Brand tracking is important. A continuous and holistic measurement of brand health and communications helps brands to face today’s challenges, such as a fragmented media landscape, differentiation and creating distinctive brand assets. But let’s face it, brand tracking isn’t always precise enough. Despite the vast increase in available data due to digitisation, the need for reliable and comprehensive insights has also increased significantly, as companies invest heavily in data driven analytics and insights-based decision making. With that in mind, we must recognise that data accuracy is an ongoing challenge.

One of the main challenges with brand tracking is to separate the actual signal from the noise caused by natural random error. Much tracking data is collected via cross-sectional tracking surveys where a sample of the population is asked a set of questions each week, aimed at understanding a brand’s current strength among its competitors. But samples aren’t representative of the entire population, and by sampling different groups of people each time – who might have a different background, and different experiences – the data can show differences that are not real. This means that all brand tracking data have a level of uncertainty – what we call the ‘noise’ in the data. This becomes a problem when the noise becomes louder than the music of truth. When fluctuations caused by sampling error outweigh true results, then it is almost impossible to identify the correct data.

On top of that, with the increase of campaigns on smaller channels – particularly digital – brand tracking becomes less relevant unless we’re able to measure all signals, including the weaker ones from a range of smaller marketing investments.

There are ways to tackle this issue, but not all of them are effective. Brands can increase their sample size. The more people you include in a sample, the better they are representing the total population. So, the uncertainty becomes smaller each time. The noise becomes quieter. This, however, is expensive. To turn this volume down and hear clearer messages you need to sample a huge number of people, and that’s often not financially feasible.

Another solution is to look at moving averages throughout a longer period of time (ranging from three to six months) But for the increasingly popular digital campaigns, which often only last a couple of weeks, looking at a three-month rolling average would mean losing track of the actual results. However, by using Nepa’s Brand Noise Reduction (BNR) you can get noise reduction without having to increase the sample size, even if you just look at a few weeks’ worth of data.

Like noise cancelling headphones BNR allows you to focus on the music. It finds patterns in the respondents’ data and identifies common variations due to the different samples, reducing random errors by up to 50% at no extra cost. This analysis boosts data accuracy and opens possibilities for more granular analysis.

Nepa’s Brand Noise Reduction analyses all the information within respondent-level data. It identifies the correlations between all respondents answer patterns, and their fluctuations throughout a period of time. As a result, BNR is able to distinguish shifts that are due to plain sample variations from those that reflect real market changes.

In a time when everything is moving so fast, insights are crucial for and brands can’t compromise on data accuracy. Find your melody, reduce the noise, and enjoy the concert.

By Robert Beatus, Head of R&D Nepa 

Want to know more? Contact us today and our brand experts will help you!

Read also other Nepa Brand Series blog posts:

Forget me not, how to stand out and be remembered.

Introduction to Brand Touch – are you Batman or the Joker?

How to measure your brand strength.

Every good story has a hero and a villain. We can all picture the hero being brave, honest, and altruistic. While the villain often has less likeable traits. However, the bad guy can still appeal to our emotional side. To the point where we sometimes prefer the underdog to the knight in shining armour.

This is because, when it comes to personalities – whether it’s a person, a character, or a brand – there’s no black or white, but a rainbow of a million different shades.

Defining your brand personality is no easy task, but it determines consumer perception and helps you shape the most successful way to communicate. This is where Brand Touch comes to the rescue.

Brand personality is developed through the interaction within a market, its environment, and consumers. There are two key elements to a brand personality, internal and external. The internal one is the emotion which consumers experience in association with a certain brand, whilst the external is how a brand present itself.

Brand Touch measures how different personality traits are perceived in the market, and then creates a mapped-out profile of a brand’s personality. Parameters such as extroversion and agreeableness are evaluated, plotted, and graphed to create a detailed analysis of a brand’s identity. This approach helps your brand align its current perception with the desired one, and to visualise its personality within the market.

