How to Build a Brand Health Tracking Program for Consumer Brands

Why Brand Health Tracking Matters

To begin with, brand health tracking is more than a scorecard. Sure, that might be one artifact of a brand health tracking program, but it’s better to think about brand health trackers as a system for learning how people think, feel, and act toward your brand over time.

When built correctly, a tracker can help you:

• Monitor performance across key metrics such as awareness, consideration, preference, and advocacy

• Detect shifts early before they affect sales or share

• Understand what drives loyalty and what erodes trust

• Quantify brand equity and connect it to business outcomes

• Literally any other characteristic of the consumer marketplace that informs strategic decisions for your brand

For some categories, brand health tracking might not need to be as regular. Slow-moving categories like auto and appliances might need an annual check-in. But for consumer brands operating in fast-moving categories like beverage, apparel, or beauty products – where new disrupters are constantly coming, going, and making things complicated and brand perceptions can change week-to-week – a more regular cadence might be necessary. The right cadence is one that will allow you to separate temporary noise from meaningful trends and react with confidence.

For more on how Langston defines brand health and measures it across categories, see our Brand Health + Market Landscape solutions page.

Step 1: Align on Objectives and Stakeholders

So you’ve decided how often you need to check in on your brand health. Next, it’s time to select the right ingredients for your tracker (the health metaphor is beginning to break down) to decide what it needs to capture and accomplish.

Some of the most common objectives include:

• Benchmarking performance against key competitors (as captured by that brand health tracker mainstay, the brand funnel)

• Measuring campaign effectiveness and creative resonance

• Identifying the objections standing in the way of growth

• Tracking loyalty and purchase intent over time

• Understanding reputation and brand trust within a category

Sidenote: At Langston, our modular research approach makes designing a study around these objectives very easy. For example, if you want to capture objections standing in the way of growth, our Funnel Fallout module captures barriers to consideration, which explains the “why” behind respondents who say they’ve heard of your brand, but wouldn’t consider it. This kind of utility is critical when designing a brand health study - you want the insights you capture to be useful, actionable, and more than interesting.

Once you’ve aligned on your objectives, you need to identify your key stakeholders. Who do you need to share the results with, and how will they be used? Your results may vary, but here are some of the most common “whos” and “whys” for brand health stakeholders we see:

• Marketing leadership, for campaign and media decisions

• Insights teams, for continuous learning and testing

• Product or innovation teams, to align launches with perception

• Executives, to connect brand performance with financial KPIs

For practical guidance on structuring insight functions around programs like this, explore our CMO Roadmap, Langston’s framework for scaling insight-driven decision-making.

Step 2: Build the Measurement Framework

We’re starting to get closer to actually building the brand health tracker itself. But before we start writing questions, it’s important to develop a brand tracking framework. A brand tracking framework defines which metrics to measure, how often to measure them, and how to interpret the results. The most effective programs combine brand funnel metrics with emotional and behavioral indicators. Despite what many marketers will tell you, people are more than just their brand funnel results. 

What do we want to know?

The first part of your framework should answer the all-important question “What do we want to know?” Here are some common approaches:

• Awareness – unaided and aided recall within your category

• Consideration – likelihood of choosing your brand next time

• Preference – how your brand compares against top competitors

• Usage and loyalty – repeat purchase, retention, and share of wallet

• Advocacy – recommendation rates or Net Promoter Score

• Sentiment and trust – how consumers describe or feel about the brand

• Share of voice and conversation – your presence relative to the market

A word of warning - it’s really easy to try and turn a brand health tracker into a catch-all study that tries to be everything for everyone. That’s a recipe for disaster. Keep your framework focused on the most essential and impactful insights you want to collect. This is easier on the respondent (shorter surveys), you (focused analysis), and senior stakeholders (clearer utility). 

Who do we want to know this about?

Consumer segments are the lens through which your brand health tracking insights will shine. In very few cases is the total population a useful segment. You need to decide who the most important people, consumers, and shoppers are and capture that accordingly.

These groups can be defined simply or be true works of art. Segmenting by demographics, purchase frequency, brand relationship, and life stage, and motivation can help uncover untapped opportunities. For larger or more consumer-centric organizations, an all-out, capital-”S” Segmentation can be a critical tool. This is a mathematically-derived way of creating consumer segments unique to your business with carefully curated blends of demographics, attitudes, and behaviors.

Langston’s Life Lenses

If a custom segmentation sounds a bit daunting, or you need more information and reassurance before creating your own, Langston’s segmentation framework, Life Lenses, helps brands link attitudinal and behavioral data to measurable outcomes. By embedding this kind of segmentation into a tracker (the segments are created using a few batteries of survey questions) teams can see not just how brand health changes, but who the most valuable consumers are driving it.

For more detail on funnel metrics and how they reflect brand health at each stage, read The Brand Funnel 101.

Step 3: Frequency and Methodology

Frequency determines how quickly you can react to market shifts. While many consumer brands track annually, higher-velocity categories like snacks, beverages, or personal care often prefer quarterly pulses.

At Langston, we’re all about survey methodology as a cornerstone of a brand health tracking program. But insights can come from a variety of sources and methodologies depending on your needs:

• Surveys: Quantitative tracking remains the core foundation. Consistent question wording allows wave-to-wave comparisons.

• Rotating modules: Introduce specific questions each wave to test campaigns, innovations, or new competitors.

• Social and search listening: Detect conversation trends, sentiment changes, and influencer impact.

• First-party analytics: Combine sales and web traffic data to correlate shifts in perception with real-world behavior.

