BEFORE YOU MANAGE
At Brandtrack, we know that your brand is unique.
Very simply, brand tracking is an annual or biannual piece of research that measures the health of the brand using market research. There is no one particular method associated with brand tracking – different companies use different approaches. But the one hallmark, common across all brand tracking, is that the same method is used each year in order to assess the changes taking place in your brand’s health.
A well trained brand manager will tell you – quite correctly – that it is impossible to manage a brand without annual tracking data. According to a recent Inter-brand survey, 45% of leading brand managers use annual brand tracking as a key input into their decision making. Brand tracking is deemed so important because of the value it adds to the strategic decision making of an organisation and ultimately to the success and profits of the brand in question.
Brandtrack measures brands.
We track the health of our clients’ brands by conducting a combination of qualitative and quantitative research. We take great pride in offering a more advanced approach than generalist market research firms and yet, despite our expertise, we serve out clients with simplicity and focus. Overall our mission is very straightforward: our clients’s brand strategies are superior because of the input Brandtrack makes to their decision making. We don’t collect data, we help clients make the right choices, and then they succeed as a result.
As you’ll see from our biographies below – we have more than enough experience to be able to back up these claims.
Mark Ritson
Mark Ritson is an Associate Professor of Marketing at Melbourne Business School. Mark has taught branding to MBA students at London Business School, MIT Sloan and the University of Minnesota. He has also consulted on branding with many of the world’s leading brands with clients that have included Sephora, McKinsey, General Mills, WD40, Johnson & Johnson, Adidas, 3M, Dom Perignon, ANZ, Bunnings, Pacific Brands, Baxter and LVMH. He has written extensively on branding issues, including articles in the Harvard Business Review and Sloan Management Review.
Paul van Veenendaal
In his 30 years in business Paul has held a number of senior management roles in both manufacturing and service industries. In many of his roles, Paul’s primary focus has been to substantially improve business revenue and profits through his passion for providing improved customer service at all levels of an organisation. Paul is also a director of CSBA, a company that specialises in customer service measurement and improvement. CSBA has a quality list of Blue Chip Clients across Australia including, Commsec, University of Melbourne and BT Financial Group.
Zarmeen Hassan
Zarmeen Hassan wears the brand manager’s hat. Her experience spans across industries like the financial sector, beverage and the Fast Moving Consumer Group. She has extensive experience working with leading brands like ANZ, Coca Cola, Veet and Dettol, and has worked with brands at various stages of the product life cycle – from launching new brands and categories, to re-vitalising brands lost to marketing myopia. She’s been the client, and hence, completely understands the pressures, trials and tribulations of being on the brand side.
“I have known and worked with Mark over the past ten years and there are few professionals who command Mark’s depth of knowledge and understanding of successful brand management. Mark’s expertise in the management and strategic positioning luxury brands is recognized internationally.”
Philip Cornell, Chief Executive Officer, Louis Vuitton Australia“We brought Mark in to help with the research and repositioning of one of our biggest global brands. He helped to put in place not only the research that enabled us to successfully move the brand forward, he also helped ensure we now a brand tracking system in place that we will use actively to monitor and grow the brand in question. Mark basically knows more about brand tracking than anyone else out there.”
James Mayjor, Vice President Bioscience, Asia Pacific, Baxter Healthcare“In order to successfully measure how brands are working, it’s best to have someone on your team who really knows how brands work. I’ve never met anyone who understands the core drivers of brands better than Mark Ritson. From FMCG to Luxury, Pharma to B2B, Mark has been able to influence business transformation through leading successful brand management with his approach to brand measurement and tracking being a fundamental building block to success.“
Andrew Nowicki, General Manager – Innovation, Fosters GroupFor the past 7 years I have been using and relying on Paul van Veenendaal and the team at Customer Service Benchmarking Australia as one of my key strategies in understanding the true customer experience. Of particular value is the level of practical insight we receive through the lens of our customers enabling us to identify, target, measure and ultimately improve the core drivers of satisfaction that matter most to our customers. Have worked with CSBA through a number of different campaigns, I find their research methodology sound and able to withstand even the most rigorous level of interrogation and accordingly have no hesitation in recommending them as a valuable partner in your customer research strategy.
Justin Tippett, Manager – Customer Services, Kamco (Keane Australia Micropayment Consortium Pvt Ltd)“Zarmeen is one of the finest marketing professionals I have encountered. She has a very strong grasp on brand fundamentals and cuts through the clutter to focus on the key challenges for the brand. She develops successful brand strategies derived from an indepth understanding of the consumer and market. She delves deep into the root drivers motivating purchase and leverages them to drive business growth.”
Aziz Rajkotwala, Business Associate Bank T&D, London“I have worked with Zarmeen for over 5 years with different brands. She has transformed and grown brands with deeply entrenched association barriers. Her capacity to build successful brand strategy through in-depth understanding of the brand dynamics and consumer insights is in-valuable, and the basic ingredient for brand success.”
Sabir Sami, President, Yum Restaurants International, CanadaBecause we have extensive experience of brand management ourselves, we know that too much data can be just as damaging as too little. So we keep our approach simple, elegant and focused on helping you make the right branding decisions.
Then there is the Brandtrack method. It’s been designed by Professor Mark Ritson who has fifteen years experience designing brand tracking for some of the world’s biggest brands. He has put all of that experience, plus his considerable expertise as one of the world’s most renowned brand thinkers, into Brandtrack’s method. We use a two stage model featuring an online projective tool that we invented, and a custom built online questionnaire that cuts out all the pointless questions and gets straight to heart of your band equity.
We really are better at this than other companies. Contact us and we’d be happy to show you more.
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