-making power, etc.), some of your survey questions will likely end up without statistically significant results. And even then, if you’re targeting a very niche business audience (e.g. financial decision makers with VP+ seniority at companies in X industries with X range of revenue), your respondent count is still likely to be relatively small, however much you can pay. Fewer responses means less certainty. Plus, there’s the human factor—people’s memories are fallible, their words don’t always match their actions, and who knows exactly what they’re basing their responses on or how thoughtfully they’re taking the survey.

The reality is that brand tracking results are always directional. They should be taken with a grain of salt, but having the right partner makes all the difference. At Brex, partnering with Merkle B2Bi proved invaluable—their responsiveness and support through the analysis portion helped us extract insights that actually guided our positioning and creative strategy as we evolved from serving startups to enterprise organizations. (Though if I were tackling a brand survey analysis now, I’m pretty confident I could get far using Claude!)

Speaking of partners who get it: While Tracksuit currently focuses on B2C tracking, they’ve developed deep expertise in what makes brand tracking effective, bringing a disruptor mindset that cuts through the fluff you often get from traditional tracking providers. Let’s dig into my conversation with their head of marketing, Mikayla Hopkins.

A conversation with Tracksuit

KK: There’s often debate about when to start investing in brand tracking—too early and you might not have signal, too late and you’ve missed baseline data. When do you typically advise companies to start?

MH: What gets measured gets managed, and today most companies have so many digital metrics that only cover short-term marketing performance, but so few that measure the impact of our brand and whether we’re doing the things that affect long-term performance.

So teams are spending all of their time “managing” the short term, which has caused a massive shift toward the kind of short-termism that undermines business performance over the longer term. Return on investment with short-term performance marketing channels like search has declined and CAC has increased ($1 in = $1.50 out is no longer the simple math that gets execs to support your case for marketing).

We guide companies to begin tracking when their brand is ready for meaningful metrics—so they’re equipped with data to support both growth and evolving market demands. Brand tracking is essential once your brand has established foundational awareness and product-market fit. Starting too early can limit insight, but like you said, waiting too long means missing valuable baseline data (and can make your fight for brand investment harder and harder).

KK: What are the “Aha!” moments you see when companies first start tracking their brand metrics? Anything that consistently surprises founders or marketing leaders?

MH: For many brands, their first Tracksuit metrics do reveal surprising insights—like lower-than-expected consideration despite strong awareness. These “aha moments” are pivotal, showing companies where their brand narrative may not fully connect to their desired business outcomes.

What we’ve baked into Tracksuit are the fundamentals—your awareness, consideration, claimed usage and preference, and how those things compare to your top 5 competitors.

This lets you diagnose issues to address (for example, if you’re at a similar level of awareness to your competitors, but have much lower consideration, then this tells you that you need to spend less budget simply driving awareness, and more on becoming better understood and more well-liked among your audience).

We also track “brand statements,” which allow you to see how your brand is going against the attributes that you’re specifically focused on driving—e.g. whether you’re perceived as high quality, or great value, or trustworthy. We track more than 7,000 brands at the moment and have run an analysis on category drivers and the qualities in brands that drive the most purchasing intent.

It’s easy to pull ‘aha moments’ from tools like Google Analytics. It’s why so many marketers get caught up in the pressure to hit short-term KPIs, meaning they over-invest in the conversion tactics and eventually exhaust all current demand (it’s a yucky spot to find yourself in! I’m guilty of it myself). But most businesses don’t have key information about how well known their brand is or whether people feel positively toward it.

Without knowing these things, and without knowing them in relation to your competitors, it’s hard to diagnose your issues and opportunities, or to plan how to address those. The level of awareness and consideration your brand has is a key factor in how much we’re able to sell, and how efficiently—people are much more likely to buy from brands they’re familiar with and feel positively about. So measuring these things is pretty damn important.

KK: For resource-constrained startups that can’t invest in formal brand tracking yet, what scrappy alternatives would you recommend? What signals can they look at to gauge brand health?

