Brand Measurement: An analyst’s journey into market research
— by Steph Giles, Senior Growth Analyst @ carwow
In June 2021 carwow acquired Wizzle — a car selling platform, expanding our existing car buying proposition. In March 2022 we launched a brand campaign to spread the news. In order for us to understand the success of the brand campaign we wanted to commission a brand tracker. This new tool would allow us to monitor our progress against awareness of our new proposition as well as perceptions of our brand, all vs our key competitors. This article is about our learnings along the way, specifically covering:
- Finding a suitable partner — what we looked for in a vendor and the different types we came across.
- Setting up the survey — our dilemmas and how this decision can make a very big difference to the results you get.
- Looking into the future — what we feel we need to do to help carwow maximise the value it gets from this rich dataset
If you’re not too familiar with brand tracking, it’s essentially a regularly run survey, to track consumers’ awareness and feeling of your brand vs your main competitors. If you’d like to read more about brand tracking there’s plenty of great reading materials available. One thing that’s important to know….
Brand trackers are a substantial investment with most of the value coming after having it run overtime and keeping the questions consistent, so the pressure is on to get it right.
Finding a suitable partner
Teaming up with our brand specialist colleagues, we set out looking for a partner. We had a small brief and a limited idea of what we needed but, after a bit of desk research, had a list of 8 vendors we wanted to speak with and understand how they could meet our shortlisted needs.
Our criteria consisted of:
- Independent & trusted market research company
- Research design expertise
- Response level data access
- Competitive cost
- Ability to run the tracker in all of our markets
The more vendors we spoke with the more we knew what we wanted so extended the list to also include:
- Comprehensive response validation techniques
- Flexibility in questions and sample sizes
- Additional offerings for creative testing & channel optimisation
All the vendors we spoke to were great and each one brought something different to the table. What we found fascinating was that vendors seemed to fit into 3 categories:
- Tech focussed: Getting from surveying to insights quickly is their USP. Providing a fantastic self-serve UI, where you can design a survey and go live in minutes.
- Panel providers: These are companies that have been in market research since their inception, are experts in this space, and give you direct access to the nationally representative panels they own and manage directly.
- Survey designers: Put their weight into designing bespoke, copyrighted surveys with metrics they feel give businesses the best insight into their market performance as a brand. Using panels from the group above, these companies have invested a lot of time and money into developing their own copyrighted metrics and methodologies. On the flip side, they don’t have much flexibility to amend the survey design.
Three completely different types of companies offering expertise and USPs in different areas of the brand tracking process. As we are an analytics team focussed on behavioural data, we were very keen to have pure research expertise, but with lots of flexibility to design a survey that met our current needs. So we went with a panel provider who could help us design the survey, while giving us maximum flexibility and reassurance on their validation techniques.
Setting up the survey
Given carwow’s long running history of car buying and popular YouTube reviews we needed a way to ensure the tracker was giving us insight into how aware the market is of our selling proposition, not just overall awareness of our brand. With the help of our brand tracking partner we considered a few ways to do this, each had their pros and cons.
We settled on running option 3 as we felt it was the best option for independently tracking our selling awareness while maintaining a good sample size. We acknowledged that we may see an increase in awareness in the second set of questions for brands that appeared in both lists, however this was not the case. We ran our first wave in March which showed our previous assumption of biassing responses wasn’t correct, what we actually saw was that users were less likely to be aware of the brand for the set of questions they saw second. We underestimated responder fatigue!
To combat this we designed a new survey using option 1. All respondents go through the same questions in the same order asking one question for both buying and selling combined with a follow up question about services, as opposed to repeating all questions with a buying and selling set.
The new survey still had cons, so for Wave 2 and 3, we ran both surveys and compared results, helping us determine the best way forward. For the new survey we had one long list of competitors (14 in total) instead of two shorter lists. During the survey launch we noticed for both surveys respondents, on average, only click 3–4 brands regardless of the length of the list thus we saw lower numbers in the new survey. To overcome this and get a truer read we cut down our competitor list to a maximum of 10, this helped to solve the problem. While this survey is only 3 questions shorter, responders feel less like they are doing two surveys and we have now switched to only running option 1.
Looking into the future
We are learning more about brand tracking each wave we run and we’re excited for its future in carwow. We have so much insight we can get from the data we collect and since we now have a stable survey design, we’ll be shifting our focus on how we can enable the business to gain maximum value from this. Our new brand tracking dashboard will allow business users to cut the data by various demographics, as well as looking at how well we’re doing with people currently in-market versus our competitors.
Regular communication and input from our steering committee will enable us to make the most of our tracker including:
- Tailoring each wave to current events to answer key questions we have in an ever progressing market.
- Adapting our competitor list to ensure we’re capturing any major new players
- Tracking new business services to ensure all our products are offering the best solutions to our consumers.
- Educating our stakeholders how they use and interpret this data — including things like getting to grips with statistical significance.
I hope you learnt a few new things from our experience, I’m sure we still have a lot to learn!