There are no good or bad traits as such. It’s all about how a brand is perceived, and how this perception relates to each trait of the personality. For example, no one wants to be the villain. But having some “negative” traits in your brand personality might work better for you than being 100% hero. Villains tend to be more self-confident, and individualistic. So, while Batman attracts the larger audience, the Joker might be able to drive price more effectively.

To understand what’s the most successful personality for your brand, you need to define your main mission. By identifying your brand KPIs you will then be able to figure out what personality traits relate to each of those. Some traits – even the ones that you might think you don’t want to have – will help you meet your KPIs, while some others – that sound more desirable – might have the opposite effect. A brand can be perceived as down to earth, but it can also be seen as competitive. It’s only by having this mix of personality traits that you can create something unique and really differentiate your brand.

Brand personality doesn’t have to be fixed, it’s something that should change depending on what your priorities are, what you want to communicate, and to whom.

For example, we’ve been supporting an international retailer to re-position themselves as a younger, and cooler brand. Through Brand Touch we’ve analysed and understood what their positioning was at the time, and then we’ve evaluated some possible future brand concepts. By analysing these concepts to understand how they’d align with their current brand it emerged that although their idea of repositioning was valuable, it was too distant from their current brand image. So, changing too fast could have risked alienating and losing current consumers. Brand Touch addressed our client in a clear direction, and the brand decided to move forward with the new positioning but at a slower rate. This allowed them to attract new consumers while retaining the older “fanbase”.

By understanding what your brand personality is, you can compare your positioning to your closest competitors and either adapt it to fill in a gap or own a particular trait of your personality and dominate that space. This self-awareness is also important when presenting new products or if you’re repositioning your brand.

For example, if you have a distinct personality, you’ll be able to identify the right advertising partnerships. Employing a celebrity who is family-oriented and welcoming can either reinforce your brand perception or shift it to present a more welcoming and caring image.

Getting to know your brand’s personality is just like getting to know a person. It’s not always straightforward and it can be unexpected. But without a personality a brand is just an empty shell, just like our hero without a villain.

By Robert Beatus, Head of R&D Nepa and John Palm, R&D Senior Analyst

Want to know more? Contact us today and our brand experts will help you!

Read also other Nepa Brand Series blog posts:

Block the background noise, listen to the music. Making your brand data more accurate and actionable.

Forget me not, how to stand out and be remembered.

How to measure your brand strength

Webinar: How to drive growth with strategic marketing insights by Kalle Backlund, Head of MMM and Kit Sandford, Head of Analytics.

14^th December at 3pm UK time, 4 pm CET.

Nepa and RealityMine invite you to a webinar about “How to drive growth with strategic marketing insights”.

There are several different approaches to support you in setting marketing strategy. Which one should you choose to meet your business needs, and why? In this Webinar, we will address which approaches you should use to gain the insight you need to drive strategic change in today’s complex landscape.

The Webinar will be hosted by Chris Havemann, CEO of RealityMine. He’ll be joined by Kalle Backlund, Head of MMM at Nepa and Kit Sandford, Head of Analytics at Nepa. Kalle has 10 years’ experience from analytics roles in research and product. Expert at using advanced analytics to solve business challenges, focusing on Marketing Optimization. Kit has 10 years’ experience of consumer and shopper behaviour using big data and market research at Dunnhumby, WPP and Nepa.

Sign up for the webinar here.

How can advertisers maximise social media potential?

LONDON, United Kingdom (October 21st, 2021) – Robert Beatus, Head of R&D at Nepa, shares why it’s mandatory for brands to stand out in Marketing Society article New challenges, simple solutions.

Read Robert’s thoughts on brand distinctiveness and the importance of having clear and consistent communication in line with your brand identity here. 

More from Robert Beatus on our blog: Talk the language of the C-suite and Keeping brand KPIs simple

Want to know more? Contact us today and our brand experts will help you!