Stay Ahead with Trackers: The Key to Understanding Consumer Behavior
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Want to enhance brand performance, stay ahead of trends, and maximize ROI? Learn how trackers can help.
CMOs, their marketing teams, insights professionals, and innovation teams across a wide spectrum of industries dedicate their careers to establishing their brands, products, and services as culture-driving forces, beloved by people of all backgrounds.
Oh, and these offerings have to sell to help drive brand growth.
No big deal, right? At Suzy, we understand the monumental effort that goes into this line of work—the research, the meetings, the decks, the calls, the emails, and yes, the calls that could have been emails.
It’s a constant and ongoing process that begs an important question: What are you doing to ensure that the efforts of you and your team are paying off? How are you staying ahead of trends and emerging competitors? The best way to answer these needs is through a tracker.
Trackers can monitor shifts and impact related to your brand, campaigns, products, and category, allowing you to see what is changing, how competitors are performing, what new offerings they are launching, and how your latest campaigns performed in terms of brand awareness and sentiment. Trackers allow you to respond and iterate, then measure the impact and shift in consumer behavior and or perception in real-time to manage emerging opportunities and threats, maintaining brand excellence and ultimately maximizing ROI for your business.
In this blog, let’s explore what trackers are, how companies can use trackers to keep their finger on the pulse of consumer behavior and attitudes across their category and specific to their brand, how to take action from the insights you can gain from trackers, and what trackers look like at Suzy.
What are trackers?
Trackers are systematic and ongoing research studies designed to measure and record changes in specific metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) over time. They provide valuable insights into trends, shifts in consumer attitudes, competitors, brand health, and the effectiveness of marketing strategies. Trackers typically involve collecting data at regular intervals, which allows companies to:
Monitor brand health by evaluating brand awareness, brand perception, and loyalty. By regularly measuring these parameters, companies can understand how their brand is performing in the market relative to competitors.
Measure campaign effectiveness by understanding the impact of marketing campaigns, assessing how well messaging resonates and impacts brand awareness and perceptions.
Understand consumer behavior by digging into consumer preferences, purchasing behavior, and satisfaction levels.
Identify market trends by spotting emerging shifts in consumer behavior, allowing businesses to stay ahead of the curve and adapt their strategies accordingly.
Evaluate competitor performance through competitive analysis, helping companies to understand their position in the market and the strengths and weaknesses of their competitors.
Examples of Trackers
Brand health trackers: Measure brand awareness, consideration, preference, and loyalty over time.
Product trackers: Monitor customer satisfaction and feedback to improve products and services.
Ad campaign trackers: Evaluate the effectiveness of advertising campaigns in terms of reach, recall, and impact. Brands also do pre- and post-tracking of campaigns to test before they go into market and then the impact they've had once consumers are exposed.
Category share trackers: Track changes in market share among competitors within an industry.
Why do brands need trackers?
Trackers create an ongoing feedback loop that provides the data necessary for informed, strategic decisions, keeping you ahead of the competition. Seeing wave over wave of data allows you to detect shifts in consumer sentiment and adjust your strategies, ensuring your brand remains relevant and engaging.
It always comes down to ROI. Trackers are the key to demonstrating to stakeholders how your brand’s efforts are impacting your awareness, perceptions, and behaviors across your category, brand, and product.
With a tracker, you can gather continuous data that shows concrete evidence of positive or negative changes resulting from marketing, strategic initiatives, or changes in their category, whether that’s related to competitors, regulations, or macro shifts. This evidence is crucial for making informed decisions and justifying investments to stakeholders.
Who needs trackers?
Whether you are a marketer, an insights professional, or part of a newly acquired or category-entering brand, there are myriad use cases where a tracker could provide valuable data about your brand, product, campaigns, or category. Let’s explore some examples.
Insights teams who need to identify and understand category dynamics
Category trackers provide a continuous stream of data, enabling in-depth analysis of long-term trends and subtle changes in consumer behavior within a specific category. This continuous monitoring allows brands to stay ahead of the curve and make informed, strategic decisions to optimize category performance.
