Your B2B brand tracker is failing you (and your buyers are rolling their eyes at it)
Author
Conor Wilcock
Managing Partner, Basis B2B
Author
Conor Wilcock
Managing Partner, Basis B2B
Marketing is full of old sayings. One that I particularly like is “When you put the head on the chicken, the chicken runs faster.” It’s often cited by far more articulate and humorous people like Mark Ritson to demonstrate the value of investing in research to measure brand health.
Specifically, Ritson advises marketers that “investing 5% of your budget in market research is not superfluous, it’s key to understanding customers, serving them better and growing your business.”
I may be biased, but I wholeheartedly agree.
Casting my mind back a decade or so, the B2B companies investing in brand tracking were the exception, not the rule. At that point, the goal was getting people to commit to an insights-driven marketing strategy; to dip their toes and maybe more in the brand tracking waters; to put the head on the chicken and let it loose.
Today, we’re dealing with a different problem in B2B. Most companies are tracking their brand health. It’s just that the majority of these trackers measure the wrong things and aren’t used in the right ways. They were built for a different era: linear journeys, rational decision-making, brand-controlled positioning.
Now, they’re out of step with how B2B buying actually works. There are plenty of heads on plenty of chickens, but most have been put on backwards.
Brand tracking hasn’t kept up with B2B buying
Perhaps the bigger issue is that we’re sleepwalking through all this.
I’ve seen first-hand the very comfortable ritual: The brand tracker arrives with its familiar charts, traffic light slides and a promise that everything is broadly fine.
Awareness: Stable.
Consideration: Up a tad (“it could just be sample noise, but let’s pat ourselves on the back anyway”).
Advocacy: Slightly down (“ignore this; it’s sample noise”).
Someone in the meeting says, “solid performance” and everyone exhales, relieved that the brand is definitively not on fire for the thirteenth quarter in a row.
Now, I don’t wish to suggest that B2B marketers are naïve or that brand tracking is inherently flawed. It’s just that the world has moved on and we haven’t moved on with it.
Recent research by Basis B2B shows that buyers now shape perception in places trackers don’t measure. And there’s a gap between brand language and buyer language so wide that you could fit a lifetime’s worth of brand funnels in it. In fact, 83% of buyer sentiment contradicts how brands describe themselves.
Where B2B brand tracking breaks down
- Trackers measure what brands want to say, but this differs greatly from how buyers think about brands when making decisions
Hands up if your brand tracker includes attributes like “innovative”, “trusted”, “leading”, “cutting-edge”. I thought so.
This is hype language that our recent study shows buyers at best ignore and at worst, recoil from. Over 70% of brand messaging relies on hype. Buyer conversations, on the other hand, focus on proof, outcomes and real-world impact.
This leaves you with an inside-out lens. Instead of reflecting what’s moving your buyers, trackers focus on the narratives inside your business. Remember: “you can’t read the label from inside the bottle” (hey, there’s another one!).
- Trackers follow a linear journey that doesn’t exist in the real world
At the heart of traditional brand tracking is a funnel that looks slick on a slide and tells us all the wrong things about the relative strength of your brand. We know from Ehrenberg-Bass that buying is memory-based rather than funnel-based.
Why? Because barely anyone is “in-market” at a given time.
Most trackers are incompatible with the 95:5 rule. They over-index on in-market metrics and give little attention to out-of-market brand health.
And sure, everything would be peachy if buyers progressed neatly through journey stages and were spat out the other side as happy, onboarded and immediately loyal customers. Think again: they encounter a need, remember a handful of brands, and choose the one that feels least risky or makes their life easiest.
This also overlooks what happens before your CRM even registers a pulse. Our analysis shows that 70-80% of negative buyer sentiment appears before a formal RFP even exists. Trackers rarely measure this pre-funnel world and therefore miss most of what buyers really think about you.
- Trackers obsess over awareness and perceptions, and ignore availability and distinctiveness
Ehrenberg-Bass makes a simple point that B2B marketers love to quote and then promptly ignore: brands grow by building mental and physical availability.
In other words, you need to make your brand easy to think of and easy to buy from.
Awareness is not the same as being thought of in the moments that matter. Most trackers avoid measuring category entry points, and even when they do, it’s usually separated from evaluating mental availability.
Trackers are also more likely to assess “brand perceptions” than the distinctiveness of brand assets and the cues that truly drive buying decisions.
Basis’ research identifies seven decision drivers which typically don’t show up in brand-owned narratives:
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- Proof of ROI and track record
- Ease of integration and adoption
- Service quality and responsiveness
- Cost-to-value certainty
- Risk and compliance assurance
- Time savings through automation
- Peer validation and social proof
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Marketers beware as I come bearing bad news: buyers are more interested in whether you will make their life easier than if you have won an award for your thought leadership podcast.
B2B brand tracking for the modern age
All of this matters because there is a real and significant commercial cost of measuring the wrong things.
If trackers lean towards lagging indicators, they tend to overreport stability and underreport risk. You’re not just throwing money away. You’re driving towards the cliff-edge with the wind in your hair and your eyes locked on the rearview mirror, remarking on the lovely view.
