Brand health and brand equity are terms that often go hand in hand — but each serves a unique purpose in helping organizations grow. Brand health measures how consumers currently perceive and interact with your brand, while brand equity is the long-term value a brand creates through awareness, loyalty, associations, and emotional connection.

Why is this important? Because in today’s highly competitive landscape, decisions driven by gut feel aren’t enough. Businesses need a clear pulse on how their brand is performing with consumers, what’s driving that performance, and where to adjust. With thorough brand tracking, you can identify not just what’s working – but why.

Top reasons brand health and equity tracking matter:

• Early warning system: Brand health trends can identify issues before they impact sales or market share.
• Competitive benchmarking: Measure your brand’s performance relative to competitors over time.
• Informed strategy: Use insights to guide marketing, messaging, and product decisions that drive brand equity.
• Internal alignment: Provides leadership and cross-functional teams with measurable KPIs tied to brand growth.
• Financial impact: Strong brand equity often correlates with pricing power, customer loyalty, and long-term ROI.

For example, an emerging CPG brand might begin tracking brand awareness and consideration quarterly. If awareness increases but purchase intent does not, that signals a deeper look is needed – possibly into perceptions, differentiation, or barriers to trial. This kind of insight turns numbers into action, aligning research with brand strategy.

Platforms like Toluna make collecting this data more accessible than ever. But as DIY tools become more common, so does the risk of missing key insights if brands don’t take an intentional, structured approach to measurement. Building effective trackers takes more than just survey software – it takes clear objectives, thoughtful design, and experienced interpretation.

That’s where consumer insights experts – like those in SIVO’s On Demand Talent network – offer a major advantage. They bring not just technical expertise in market research tools, but the strategic acumen to ensure your brand tracking delivers real business value.

Knowing what to measure is essential when building a brand health tracker that informs your decisions. While platforms like Toluna make data collection easier, selecting the right brand metrics – and aligning them to business outcomes – is where expert guidance becomes critical.

So what are the best metrics to measure brand health? That depends on your brand’s goals, growth stage, and industry. But most robust trackers include a mix of leading and lagging indicators – both performance and perception-based. Here are the core KPI categories to start with:

Core KPIs for Brand Health Tracking

• Awareness: A foundational measure – How aware are consumers of your brand? Is it top of mind (unaided) or only recognized when mentioned (aided)?
• Consideration: Among those aware, how likely are they to consider purchasing your brand? This often signals intent.
• Usage or Purchase: Are consumers actively engaging with or buying your brand? A key lagging indicator of health.
• Preference: When choosing between brands, do consumers prefer yours? This shows competitive standing and loyalty.
• Recommendation (NPS): Would consumers recommend your brand to others? A proxy for satisfaction and brand advocacy.

Diagnostic Metrics That Add Depth

Once foundational brand dynamics are understood, adding diagnostic layers helps clarify *why* performance is up or down. Examples include:

Attribute Associations: What characteristics do consumers associate with your brand? (e.g., “innovative,” “affordable,” “trustworthy”) These help build or differentiate brand equity over time.

Reasons for Rejection: Why might someone actively avoid the brand? Identifying barriers can inform product or messaging adjustments.

Brand Imagery and Personality: How does the brand make consumers feel? What tone, values, or lifestyle does it represent? These emotional drivers heavily influence equity.

When setting up a brand health tracker on Toluna, structuring your survey to include both topline KPIs and diagnostics gives you a 360-degree view of what’s working and what to refine. And because the tool enables quick turnaround and segmentation, you can easily monitor brand performance by audience segment, region, or campaign exposure.

But selecting the right KPI examples for brand equity tracking requires careful thought. Tracking too many might add noise; not enough may dilute clarity. That’s why SIVO’s On Demand Talent professionals are often brought in – not just to design and launch surveys, but to ensure the trackers evolve alongside your business goals.

With years of category experience and deep knowledge of DIY research platforms, these experts simplify complexity, streamline data inputs, and help teams transform numbers into growth. They’re not freelancers executing a brief – they’re strategic partners who help you answer the right questions in the right way, time after time.

Building a brand equity tracker with Toluna – or any DIY research platform – starts with a strong foundation: clear KPIs, a diagnostic framework, and a repeatable structure that reveals how your brand is performing over time. While Toluna offers intuitive templates and tools, you need a thoughtful setup to ensure your brand tracking delivers strategic value, not just data.

Designing the Brand Equity Framework

You’ll want to start by mapping out what brand equity means for your business. At a minimum, this usually includes:

• Awareness: Do consumers know your brand exists?
• Perception: How do they see your brand – positive, negative, differentiated?
• Usage: Are they buying or choosing your brand over competitors?
• Loyalty: Do they come back, and would they recommend you?

Using Toluna, you can create custom surveys that measure these areas using validated question types – aided and unaided brand recall, brand favorability scales, Net Promoter Score (NPS), purchase intent, and more. These items give you a robust snapshot of overall brand health.