Innovation teams who need to track product performance
For innovation teams, understanding how new products perform in the market is crucial. Product trackers provide continuous data on key metrics such as adoption rates, customer satisfaction, and usage patterns which can impact future product development.
Marketing teams that want to evaluate the effectiveness of a marketing campaign
Before and after launching a new campaign, it's crucial for marketers to understand how it may perform and how it actually performed across various KPIs to make informed strategic decisions and future adjustments.
The trouble with trackers today
As important and useful as trackers are for brands, they come with their fair share of issues. Traditional trackers can take up to six months per wave to set up, field, and analyze. By the time brands get their tracking data back, it’s often too late to take action because the insights are old and irrelevant. This delay can hinder timely decision-making and responsiveness to market changes.
Additionally, traditional trackers come with high costs, often due to large agency markups and expensive IR/sample costs. Many brands spend hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars on trackers each year.
Furthermore, these trackers frequently lack the flexibility and depth to probe the "why" behind data, leaving brands with unanswered questions about fluctuations in their metrics.
If your current tracking method feels too slow, too expensive, and too limited, it's time to consider a more efficient solution.
How to know when to switch trackers—and why you should choose an agile company today
You should consider moving trackers if your current system delivers outdated insights, incurs high costs, lacks flexibility, or fails to respond quickly to market changes. After all, your tracker is supposed to help you keep up with quickly evolving market dynamics. If it doesn’t, it’s time to switch to a more agile tracker provider for real-time insights, deeper consumer behavior insights, and up-to-date, actionable data.
If you’re a brand without a tracker or unhappy with your current one, you need an actionable, fast, fairly priced, and agile tracker to consistently track, understand, and act on awareness and perception trends around your category, brand, and products. That’s where Suzy comes in.
Introducing Trackers at Suzy
Suzy offers Trackers to help enterprise brands understand the health of their brands and identify consumer behavior before it impacts the bottom line. Here's how Trackers work at Suzy:
Customized tracking strategy: Our experienced market researchers collaborate with you to design a tracking strategy tailored to your unique needs, ensuring comprehensive support and practical recommendations at every stage.
Actionable insights: Suzy’s internal Center of Excellence team actually provides recommendations after each wave and even between waves based on their findings. Whether refining a marketing campaign or adjusting a product feature, the insights from our trackers empower you to take decisive actions that drive results.
Retargeting functionality: With Suzy, you can retarget respondents from a tracker study with additional quantitative or qualitative research to dig deeper into why their perceptions or behaviors are changing in real-time. This allows you to make agile adjustments, ensuring you continue to meet their evolving needs effectively.
Agility and cost-effectiveness: Our trackers provide the same agility and cost-effectiveness that Suzy is renowned for. With no CPI and the dual capability of quant and qual in our platform, you can get more out of your trackers—at a fraction of the cost. This ensures you receive high-quality, reliable data without overspending, maximizing your return on investment.
At Suzy, we’re committed to offering tools that help brands understand their customers and their own place in the market. That includes:
Premium, proprietary audiences through Suzy’s panel Crowdtap and the ability to integrate global audiences and your own audience through Suzy Connect. Integrated quant, qual, high quality audiences, and data analysis housed in one platform so you can connect and consolidate your market research tech stack without sacrificing depth or quality.
An intuitive, easy-to-use platform with precise audience targeting and flexible data analysis so you can efficiently uncover the insights that will drive your business forward.
Innovative technology, like AI survey generation and qual summaries, so you can confidently address your target consumers and their needs at the speed of culture.
Last Words
Want to see how Suzy Trackers can help you act on the shifts you see in the tracker data? Want to do tracker research faster than ever before and more cost-effectively? Book a demo with our team today! Discover how you can shift your trackers away from slow, stale incumbents and into an agile tool like Suzy to make up-to-date decisions and stay ahead of the curve.