Leveraging insight communities to maximize the effectiveness of your brand tracker

This article is part of a year-long, 25th anniversary series that explores where insight communities have been, where they are today, and the market and customer trends that are shaping where C Space is taking insight communities next.

More than 75% of brands have a brand tracker in place. This makes sense: an ongoing tracker is an essential tool for uncovering brand perceptions, monitoring brand health, identifying strengths and vulnerabilities and assessing marketing impact. Across Escalent Group (Escalent, C Space and Hall & Partners), we’ve run hundreds of brand trackers of all shapes and sizes, some continuous, some waves, some US-only, some multi-market. No other product aside from an insight community allows us to provide as much ongoing insight to our clients about how and where to intersect with loyal, on the fence, and net new customers – and where to strategically invest marketing and innovation dollars for the greatest impact on revenue and growth.

But the best brands aren’t relying solely on their quantitative brand trackers to influence business decisions about where to meet market trends, avoid disruption and capitalize on key opportunities. These brands realize that without the right in-the-moment follow-up, numbers alone can only tell you what is happening, not why it’s happening and what to do about it.

This is where intersecting brand trackers with insight communities becomes a game-changer, creating a holistic, programmatic, actionable and competitive analysis of your brand’s landscape. 

Wondering how best to integrate online research communities to address business challenges and capitalize on brand growth opportunities? Read on.

1. Solve a business problem, rise to an opportunity with faster insights:

Brand trackers flag trouble or opportunity on the horizon. When these sudden peaks and valleys pop on your tracker (a sudden drop in customer satisfaction, unexpected shifts in brand perception, a new disruptor in the market or a new target consumer), it’s crucial to act swiftly. C Space’s Pop-Up Spaces are perfect for an urgent deep dive into quantitative research data or for powering a strategy reset sprint.

In just a week, we create a private, intimate pop-up space with 100-200 of the exact customers you need to engage. Leveraging creative, mobile-enabled tools like image annotation, screen recording, video and audio response and guided storytelling, these fast-turn research communities allow you to quickly unpack your threat or opportunity from multiple angles, uncovering deep, scalable insights that help you effect change with confidence. This approach for tracking brand health helps you move fast, but with the clarity and understanding needed to innovate and make smarter, more effective decisions at speed. 

2. Keep pace with change with real-time insights:

While our Pop-Up Spaces offer a targeted, high-impact solution to address immediate red or green flags, C Space’s Insight Communities fully integrate with your brand tracker. They are a continuous, proactive approach to deeply connecting with your customer base, even during gaps in your brand tracker fielding. This ongoing customer engagement strategy helps you stay ahead of cultural trends, navigate oncoming disruption, uncover white space opportunities and track changing customer needs and analyze sentiment at all times.

A C Space Insight Community can include multiple segments, reflecting the diverse composition of your brand tracker. It can even feature members who participate in your brand tracking study, allowing you to hear directly from “data points” and gain next-level strategic insights. Our online research communities are designed to support multiple workstreams simultaneously, allowing you to assess and strengthen your brand across many dimensions at once. For example, you can gather timely feedback on a competitor’s new campaign, gauge early reactions to a policy change to determine if it should be incorporated into your next brand tracking study and test new product concepts with your audience — all in parallel. This enables you to stay agile and proactive, addressing multiple priorities without missing a beat.

Learn more in our guide linked below,  Customer Inside: Building the Next Generation of Insight Communities.

3. Effective insights to save money on brand tracking, without sacrificing impact:

When research budgets are highly scrutinized and insight leaders are under intense pressure to do more with less, a C Space Communipanel provides access to an already empaneled sample of thousands of your customers, maximizing your tracker spend and impact. For clients running a comprehensive brand tracker just once or twice a year, our Communipanels provide quick, regular pulses to keep you in tune with consumer sentiment without the need for extensive brand research.

To further streamline the process, we can automate reporting on these surveys through dynamic dashboards in our Enlyta platform, maximizing both insights and efficiency. And then, as needed, we can bring members of your Communipanel into a Pop-Up Space, in-depth interview or focus group to unpack why things are changing (or not).

We recognize that brand tracking programs differ greatly across organizations, whether it’s in cadence, level of detail, scope, or the tools and market research methodologies used.

That’s why C Space offers a range of online community solutions designed to seamlessly integrate with your brand tracking program, no matter its structure or complexity. Our products range from focused, intimate pop ups to longitudinal, versatile insight communities to large, flexible panels – each designed to enhance your brand tracking program and make it more impactful in different ways.  Contact us to learn more.