Adding Diagnostic Layers

To go beyond surface-level brand metrics, add diagnostic questions that explore the “why” behind performance. For example:

• What attributes do consumers associate with your brand?
• How well do you deliver on those expectations?
• What improvements do they want to see?

With Toluna’s flexible survey setup, you can segment findings by demographics, need states, or competitor perceptions to uncover deeper brand drivers – essential for understanding what’s working and what needs attention.

Tracking Brand Equity Over Time

One of the biggest benefits of building a brand equity tracker in Toluna is speed and repeatability. You can run waves monthly, quarterly, or annually depending on your business needs. Just be sure your KPIs and structure remain consistent. Changes in survey design midstream can blur trend lines, making it difficult to spot real shifts in brand performance.

And remember – brand tracking isn’t just for enterprise companies. Even startups and challenger brands can benefit from watching how awareness and sentiment evolve with marketing and product changes.

Finally, consider combining quantitative results from Toluna with qualitative inputs (whether from open-ends, diary tasks, or additional methods). This combination lets you dig deeper into the emotional and functional associations behind the scores.

As DIY research platforms gain popularity, companies are finding that tools like Toluna make it easier than ever to launch surveys and collect data. But the challenge lies not in running research – it’s in making sure that research moves the business forward. That’s where experienced insights professionals, like SIVO’s On Demand Talent, can make all the difference.

Expertise That Keeps Research Strategic

Pressing ‘launch’ on a survey is easy. Designing one that aligns with your brand strategy, captures the right KPIs, and guides decision-making? That takes experience. On Demand Talent professionals know how to:

• Translate brand goals into measurable KPIs
• Structure surveys for clarity and respondent quality
• Choose the best metrics to measure brand health
• Balance consistency with flexibility across tracking waves

Even the best DIY tools can’t replace strategic thinking – and that’s where On Demand Talent adds depth. They keep research aligned, unbiased, and actionable.

Closing Skill Gaps, Fast

DIY platforms work best when paired with internal teams who know how to use them well. But many organizations face bandwidth issues or skill gaps – especially when launching a new tracker, interpreting complex results, or turning data into strategic storytelling. SIVO’s On Demand Talent experts step in on a fractional basis – often within days – so your team isn’t left struggling.

Unlike generic freelancers or contractors, they bring years (often decades) of insights experience and are ready to deliver on high-impact work without lengthy onboarding. That makes them ideal for:

• Short-term roles (e.g., backfilling a brand insights lead)
• Specialized projects (e.g., mapping brand drivers or building scorecards)
• Upskilling internal teams in tool best practices

Getting More From Your Tool Investments

DIY research isn’t just a cost-saver – it’s also a pathway to greater efficiency. But smart usage takes coaching and expertise. Working with SIVO’s On Demand Talent allows you to maximize your investment in platforms like Toluna by teaching your team how to build scalable trackers, flag red flags early, and communicate findings in a brand-relevant way. It’s about replacing guesswork with confidence.

Instead of choosing between speed and quality, pairing tools with the right experts gives you the best of both worlds.

Running a brand equity or health study is only worthwhile if the results inspire action. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by metrics, charts, and dashboards – but the real value comes in knowing what to do next. Here are practical tips to make sure your brand tracking leads to decisions, not just data.

Focus on the 'Why', Not Just the 'What'

Brand equity tracking often shows you what’s shifting – for example, a dip in unaided brand awareness or a rise in preference for a competitor. But diagnosing why it’s happening is where true value lies. Don’t stop at top-level KPIs. Use diagnostic layers in your Toluna surveys (like image associations, brand attribute delivery, or open-end responses) to explore the root causes behind those shifts. When you find the “why,” your marketing and brand teams can act with precision rather than guesswork.

Build in Benchmarks

Without context, it’s hard to interpret what good brand health looks like. Consider building norming data into your tracking setup. This could include:

• Historical norms (e.g., how your brand has performed over time)
• Competitive benchmarks (e.g., how you stack up across key KPIs)
• Industry averages (e.g., typical scores for brands in your category)

Toluna allows for easy quota control and audience targeting, making it possible to include competitive or category-based insights alongside your own brand data.

Look for Consistent Patterns

A single score shift isn’t always meaningful. But patterns across time or specific segments often are. Use Toluna’s analytics features to segment results by age, region, usage patterns, or attitudes – and monitor how these scores trend over time.

For example, a fictional startup may notice that although overall awareness is steady, decliners are seeing a significant dip in brand trust – signaling a message misalignment that warrants a communication shift.

Tell a Clear, Action-Oriented Story

Insight becomes influence when it’s presented well. Whether you’re sharing results with marketing, product, or leadership teams, turn data into stories. Use visuals to guide attention, show score shifts over time, and – most importantly – connect data points to business implications. Include strategic recommendations, not just reporting tables. This is where support from experienced talent (like SIVO’s On Demand professionals) can turn a decent report into a decision-driving asset.

In the end, great brand tracking isn’t just about collecting data – it’s about knowing what to do with it, when to act, and how to learn. With the right setup and talent in place, tools like Toluna become a launchpad for growth, not just measurement.