TRACKING BRAND STRATEGY TO BUILD ACTIONABLE INITIATIVES

The CHALLENGE

After repositioning its key market brands, a global manufacturer wished to implement a brand strategy measurement program to assess and monitor brand performance over time.

Our challenge was to translate the brand positioning into a sharp measurement tool to continually assess the brand perception among target consumers and provide actionable insight to the client team.

The APPROACH

Burke leveraged its Brand Atlas learning plan to design a custom tracking program for the client’s brands, which started with uncovering the key tracking elements that would provide the most accurate view of its strategy’s effectiveness over time. The goal was to create a tracking survey that aligned with the strategy and addressed both the emotional and functional aspects of engagement.

First, Burke led a blueprinting workshop with key stakeholders to articulate the brand’s positioning through discussion focused on brand story elements, spanning functional, emotional, and aspirational brand goals. The team created a list of attributes that best reflected the current and desired positioning, tested those among consumers in qualitative, and integrated them into the brand-tracking survey.

Once analyzed, survey results served as the foundation for an activation session to determine where the client should focus its brand positioning efforts and how, specifically, to execute those efforts. Lastly, subsequent waves of research allowed the client to monitor its progress against initiatives.

The OUTCOME

During the blueprinting, the brand team learned they needed more information to form a consistent brand promise and translate brand aspirations into consumer language before they created a survey for tracking. After more discussion and consumer testing, the team was able to optimize the survey metrics which produced more actionable insights from its tracking program. Burke rallied key decision makers from the client and its ad agency around these results to create a clearer action plan for its brands going forward.