Brand experience tracking. Why digital-first brands should rethink brand measurement priorities.

20 Dec

Are today’s tracking programmes still delivering?

In the world of market research, there are two tracking services that have been ubiquitous for the past 25 years. Brand and Customer Satisfaction trackers form the foundations of many research agency propositions and are often where the bulk of the money is made.

But digital-first brands should be questioning the value they offer before investing in these default, and very separate, tracking solutions. There might be a better way.

Read on to discover why we have developed ‘Experience Echo’, a tracking survey service designed to provide a more human-centric and actionable alternative to the status quo.

The tracking survey landscape today

The first of the ubiquitous tracking studies is the Customer Satisfaction / NPS tracker. As customers of different brands, most of us will get invites for these surveys landing regularly in our email inboxes - though just a small percentage of us actually ever take part. These surveys monitor how customers rate their experience with a brand they use based on a number of overused KPIs (overall satisfaction, likelihood to recommend, customer effort etc). A handful of diagnostic feedback questions are usually bolted on to try to explain the KPI results. The sponsors and users of this type of tracker are typically product and CX teams.

The second of the tracking studies is the Brand tracker. This monitors how a brand performs (vs. competitors) on the KPIs that make up a typical ‘brand funnel’ (awareness > familiarity > consideration > use > loyalty) and attitudinal ratings against aspirational brand attributes (eg innovative, distinctive, etc). Often added in are some metrics looking at the cut-through and impact of the latest marketing campaigns. In contrast to Customer Satisfaction / NPS trackers, the brand tracker takes a market-wide view of the brand, including feedback from non-users. The sponsors and users of this type of tracker are usually brand and marketing teams.

Throughout our time working in market research, almost every established brand we have worked with has had both of these types of research trackers in place. And whilst some small variations exist in terms of content and how questions are asked, the question areas and goals themselves are rarely changed or challenged. Having created both types of tracking studies many times over it would be natural when starting a new research company for us to jump back on the gravy train. It’s tempting for purely commercial reasons but we think there is a compelling alternative that can add more value for the brands that Waveform works with and also be more of an insight challenge for our team.

Creating a fit-for-purpose tracker

Waveform has been set-up to primarily support digital-first brands, those whose primary connection and interaction with their audience is via digital channels and devices. We naturally had to consider whether these two default trackers are a good fit for digital brands. Our gut, informed by many years of research practice, told us they are lacking relevance and crucially, value. Another approach could do better and fill some obvious insight holes.

We felt there was an opportunity to take a human-centric snapshot of the overall brand experience - how well a brand is delivering against the outcomes that audiences seek. We wanted to focus on the factors that influence brand growth for digital-first brands: value, engagement, and experience. And we wanted to provide more directional insight that will actually help fill gaps in the product, service or experience offer - adding value and boosting brand growth.

We needed a solution that looks at the whole brand relationship, a ‘brand experience tracker’. Taking this as our high-level brief, we set about creating our own solution which we are excited to be rolling out fully in early 2023.

Challenges to meet and pitfalls to avoid

To start, we needed to create a more detailed research brief. And like any good research brief, we needed some background context to kick off the creative process: some already-established truths, pain points and challenges to face (and overcome) related to tracking brands and CX. We collated what we knew as issues based on our experience of both tracking studies and wider ad-hoc projects. There was quite a lot to consider:

The split between Customer Satisfaction and Brand tracking studies is business focused not people-focused. Audiences and users don’t split brand perceptions into CX and marketing buckets with neatly compartmentalised KPIs.
A human-centric view of brand health should centre on whether value is added to their lives by a brand. And does it create better outcomes (removing pains, adding gains) for them if they choose to use it. This seemed lacking from most tracking studies.
It’s also clear that digital-first brands are defined by the experience they deliver. The experience is the distinctive brand asset. Again, you cannot separate CX and brand in the way that tracking surveys often do and have a good view of brand health.
In a digital-first world, customer satisfaction and good NPS scores are not enough to guarantee success. We’ve seen many brands struggle despite the usual KPIs suggesting they’re on the right track. There is a clear disconnect between what people say they would do and what they actually do.
Traditional brand tracking focuses on what marketing is saying but what often matters most is what the customers are saying. Consumers will almost always trust what their friends and peers say over what the brand says.
Tracker outputs can lack inspiration and empathy. Without additional qual research, tracker deliverables are typically poor at creating customer closeness. We needed more than dashboards and scorecards. We needed to bring to life customers’ experiences, desired outcomes and feelings.
On a practical level, customer tracking programmes are often difficult and expensive to run. A lot of money, time and effort go into getting those 2-3% response rates on Customer Satisfaction surveys. And for brand tracking, the need to find fresh people to survey each wave leads to very high costs.
Finally, not all markets and brands are as dynamic and fast-moving as each other. We’ve witnessed many examples where month-to-month tracking results do not change and little incremental value can be delivered to the client. The frequency of surveying needed to be adaptable.

The objectives of a brand experience tracker

So what knowledge and data would a brand experience tracker cover? We pulled together an objectives list that has informed our survey content and analysis. Focused on what we felt was lacking but also pragmatically, covering some of the familiar KPIs that brands will use as a barometer of performance:

Discover the drivers of customer value: Identify which specific elements of the value proposition and experiences with the brand are driving choice, engagement, referrals and loyalty.
Identify gaps vs. desired outcomes: Discover the parts of the product and service experience, where the brand is serving (gains) or underserving (pains) vs. desired outcomes.
Identify gaps vs. the competition: Find the CX leaders within the market and identify relative strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for value / experience-led growth for the brand.
Monitor Brand Experience: Track the performance factors that matter to growth: Knowledge, Engagement, Value, Product-Market-Fit (would the brand be missed) and Active Recommendation. Plus optional legacy KPI metrics (CSAT, NPS, CES) for comparability.
Measure unique market drivers: From value for money to speed of delivery, identify and track the experience metrics that matter most to customers in the client’s specific market.
Bring customers’ needs to life: Provide real examples of customer brand experiences that reflect the performance metrics and drive engagement with the opportunities discovered.
Reflect market and brand differences: Each market will have distinct needs, audience expectations and competitors. This must be reflected with an adaptable survey.

Our answer: Experience Echo

Taking everything from this process and objectives list we’ve created version one of ‘Experience Echo’, our brand experience tracker. A tracking service that will help brands discover, monitor and improve the things that matter to brand choice, engagement, loyalty and advocacy.

The aim is to deliver regular fresh insight into brand experience and needs. Providing data, insights and empathy needed to create positive outcomes for customers and brands. And we’ll make this easier and relatively lower cost.

To find out more about ‘Experience Echo’ visit our service page here.