Once upon a time I attended a Brand Tracking debrief delivered to one of our clients by a well known international research agency. I was there to see how the ‘brand was doing’. We had sat through 4 hours and nearly 200 slides. As we left, our client tapped me on the shoulder and said ‘tell me Gary, are we doing well or badly?’. The truth was, I couldn’t help. The sandwiches were good though.
The methodology used for the research was set in the old mad men era of brand building and the way the data was collected and the questions that were asked were crying out for change, it needed a complete revamp. The other issue was that there were loads of what we call ‘black box’ calculations. You grab some data from one place, add it to some data from another, divide it by a mysterious X number to give you some kind of co-efficient that was good in circumstance x and bad in circumstance y. The result being that only a few wise heads understand it and the data didn’t get used much. What a waste!
The BAM, or Brand Alignment Monitor, is the antidote to this. It’s very simple, tracks through all the brand’s touchpoints and produces one simple metric for all the calculations. See for yourself in this video!