MH: Teams with smaller budgets can still gauge brand health with a few reliable metrics, however it’s usually lower in the funnel/flywheel and doesn’t give great insight into the full picture or market-level insight.

I’d recommend tapping into social media sentiment, customer reviews, branded search terms and even Google Trends as starting points. While formal tracking is ideal, these methods provide signals of brand momentum and areas needing refinement.

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🖇️ Quick aside here—before investing in expensive tracking, there’s a wealth of brand insights you can gather through strategic desk research. I’ve packaged my approach into a Brand Insights Checklist Notion template that helps you uncover:

• Customer insights: What are people actually saying about your brand?

• Competitive insights: Where do you win (and lose) against alternatives?

• Cultural & category insights: What broader trends affect your brand’s perception?

Using Notion AI as a brand example, this template breaks down exactly how to find and organize these insights to inform your strategy. I’ve used this framework to support everything from campaign briefs to budget requests to landing page decisions.

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KK: When brand operators are presenting brand tracking data to execs who are primarily focused on performance metrics, which metrics or visualizations tend to resonate most? Any tips on making the connection to business outcomes?

MH: Communicating marketing to non-marketing stakeholders is the single biggest skill a marketing leader can refine. I practice this weekly! You need to speak their language when presenting brand metrics to execs. 

Showing how brand health supports long-term growth reframes marketing as a dual driver of immediate results and future demand. Once you have started tracking the fundamentals over time and the “so what,” it becomes a lot easier to relate them to business outcomes.

Example: Let’s take a single metric like Consideration (e.g how many people in a given category, would choose your brand over another).

First and foremost, why does consideration matter as a brand metric?

The short answer is that the only way to increase usage and preference is by increasing consideration.

The challenge is that Tracksuit’s data has found that 92% of categories have less than three brands in their consumer’s consideration set. Put differently, when someone is looking to make a purchase, they typically don’t consider more than 2 to 3 brands at a time. We have a bias towards familiarity, and when we’re presented with too many options to consider, we feel overwhelmed (case in point—the overwhelm you feel when looking at the Netflix home screen trying to choose a movie or TV show to watch).

For a brand to be in someone’s consideration set, they need to first be aware that it even exists. Our data reveals that most brands only convert about half of users who are in the awareness stage to the consideration stage, yet according to data from McKinsey, if a brand finds itself in a customer’s consideration set, it’s 2-3x more likely to be purchased.

Put simply, performing well at the consideration stage is essential for a brand’s success. After all, the only way for your offering to be used and (hopefully) preferred is for it to be considered.

“Today’s future demand is tomorrow’s existing demand, and being consistently in-market with brand marketing fields familiarity, and familiarity drives consideration.”

From there, invest in growing consideration as a core brand metric and demonstrate to leadership how this has changed, relative to your competitor set, over X period of time. Set strategies for brand growth that you can populate with your own data and set the scene for leadership. I also send Mark Ritson’s “The Seven Things Marketers Need to Know in Order to Answer The Question” to every marketer I care about! 

KK: What are some signs that your current brand tracking setup isn’t giving you actionable insights? When should teams consider changing their approach?

MH: Your brand tracker should have a competitor-anchored approach that lets you regularly assess brand positioning and shift strategies proactively—so metrics stay relevant and in line with evolving goals. Here’s an example of Liquid Death’s dashboard, illustrating whether their strategic narrative is actually landing with the market and specific demographics (you can drill deeper and see how it’s shifted over time).

A glimpse at Liquid Death’s brand tracker

Digging deeper, we can see people aged 18-44 years old trust Liquid Death more than those 45+ (22% vs 10%).

Deeper dive into Liquid Death’s brand tracker

KK: Brand tracking can surface some uncomfortable truths about how your brand is perceived. What’s your advice for marketers who need to socialize not-so-great narratives with leadership?