Step 4: Design the Survey and Sampling Plan

We’ve made it! It’s time to write a brand health tracking survey. This is really important. A tracker’s credibility depends on its design. You can’t just write a question that says “Do you like my brand better than other brands?” and make important decisions based on the shallow responses you’ll get. This takes patience. This takes poise. This takes expertise. This takes a high tolerance for version control issues from that one team member who insists on sending feedback via text message. 

Anyway, for the best chance at success, keep these principles in mind when designing your brand health tracker survey and strategy:

• Questionnaire structure: The order and sequencing of your survey question matters. Start with unaided awareness, then aided awareness, consideration, usage, and advocacy. End with attribute ratings that align with your positioning. Be sure not to prime respondents earlier in the survey for questions that come later. Keep questions as mutually exclusive as possible. Use consumer-friendly language (no, your respondent probably can’t recommend “potential high-value synergies” to you in a survey environment)

• Consistency: Do not rewrite questions mid-program. Trend data only holds value when wording remains stable. You’d be surprised (and it can be proven with basic math!) how much change can ripple out of adding one single brand to a brand funnel in Wave 2 that wasn’t there in Wave 1. Your survey is now different, and people will respond differently as a result. Of course, we are all human, priorities shift, and updates need to be made. But it’s also why doing the hard work before you field your first wave is so important. We have two sayings around here as a result of this phenomenon. The first is, “The best Wave 1s are designed to be Wave 2s”. The second is, “Most Wave 2s end up being new Wave 1s.”

• Sampling: Use representative panels for your target market. Set quotas by region, gender, age, or behavior to ensure comparability. If 18-24-year-old men made up 80% of your Wave 1 sample and 13% of your Wave 2 sample, you’re going to have a bad time. Consistent sampling is paramount. 

• Benchmarks: Establish competitive baselines early. Index your results against category norms to understand relative performance. This helps bring a lot of utility to the first wave of a brand health tracker, too, in the absence of wave-over-wave comparisons.

Step 5: Build the Data Pipeline and Dashboard

Once data collection is stable, focus on how the insights will live inside your organization. Your dashboard or report should deliver clarity, not sow confusion. Consider working with a partner that can help you package and share this information to your organization’s preferred formats.

Some dashboarding best practices:

• Combine results from multiple waves in a single view so users can see change over time

• Include filters for demographics, regions, or segments

• Highlight statistically significant shifts automatically

• Add trend indicators and notes for context

• Create snapshot reports for executive reviews and board meetings

For clients using Langston’s Landscapes ecosystem, these dashboards often integrate category-level data, allowing teams to compare their own tracker results against broader market patterns.

Step 6: Analyze and Translate Findings into Action

A healthy brand comes from what you learn from the data, not just the data itself.

To turn measurement into movement:

• Track trajectories, not moments. Focus on multi-wave trends rather than single data points (for Wave 1 studies, see our note about benchmarking above!).

• Explore the intersections. Identify how metrics like awareness, consideration, and loyalty change within and across key consumer segments.

• Show and tell your storylines. Use data visualization to explain what changed and why.

• Tie metrics to outcomes. Correlate improvements in metrics like consideration or NPS with sales and retention metrics when possible.

• Share insights widely. Brief teams across marketing, innovation, and retail on what the results mean for their work, and keep in mind that insights might need to be visualized, presented, or contextualized in new ways for different audiences.

Recent Langston customer stories, such as SCOTT Sports, provide real-world examples of how continuous feedback loops translate into faster decisions and clearer growth priorities.

Step 7: Manage Governance and Cadence

Brand health tracking, just like your personal health (the metaphor has returned!) is not a set-and-forget situation. It requires process discipline to ensure that every wave of data is comparable and meaningful. Establish a clear calendar for data collection and reporting so results arrive on a predictable rhythm. Maintain a glossary of every metric and question to preserve consistency over time, and regularly audit sample composition and weighting to protect data quality. 

Change is inevitable, but should also be your greatest enemy. When it happens, the best thing you can do is document and account for it. When methodological updates are necessary, combine old and new approaches for one cycle to maintain continuity. Ideally, you can assign a dedicated owner who manages governance and keeps stakeholders aligned. Strong oversight keeps the tracker credible, builds trust in the data, and ensures teams actually use it to guide decisions.

Step 8: Avoid Common Pitfalls

Many trackers fail not because of design errors but because they are underused. Common traps include:

• Too many metrics: Focus on what drives growth and retention

• No executive buy-in: Ensure leadership reviews tracker results regularly

• Ignoring competitors: Relative movement matters more than absolute numbers

• Irregular cadence: Skipping waves breaks continuity and makes results unreliable

• Poor communication: Translate data into language stakeholders understand

Avoiding these pitfalls transforms tracking from a reporting tool into a strategic advantage.

Step 9: Launch Plan and Next Steps

A simple 90-day roadmap can bring your tracker to life for the first time:

Days 1–30: Align objectives, define KPIs, build questionnaires, confirm samples

Days 31–60: Field your study, design dashboards, validate data pipeline

Days 61–90: Present results, collect feedback, set cadence, and schedule the next wave.

From there, brand health tracking becomes a continuous system—a living measurement that evolves alongside your strategy.

If you are ready to design or refresh your tracker, talk to our team about building your program.

Closing Thoughts

A well-structured brand health tracking program gives consumer brands a competitive edge. It reveals what consumers truly think, how loyalty forms, and where perception can improve.

Regardless of whether your organization has a dedicated consumer insights team or is just beginning to build one, Langston helps brands of all sizes design, implement, and sustain effective brand health tracking programs. We guide teams through every stage, from setup to interpretation, so they can turn continuous measurement into growth.

Talk to our team about building your tracker to start making a lasting impact for your brand.