Is your brand tracker ready for the future?  Will it thrive in the ever-evolving digital landscape of 2025?

For years, brands have relied on tracking studies to monitor changes over time, optimize product development, and assess campaign effectiveness. But are tracker studies still fit for purpose in an uncertain world?

While the answer is very much yes—such studies offer crucial insights into consumer behavior, perceptions, and trends, making them an essential tool for continuous improvement and competitive strategy—you may indeed need to start asking yourself different questions in order to get the insights you need today.

As with anything, it’s important to review what you really need from your trackers. Our fast-paced world demands that tracker studies evolve. They must adapt to a new data ecosystem that captures the full context in which consumers operate. This evolution is critical for brands aiming to make informed decisions in a dynamic environment.

Continuous evaluation and adaptation will help you better understand your consumers, predict market changes, and ultimately drive business success. To this end, we need to ask ourselves questions such as:

1. Am I, as a market researcher, operating in a silo?

Eliminating silos inside organizations allows for a more cohesive understanding of operations and customer insights which enhances decision-making. When departments like marketing, sales, and product development work independently, valuable insights remain isolated, hindering a holistic view.

Businesses are also increasingly integrating external data sources, such as social media data and online reviews, to complement tracking efforts. Moreover, advancements in technology, such as generative AI, are revolutionizing the way businesses analyze and interpret data.

Blending traditional approaches, like trackers, with new technologies, is the future of research. By leveraging the latest advancements, businesses can gain a comprehensive understanding of consumer behavior, brand performance, and market trends, empowering them to make informed decisions.

2. What internal and external data sources can we integrate?

In addition, it’s critical to integrate fresh streams of data from other sources. For example, we must not ignore the power of other data when it comes to reputation—social listening, product reviews, customer feedback, and much more all feed into the matrix. Integrating such data streams when examining reputation can bolster the traditional tracker model, empowering businesses to make more informed decisions, adapt to changing circumstances, and proactively shape their brand image.

Similarly, combining market research and business data with tracker data can enrich insights from the ground up. Find solutions that can not only properly handle the intricacies of market research data, but also ingest and process sales and transactional data, and more. Combining data streams can help you see the real-world impact of studies. Context is everything.

In this way, we must work hard to prevent fragmented strategies and missed opportunities for optimization and growth. External data sources, such as those from ad hoc projects and secondary research, also feed into a more comprehensive view of customers and market dynamics. Bringing in diverse data streams is key to gaining a complete picture of consumer behavior and preferences.

3. Have I fully considered the role of new technologies?

In all these ways and more, our use of brand trackers can’t just focus on what is being asked, it must evolve to encompass the changing data ecosystem (including how data is analyzed). Brand trackers must work hand in hand with the latest technologies and techniques. After all, a world of constant change requires a more contextual approach, which means taking more data into account. As part of this, it’s also important to consider how—and when—AI and brand trackers can work hand in hand.

That said, with AI being trained on existing data, it’s not as freely able to move with the times as quickly as a good old survey with fresh participant data. So tracking still has its rightful place in insights generation—though we would hope it looks different from, say, five years ago.

We’re often asked, “What if we stopped tracking altogether and just used passive techniques such as social listening, big data, and behavioral economics?” Despite the recent explosion of genAI and ResTech (research technology), we believe the answer is still that this is not a great idea. It’s important to ensure we are using all of the tools available for us. The relevance of brand trackers depends on restricting them to those things that you really need to measure and that you can’t get elsewhere, and then to use ResTech, new tools, and sources (even perhaps synthetic) to supplement, not to replace.

4. What more could I do to best support and understand the impact of our marketing campaigns?

Organizations spend a considerable portion of their budget on advertising to grow their revenue and market share. The myriad of changes in consumer behavior, brand perception, and market trends play a role determining the success of core marketing functions, which is why insights professionals ongoing brand tracker studies are more important than ever.

In a continually fragmenting media landscape, marketers need a means to evaluate the impact of campaigns over time. Often, they can no longer track ad effectiveness through the digital channels to which they are accustomed, as third-party cookies become a thing of the past and more stringent regulations are on the rise. It is not possible to rely solely on big data and direct response advertising and measurement, as these techniques often miss the context and deeper audience understanding that market research methodologies can provide.

Tracker studies help businesses understand how markets and consumer groups change over time, rather than just at any one moment, meaning that they represent an important piece of the market research toolkit. They reveal important things like how much people know about a brand, if customers are happy, what people think, and how well marketing works. Yes, trackers arguably have a larger role to play than ever before, but what is asked and how it is analyzed must change with the times.

John Bird currently serves as an Executive Vice President for Infotools. His experience spans B2B and B2C work and he has conducted research programs in over 70 countries. He is focused on fueling curiosity and moving clients from three ring binders and “death by PowerPoint” to Infotools Harmoni, a SaaS data design, investigation and reporting platform.