MH: A trend we see across the 500+ marketing leaders we work with is a bias toward thinking our brand is more well-known and liked than reality. We live in echo chambers and it can be a hard convo to have. The best marketers, though, actively seek out tools to hold them accountable and aren’t afraid of seeing where their brand is at and taking leadership on a journey to building a more sustainable business. 

Helping them understand that marketing has both a short-term and long-term role, and that those types of marketing and the results they generate are different is always going to be your starting point. Use the existing research—plus your own brand tracking—as proof for others to understand the need to invest in the future as well as spending to convert customers today.

KK: How do you recommend companies balance tracking brand health versus competitive intelligence? Are there particular competitor metrics worth paying extra attention to?

MH: Executives need solid proof that marketing strategies are delivering results and return on investment. Half-baked ideas and wishy-washy claims won’t cut it. So ditch the fluff and replace it with data. Instead of only saying that you’ll run X campaign, X strategic partnership, or acquire XYZ community to increase brand awareness, establish a benchmark for growth that’s realistic for your business and tell them why doing so can increase upper funnel metrics → site traffic by 30% in 6 months → sales in X months and bottom line profitability in 1 year. The last bit is what gets executives to sit up and take notice.

Develop a strong understanding of what the metrics mean and what to do about them. Speak the language of finance and ultimately understand the commercial power of a strong brand. Which, put simply, is: 

1. Acquisition of customers becomes easier and more efficient 

2. Pricing power is realized

3. & it leads to higher valuations

Those 3 metrics are measurable and should be a key part of any leadership discussion!

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Making brand measurement work at any stage

Whether you’re ready for formal tracking or not, here’s my advice.

Track what you have:

• Branded search volume trends

• Social media sentiment

• Customer support interactions

• Sales call feedback

• Review site ratings

Look for patterns in these areas:

• Common points of confusion about your brand

• Recurring customer praise or complaints

• Competitive mentions

• Share of voice in your category

Most importantly, document everything. Even without formal tracking, building this knowledge base gives you valuable context for when you do start measuring more formally.

The long-term case for brand tracking

Let’s wrap up on this note—while I’ve argued that many startups and growth-stage companies aren’t ready for formal brand tracking yet, there’s a lot of compelling research supporting that helps deliver business outcomes in the long run. Les Binet’s seminal report (and marketer favorite) “The Long and Short of It: Balancing Short and Long-Term Marketing Strategies” hammers on Mikayla’s insights about brand measurement that are worth considering as your company matures:

1. Brand tracking reveals what short-term metrics miss

   “Tracking studies impose a powerful reverse bias, in favour of campaigns that work most powerfully over the long term” (p. 39). While we often fixate on immediate campaign results, brand tracking studies do capture long-term impact. Unlike pre-testing or short-term performance metrics that favor quick wins, tracking studies help us understand the cumulative effects of brand building over time.

2. It’s a counterweight to short-term thinking

   Most marketing metrics today push us toward short-term optimization. We obsess over this week’s conversion rates or this quarter’s CAC because that’s what we can measure easily. But as Binet and Field note, tracking studies are “a useful check on the influence of pre-testing” (p. 39). This counterbalance helps justify longer-term investments that might not show immediate returns but deliver significant benefits over time.

3. It connects brand to pricing power

   One of their most compelling findings is how “tracking studies bring strong benefits to campaigns’ pricing and profit performance over the long term” (p. 40). By measuring brand metrics like awareness, consideration, and preference over time, tracking studies can demonstrate how brand building enables companies to command premium prices and maintain higher profit margins (= more investments in them).

This aligns with what Mikayla said about consideration being a critical metric—after all, you can’t command premium prices if you’re not even in your customers’ consideration set. And as she notes, most categories have fewer than three brands that customers actively consider. Building and maintaining that consideration requires consistent brand investment that pays off over years, not quarters.

Bottom line—you don’t need a six-figure tracking budget to start measuring your brand’s impact. What you need is clarity about where you are in your journey, pragmatism about what metrics matter now, and persistence in documenting everything along the way. Your future budget requests will thank you. 🐌

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Thanks for reading.

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