Most brand tracking studies focus on customer acquisition. They measure awareness, familiarity, consideration, and other top-of-funnel metrics, benchmarked against competitors and tracked over time to monitor shifts in perception or gauge who’s “winning” the attention game.
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Figure 1: A typical dashboard from a brand equity tracker
That’s all important.
The problem is, these studies rarely reveal anything meaningful about the people who already chose you—your customers. Yes, a strong brand can serve as an efficient magnet for prospects. But it’s also a powerful proxy for your relationship with customers. When designed well, a brand equity study should help you understand the strength and dynamics of that relationship.
We see a lot of brand trackers in our practice at Conclusive. They’re usually the first item on the manifest of discovery materials in a new engagement. And if they include current customers at all, most do a poor job of answering critical questions—like why a customer hasn’t made a repeat purchase, why they’re not considering additional products or services, or whether reputation issues are motivating loyal users to look elsewhere.
It’s no surprise that in a recent release from The CMO Survey, many marketing leaders admitted they rarely or never measure brand equity in their organizations.
And yet, we all know the conventional wisdom: it’s cheaper to keep an existing customer than it is to acquire a new one. Which is why it’s essential that brand tracking explore how your brand performs with the people already in your house.
In this context, reporting top-2-box or mean scores for familiarity and consideration doesn’t get you very far. What matters more are questions like:
- How much do customers trust you?
- How well does your brand align with their needs and preferences?
- How motivated are they to stay with you when things go wrong?
- What is the basis of their commitment—functional, emotional, self-expressive?
Even more important are two often-missing follow-ups:
- How well do these factors predict customer behaviors such as repurchase intent, purchasing cadence, purchase size, share of wallet, evangelism?
- And what marketing mix factors are influencing these predictors? If trust is in decline, is it because the product experience has changed? Because the message is off? Because the price doesn’t match the value?
A Case in Point: The Vulnerable Customer Segment
In one recent client study, we measured five dimensions of brand commitment across their customer base. On the surface, the average scores weren’t all that illuminating.
Figure 2: Top-level view of customer KPIs for client
But when we combined that data with data from the client’s CRM system, we were able to cluster customers along two key dimensions: profitability and satisfaction. We identified a vulnerable segment of customers that had historically high profitability, but were trending down on satisfaction.
Figure 3: Clustered customer KPIs
The data suggested that this group had once been enthusiastic advocates. But trust in the brand had eroded. The decline began around the same time the client had made leadership changes and subsequently announced major shifts in its customer policies, including pricing.
Figure 4: Vulnerable customer credibility trend
One customer in this segment summarized the sentiment bluntly in an open-end question on the survey:
“I used to love this place, but with all the changes I feel like I’m just a number now.”
Satisfaction and NPS KPIs dropped significantly within this segment—even as other segments held mostly steady. And in a linear model, credibility was the single strongest predictor of these KPIs across the entire base.
Figure 5: Linear model of commitment scores by various predictors
This is what brand equity tracking should be doing: identifying where the customer relationship is starting to fray and why.
A well-designed brand tracker furnishes a relationship roadmap. In the case above, credibility (or trust) emerged as the most predictive customer experience factor. The client took that insight seriously. They adjusted messaging to clarify the value of recent changes and made surgical modifications to the pricing structure. Follow-up tracking suggests it worked.
This is what happens when brand equity research is treated as a strategic diagnostic, rather than simply a descriptive dashboard.
To be clear: there’s nothing wrong with tracking top-of-funnel metrics. But if that’s all your study is doing, it’s likely underdelivering. Especially if your business depends on long-term customer relationships, retention, and development.
If you’d like to dig deeper into how your brand is performing with your current customers, or if you want a no-strings review of your existing tracker, we invite you to schedule an appointment with our research crew.