B2B brand trackers miss the things that kill growth: integration anxiety, compliance concerns, lack of proof, peer scepticism. They are terribly unpredictive because they ignore the memory structures that lead to real-world decisions.
This is all a bit “doom and gloom” isn’t it? Let me attempt to right the ship here.
Broadly speaking, B2B companies can respond to the brand tracking problem in three ways:
- Keep calm and carry on – after all, the line’s going up and to the right so no one’s complaining, even if you know deep down that the research has been impeccably designed for the wrong reality
- Admit defeat and reallocate budget – this probably won’t come from the marketers themselves, but there is a horrible risk that B2B companies sunset their brand trackers because they’re expensive and unwieldy, and because you were honest and told the executive team that it’s not perfect
- Adapt, modernise and re-execute – the hardest of the three but really the only way to see value creation from your brand tracker in the long-run
For those choosing Door Number Three, you’re in luck, as there’s a handy set of tips below to help you on your noble quest.
Five ways to improve your brand tracking
1. Ditch the brand-led design and lead with buyer language
Use the vocabulary buyers use when comparing brands.
This may be quite different to the language you wish buyers used, and that’s OK. If your customers talk about “hours saved”, being “audit-ready”, “never missed a deadline” and “support responds within five minutes”, your tracker should measure those things.
2. Make category entry points the heart of your brand tracking
Incorporate the cues that trigger brand recall: “when we’re replacing a legacy system”; “when compliance risk spikes”; “when we need to cut admin time.”
These are the moments where mental availability matters and can be the catalyst or the inhibitor of brand growth.
3. Evaluate real, buyer-validated decision drivers
The seven drivers identified in our research cut across industries and company sizes. They appear again and again in buyer conversations. Buyers use them to narrow shortlists, justify recommendations and decide whether a vendor feels safe. They are the backbone of B2B decision-making.
Track performance on these to turn your brand tracker from a descriptive model of brand image to a predictive model of commercial performance.
4. Detect the early signs of buyer hesitation
Integration concerns, pricing confusion and scepticism about proof points are surefire signs that your prospective customer is pumping the brakes.
Consider integrated brand tracking programmes that tap into real-world, real-time behavioural signals as well as audience surveys.
5. Improve how you measure peer validation strength
It’s hard for marketers to admit, but buyers trust people like themselves more than anything your brand could say about itself.
Track how accessible and credible your brand’s peer references are. Assess how strong your ecosystem of brand evangelists is. You’ll then have a far clearer picture of brand health than any single momentum score.
1. Ditch the brand-led design and lead with buyer language
Use the vocabulary buyers use when comparing brands.
This may be quite different to the language you wish buyers used, and that’s OK. If your customers talk about “hours saved”, being “audit-ready”, “never missed a deadline” and “support responds within five minutes”, your tracker should measure those things.
2. Make category entry points the heart of your brand tracking
Incorporate the cues that trigger brand recall: “when we’re replacing a legacy system”; “when compliance risk spikes”; “when we need to cut admin time.”
These are the moments where mental availability matters and can be the catalyst or the inhibitor of brand growth.
3. Evaluate real, buyer-validated decision drivers
The seven drivers identified in our research cut across industries and company sizes. They appear again and again in buyer conversations. Buyers use them to narrow shortlists, justify recommendations and decide whether a vendor feels safe. They are the backbone of B2B decision-making.
Track performance on these to turn your brand tracker from a descriptive model of brand image to a predictive model of commercial performance.
4. Detect the early signs of buyer hesitation
Integration concerns, pricing confusion and scepticism about proof points are surefire signs that your prospective customer is pumping the brakes.
Consider integrated brand tracking programmes that tap into real-world, real-time behavioural signals as well as audience surveys.
5. Improve how you measure peer validation strength
It’s hard for marketers to admit, but buyers trust people like themselves more than anything your brand could say about itself.
Track how accessible and credible your brand’s peer references are. Assess how strong your ecosystem of brand evangelists is. You’ll then have a far clearer picture of brand health than any single momentum score.
How Basis can help
The old model of brand tracking is creaking if not broken, and a new one is emerging. Basis B2B’s ACTS framework defines what modern brand tracking needs to deliver:
- Accountable: Link brand health directly to business outcomes.
- Customised: Tracking frameworks built around each client’s strategy and category.
- Timely: Detect brand shifts early and diagnose why they are happening.
- Strategic: Deliver clear direction, not just reporting.
We execute hybrid brand trackers that get in front of your target audiences through primary research, while also listening to the conversations that shape perceptions through our AI and innovation practice, Basis Ideas. The combination of survey tracking, behavioural signals, and AI-assisted analysis changes the game. Through our Ideas business and our partnership with AnswerRocket, Basis teams can now identify shifts earlier and understand what is driving them before clients feel the impact.
We connect brand measurement to commercial success: pipeline friction, category entry points, mental availability. We make insight actionable: go-to-market strategy, messaging frameworks, value proposition development, customer-centricity.
Where to go from here
If the last decade was about doing something, the next decade should be about doing it better.
The B2B brands that win will be those that connect their brand tracking programmes with the actual dynamics of their markets and their buyers.
Get it right and you’ll have free rein over which strained metaphor or marketing adage you choose to describe your brand’s growth – there are plenty available!
