Awareness, Attitude and Behavior Tracking

Strategic tracking of consumer awareness, attitudes & behavior delivers essential marketing intelligence about the cumulative effects of all your company’s marketing activities on consumers. Strategic tracking answers a number of important questions:

• How is your brand’s awareness trending over time, relative to competition?
  Awareness is the single most important marketing variable in many product categories.
• How is your brand’s image evolving over time?
  The strategic management of brand image is one of the most important goals of marketing.
• What advertising messages do your consumers remember about your brand, and how do these messages change over time?
  Advertising messages tend to undergo learning & memory distortion as they are interpreted & remembered by consumers.
• What variables define your optimum target market?
  The identification & monitoring of your brand’s optimum target market is an important output of good tracking research.
• What impact are your competitors having in the marketplace?
  Good tracking research allows you to monitor & assess a new competitive product or advertising campaign before it is too late to react.

Interviews for tracking studies may be conducted continuously or periodically. Continuous tracking has several advantages over periodic or "wave" tracking. Continuous tracking:

• Affords a complete record of consumer measurements over time — with no gaps or missing time periods in the data.
• Smoothes out the effects of short-term disturbances such as adverse publicity, new product introductions, bad weather, etc. In contrast, periodic tracking can be biased strongly if some negative event occurs just as a "wave" of interviewing is conducted
• Measures the effect of seasonality on awareness & sales
• Provides better competitive information. The interviewing is ongoing and not biased to the media schedule of one brand as tends to happen in wave tracking.
• Can be analyzed in relation to other continuous data — such as sales, advertising expenditures and market share.

The true strategic value of tracking research is fully realized only after several years of consistent consumer measurement. Several years of longitudinal data yield insights into your brand, your market and your advertising.

Periodic or "wave" interviewing also has some advantages. Periodic tracking can be:

• Concentrated into a short time interval to provide highly precise before-after measurements for specific flights of media advertising
• Timed to coincide with media schedules
• Less expensive than continuous tracking

SMART tracking overcomes the problems associated with traditional tracking
programs by providing an analytical orientation to the research process.