What is Brand Health Tracking in Market Research?
Brand health tracking is the continuous measurement of a brand’s emotional equity, loyalty, and performance across key metrics like trust, awareness, and advocacy. It helps brands evaluate how consumers perceive them and detect early signs of opportunity or concern.
Brand tracking and brand health tracking are essential tools for measuring how your brand is performing in the minds of consumers—and more importantly, how that performance is evolving over time. Your brand’s success can rise or fall overnight. Whether you’re an established player or a fast-growing startup, tracking your brand’s perception helps you stay agile, informed, and competitive.
At Touchstone Research, a leading brand tracking company, we help clients implement powerful, ongoing tracking solutions to monitor brand performance and identify growth opportunities. This article explores what brand tracking is, how it works, why it matters, and how to use it strategically.
What Is Brand Tracking?
Brand tracking involves the consistent, systematic measurement of key brand metrics over time. Unlike one-off studies, ongoing research programs like brand health trackers and brand tracking surveys allow you to:
- Monitor Brand Awareness: How familiar are consumers with your brand? Is your advertising cutting through the noise?
- Benchmark Against Competitors: Measure your performance relative to others in your category.
- Identify Trends and Opportunities: Spot early shifts in consumer sentiment or behavior.
- Enable Agile Decision-Making: Adjust creative, media, or product strategies with data-backed confidence.
Brand Tracking Example
A brand tracking example might involve a streaming service launching a major original series supported by a national ad campaign. Through brand health tracking surveys conducted before and after the campaign, they measure unaided and aided brand awareness, brand favorability, and intent to subscribe.
Results show a 20-point lift in unaided awareness, a 15-point increase in favorability among Millennials, and a spike in subscription intent among first-time viewers. These insights not only validate the campaign’s effectiveness but also help the marketing team refine creative for future series launches and reallocate media spend to the highest-performing channels.
What Is Brand Health Tracking?
What is BHT in market research?
Brand Health Tracking (BHT) is a specific type of brand tracking research that dives deeper into the emotional strength, loyalty, and long-term value of your brand. It assesses how consumers feel about your brand and whether those feelings translate into advocacy, preference, and sustained engagement.
Brand health tracking research is essential for understanding your brand equity and evaluating whether your brand is resilient in the face of competitive threats or market shifts. Whether it’s a one-time brand health tracking study or part of a larger tracker, these insights reveal how connected consumers are to your brand emotionally—and how that connection impacts behavior.
Key Brand Health Tracking Metrics
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): A leading indicator of brand advocacy, NPS measures how likely consumers are to recommend your brand to others on a scale from 0 to 10. It segments respondents into Promoters, Passives, and Detractors, helping you understand loyalty and customer satisfaction.
- Trust and Loyalty: These emotional markers determine whether consumers feel confident in your brand’s reliability and are willing to stay with your brand over competitors. Trust drives repeat purchases, while loyalty reflects deeper engagement and resistance to switching.
- Purchase Intent: Measures the likelihood that a consumer will buy your product or service in the near future. It’s a strong signal of potential conversion and is often used to gauge campaign effectiveness or product readiness.
- Brand Equity: A composite measure that reflects the overall value of your brand in the marketplace. It encompasses consumer perception, emotional connection, recognition, and even financial performance. Strong brand equity leads to pricing power, customer retention, and long-term growth.
Brand Health Tracking Example
A global skincare brand noticed stagnant sales despite steady awareness. Through a targeted brand health tracking study, they uncovered a drop in consumer trust—driven by online concerns about ingredient transparency. NPS and favorability had both declined 12 points year-over-year.
By identifying this emotional disconnect early, the brand launched an educational campaign focused on product safety and authenticity. Within two quarters, NPS rebounded by 10 points and trust scores returned to pre-crisis levels—demonstrating the power of brand health tracking research to safeguard long-term brand equity and restore consumer confidence.
Best Practices for Brand Tracking & Brand Health Tracking Surveys
Successful brand tracking studies and brand health tracking studies are built on consistency and strategic clarity. Typically conducted monthly or quarterly, these surveys target your key consumer segments to track awareness, sentiment, and behavior over time. To ensure your brand tracking delivers real value, follow these proven strategies:
- Define Clear Objectives: Know what strategic questions you want answered.
- Identify Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Track metrics aligned with your goals (e.g., awareness, consideration, favorability).
