Using modern brand tracking to your advantage
While we often focus on the immediate results of advertising, most of the impact is delivered well past when a campaign runs — making effectiveness hard to assess accurately in the short term.
Brands don’t exist in a vacuum — they live in people’s minds — and those perceptions are dynamic and fluid over time. As Jenni Romaniuk, a leading researcher at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, puts it: "Humans are made of stardust, but brands are made of memories.” You’re not just competing at shelf and in search, you’re competing for a small piece of real estate in a consumer’s mind, attempting to build lasting memories of your brand whilst their attention grows increasingly fragmented.
To understand the true return on advertising, you need a way to understand if you have, or haven’t, achieved any perceptual shift in the minds of consumers. Are you investing properly in and winning “Mental Market Share” - the measure of how often your brand comes to mind, compared to all other brands, when people think of buying the category, according to Romaniuk and Byron Sharp in their book “How Brands Grow, Pt. 2.”
This is where brand health studies come in. At Mythic, we see brand health research as an essential marketing tool, but we also believe that there’s a right and a wrong way to approach it. Here’s our point of view on why brand health tracking matters and how to do it most effectively.
WHY BRAND TRACKING MATTERS
The 95:5 Reality
The hard truth of marketing, illuminated by the work of the LinkedIn B2B Institute and grounded in the research of Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, is the 95:5 rule, which proves that at any given time, 95% of your potential customers are generally not in the market to buy. They don’t need your product or service right now. So if the focus is simply driving immediate sales with the 5% of people who are actually ready to buy, you are optimizing for a tiny fraction of the total addressable market.
Alternatively, more effective advertising focuses on building resonance with the other 95% of customers who will be in market sometime in the future. The stronger the memory structures you build in their minds now, the greater “Mental Availability” you create for the future, ensuring your brand comes to mind easily and frequently when they are in market — or ideally before they even have a need. Brand tracking provides a way to measure how effectively you are building these memory structures with future customers, giving you a more accurate picture of total brand growth over time, not just in the short-term.
The Value You Can’t Immediately See
Additional research from Les Binet and Peter Field has proven that long-term brand building is the primary driver of sustainable profit growth. According to their report, “Media in Focus: Marketing effectiveness in the digital era,” for many categories, as much as 70% of a campaign’s total profit impact occurs more than six months after it has finished.
This delayed impact creates another dangerous measurement gap if you never look beyond the short-term results on your weekly dashboard. Clicks, conversions and cost per acquisition have a role to play, but they tell you little about the cumulative value-creating effect of brand building. Brand tracking can bridge this gap, measuring the perceptual shifts over the short, mid and long term to provide a more holistic picture of performance and identify any compounding returns that occur after an initial investment has been made.
HOW TO UNLOCK BETTER BRAND TRACKING
Like all marketing tools, there are many philosophies for how to approach brand health tracking. At Mythic, we’re tracking the future trajectory of brand tracking and the principles that transform brand tracking results from a report card to a playbook that unlocks new opportunities for your brand.
Unlocking Competitive Edge Through Category Entry Points
Even after understanding the value of measuring long-term ad effects, you may be wondering what memories your brand should be building. The answer lies in Category Entry Points (CEPs), a cornerstone of the aforementioned Jenni Romaniuk’s work. CEPs are defined by Romaniuk and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute as the cues that nudge a consumer towards a purchase — the initial thoughts, feelings, frustrations or situations that incite the need to buy.
For example, a consumer likely won’t wake up wanting a specific brand of insurance. They are likely triggered by something — buying a new car, getting married or feeling anxious about the future. Each of these is a CEP. The goal of effective marketing is to build a strong, distinctive bridge between your brand and as many of these CEPs as possible so when these triggers occur, your brand instinctively comes to mind.
Good brand tracking can help you identify these triggers, measure your brand’s association with them and benchmark performance against competitors. Better brand tracking goes beyond providing a scoreboard, helping you identify the next best opportunity to get ahead of your competition and achieve more significant sales and revenue over time. It helps you answer the most critical strategic questions like:
From Awareness to Asset: Quantifying Your Brand’s True Value
Standard brand tracking tells you if people know you. Metrics like aided awareness, consideration, and purchase intent are fundamental, but they are also table stakes. They reveal little about the quality of your brand’s recognition or the tangible equity you’ve built. To truly quantify your brand’s business value—the value directly attributable to your marketing—you must go deeper.
This is the role of Distinctive Brand Assets. While a good tracker identifies broad brand strengths, a better tracker diagnoses and quantifies the specific elements that build brand equity. As defined by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and the WARC Effectiveness model, Distinctive Assets are the non-brand-name shortcuts that trigger recognition: the colors, shapes, characters, sounds, and slogans that instantly communicate who you are. Think of McDonald’s golden arches or Intel’s five-note mnemonic—they are unmistakable.
Why is this critical? Because a growing body of research from WARC and others proves that strong distinctive assets directly boost marketing effectiveness, increasing salience and memorability far beyond competitors. By tracking the strength of these specific assets, you can draw a straight line from your marketing efforts to the creation of brand strength.
This is how you transform the internal conversation. When you can measure and demonstrate the growing value of your brand’s unique assets, marketing is no longer a discussion about costs on a spreadsheet. It becomes a strategic dialogue about building and managing one of the company’s most powerful and enduring financial assets.
Fine-Tuning the Engine: Two Final Considerations for a Modern Tracker
Measuring the right things is only half the battle; they must be measured in the right way. Two final considerations are essential for making your brand tracker a truly dynamic tool:
Ultimately, moving beyond standard metrics to measure valuable assets—and doing so with strategic frequency and sampling—is what transforms a brand tracker from a simple report into an engine for growth.
What’s Next?
Brands are built in the mind, but their value is realized on the bottom line. Modern brand tracking is the essential bridge between the two. It allows you to understand the memories you’re creating, measure their impact over the long term, and prove that you’re not just making ads—you’re building one of your company’s most powerful and enduring assets.
At Mythic, we believe a better, more effective brand tracker must go beyond the dashboard to solve harder problems and guide strategy that actually moves the needle. There really isn't a one-size-fits-all approach. The right solution must be tailored to a brand's unique learning agenda, overarching marketing strategy, goals, and budget.
If you’re ready to elevate your brand and become an unstoppable force for growth, reach out to newbiz@mythic.us to get started.
