What if you could monitor your brand like the stock market?

Do you track your brand’s health? When was the last time you checked your brand’s health? How frequently do you check your brand’s health? Download the OYO report to understand the importance of real-time brand tracking.

In today’s always-on digital age, what consumers think and feel about your brand changes constantly. A well-designed ad campaign could backfire or a positive viral moment can bring in more business and open up new opportunities. In short, consumers interact with brands across mediums and channels and their opinions on your brand can be formed through every little interaction, contributing significantly to brand perception.

BrandIndex, the flagship brand tracker from global internet-based market research and data analytics firm YouGov, is the only daily online brand tracking tool in India. For over four years, BrandIndex has been continuously measuring the public’s perception of 250 brands every day across nine sectors. It gives you, both, a historical and instant view of your brand and campaign performance against your competitors.

Daily brand tracking also helps you demonstrate credible results to the board, investors, and industry watchers. It helps to mine demographic data to discover growth opportunities, leverage insights to develop effective advertising messages to target the relevant consumer segments, and to discover your own vulnerabilities before the competitors do.

Day-to-day tactical activities, high-level strategic decisions and brand perception are all interlinked and impact the brand health. Using BrandIndex data, we analysed OYO, one of the brands tracked in our hospitality and travel sector, to demonstrate the importance of daily brand tracking.

How positive brand perception is a hidden ingredient of OYO’s success

In the last few months, OYO’s been the talk of the town both in India and beyond. Be it OYO Founder Ritesh Agarwal’s move to buy back shares worth $2 billion from investors, or the company’s investment and collaboration deal with Airbnb. In fact, the last two years have been great for OYO, especially from an investment perspective, when the hotel and bookings sites as a category saw a decline in investments. In September 2018, OYO raised $1 billion in funding and checked itself into the unicorn club and with Airbnb’s $200 million investment two months later, OYO’s total investments stood at $1.65 billion.

While there are many reasons why OYO has been a hit among investors, one of the key reasons is how it has maintained positive brand perception among consumers and vice-versa. The data from YouGov, the global internet-based market research and data analytics firm, validates the positive brand perception that OYO enjoys with consumers.

BrandIndex, YouGov’s daily syndicated brand health tracker, points out that OYO’s Index score (an average of impression, quality, value, reputation, satisfaction and recommendation scores) has been on the rise for the last two years. Between April 2017 to March 2019, the score consistently improved from 16.7 points to 20.5 points.

Even OYO’s conversion rate from Consideration to Usage showed a 5% increase between April 2017-April 2019 (from 67% to 71% conversion) even when the conversion score dropped for the overall hospitality category to 52 percent. To put it simply, the stats indicate that OYO enjoyed a steady positive perception and whatever the brand has done so far has gone down well with its consumers, be it strategic tie-ups or tactical day-to-day operations on ground.

While a lot of brands understand the importance of brand tracking, what they miss out is the need to keep tabs on competitors and how the industry as a whole is performing.

Download the OYO case study to get an in-depth understanding of why investors favour OYO, through YouGov’s BrandIndex data

The dynamic nature of perception and why brands can get caught off-guard

But it wasn’t all smooth sailing for OYO, and there were times where it faced temporary slumps. In fact, in September 2018, it was in the news for all the wrong reasons when an American blogger shared an account of being harassed at an OYO property in Delhi. At the time, OYO’s buzz score, calculated on the basis of positive or negative news about the brand, fell from 24.4 in July to 19.5 in mid-September. Interestingly, at the time, the score for OYO from female customers dropped to as low as 12.2 and only increased when the brand took corrective measures.

In short, brand perception is volatile. Hence, it is becoming increasingly important for brands to not just have real-time data about what customers are saying, but also measure these social interactions to see how they are impacting the brand. This is equally applicable to both, the biggest and most trusted brands, and newcomers.

This is where daily brand tracking comes into play.

Start monitoring your brand like the stock market. Click here.

Why it matters to get the real big picture in real time

“Today, we are observing that brands are increasing their digital spends and entering into a continuous conversation with their customers. And, that’s why you need to demand that your brand track map all your efforts on a daily basis and report it in a manner that allows you to be agile in response to market opportunities,” says Deepa Bhatia, General Manager, YouGov India.

Better equipped to be agile in ‘digital India’

Businesses which leverage syndicated brand trackers say that getting a macro-level insight on the industry and overall trends helps them see where their brand stands, how past trends have affected the industry and the road ahead. Syndicated brand trackers are increasingly becoming a good tool for growing businesses to assess areas which need their attention or action.

“With BrandIndex, startups, especially B2C businesses, are exposed to a continuous stream of data that helps them strategise in a very agile manner. For instance, since these startups are focused heavily on customer acquisition, metrics that help them gauge advertising impact and effectiveness and look at their purchase funnels in comparison with the competition would vastly improve their ROI. And with that simple knowledge, they are better equipped to decide what their next customer acquisition strategy will be,” explains Deepa.

To sum up, with the Indian market getting increasingly competitive and with digital becoming the biggest change driver in the country, brands will find themselves under pressure to keep their strategies working for them. And, they can, with a little bit of help from BrandIndex, a continuous daily brand tracker.

YouGov could already have up to four years of historical data on people's perception of your brand. Simply contact [email protected] to find out more and request for a live BrandIndex demonstration.