- Keep It Consistent: Use the same questions, samples, and timing to allow for trend analysis.
- Survey the Right Audience: Ensure a well-screened, demographically representative sample.
- Include Competitive Benchmarks: Compare results to key competitors in your space.
- Use Mixed Methodology: Include closed and open-ended questions for a 360° view.
- Segment Your Data: Analyze by demographics, behaviors, or psychographics.
- Take Action: Review insights regularly and apply them to improve strategy, messaging, and product development.
The Strategic Power of Ongoing Brand Tracking Surveys
Brand tracking isn’t a static activity—it’s an ongoing feedback loop that provides continuous business intelligence. Done right, it empowers brands to:
- Benchmark and Measure Progress: Track against past data, competitor benchmarks, and industry norms.
- Optimize Marketing Spend: Identify which messages, channels, and creatives are working.
- Inform Product Development: Reveal unmet consumer needs or usage trends.
- Mitigate Crises: Spot and address negative sentiment before it snowballs.
- Demonstrate ROI: Justify branding and marketing investments with hard data.
- Stay Ahead of the Curve: React to trends faster than the competition.
For example, a fast-casual restaurant brand might use brand tracking to measure the impact of an influencer-led campaign targeting Gen Z. If post-campaign surveys show a 15-point lift in unaided brand awareness and a 9-point increase in NPS, the brand could use these insights to refine targeting, creative messaging, and media spend in future waves.
Why Touchstone Research?
As a trusted brand tracking company, Touchstone Research has been a strategic partner to top global brands for over three decades.
What sets us apart:
- Deep expertise across industries like CPG, media, tech, gaming, and youth markets
- Powerful segmentation and benchmarking frameworks
- Seamless integration with your internal research and marketing teams
Whether you’re building a new tracker or upgrading an existing one, we’ll help you gather, interpret, and act on the insights that matter most.
Let’s Build Your Brand Tracking Program
Brand tracking is not optional—it’s a strategic imperative. It’s your compass for navigating competitive pressure, evolving consumer behavior, and high-stakes decision-making.
If you’re serious about building a resilient, insights-driven brand, Touchstone Research is ready to help. From Gen Z to general population, our tailored research programs will equip you with the insights you need to grow with confidence.
Whether you’re launching a new brand health tracking study or optimizing ongoing brand tracking research, Touchstone Research helps you uncover the insights that drive long-term brand growth.
📩 Contact us today to start building a smarter research program.
FAQ’s Brand Health Tracking & Brand Trackers
Understanding the nuances of brand tracking and brand health tracking is essential for marketers and researchers aiming to make data-driven decisions. Below are frequently asked questions that clarify common terms, frameworks, and methods related to brand health tracking.
What is BHT in market research?
BHT stands for Brand Health Tracking. In market research, it refers to the ongoing measurement of brand metrics like trust, loyalty, advocacy, and emotional connection. These insights help brands monitor long-term equity and resilience in a competitive market.
What is an example of a brand tracker?
A brand tracker example might include quarterly surveys assessing brand awareness, favorability, and purchase intent. For instance, a telecom brand could track changes in consumer sentiment before and after a national ad campaign using the same metrics and sample each time.
What is a brand health check?
A brand health check is a focused, point-in-time assessment of brand performance indicators such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), trust, perception, and loyalty. It’s often used to benchmark progress or understand the impact of marketing initiativ
What are the 4 levels of brand awareness?
The four recognized levels of brand awareness are:
Unaware – Consumers don’t recognize or know the brand.
Recognition – Consumers recognize the brand when prompted.
Recall – Consumers can name the brand without prompts.
Top-of-Mind – The brand is the first mentioned spontaneously in a category.
What does a brand health tracker measure?
A brand health tracker typically measures emotional and behavioral indicators such as trust, loyalty, advocacy (NPS), brand favorability, purchase intent, and long-term brand equity. These metrics reflect how consumers feel about a brand—not just whether they know it.
What’s the difference between brand tracking and brand health tracking?
While often used interchangeably, brand tracking and brand health tracking have distinct focuses. Brand tracking measures awareness, recall, and perception—often for campaign evaluation. In contrast, brand health tracking dives deeper, analyzing emotional connections, loyalty, trust, and long-term equity. A strong brand health tracker combines both to provide a comprehensive view of your brand’s performance.
