The Top 12 Brand Monitoring Solutions

Marketing professionals rely on a strong brand - but knowing how your brand is performing is a really hard problem! Why is it so hard? Well, brand crosses lots of functions, and each function has a silo view of how the brand is doing:

• Public relations team look at media mentions & reach
• Advertising professionals look a brand lift, recall & perceptions
• CX teams look at NPS scores and feedback from review sites
• Email marketers use open rates and click-through rates
• Web teams use web traffic and session durations 
• Creative teams use expert judgement and gut feel
• Social teams look at followers and engagement rates
• Product teams use ratings from review sites
• Finance looks at share of market, revenue, and pricing premiums

So, what does the brand marketer use? Unfortunately, they often run to all the previously mentioned teams begging for their data. They create a massive spreadsheet - then, they run a survey on brand perceptions and hope the data matches. You see the problem? It's a mess. Modern brand measurement solves this problem by looking at ALL OF THE DATA, aggregating it, analyzing it. This enables a shared, single view of the brand. 

BrandOps is the pioneer of modern brand measurement and monitoring software via their 'Share of Everything' model. BrandOps automatically collects data from dozens of sources (web, social, review sites, news, videos, etc.) and uses a best-in-class algorithm to assess how a signal affects brand measurements including: brand presence, awareness, interest, and reputation. The company's background is in large-scale analytics and deep learning (AI).

BrandOps provides 74 metrics that are aggregated into the brand pillars (displayed above). This enables customers to identify strengths and weaknesses and to focus attention and investments. In addition to summary statistics, users have full access to the underlying data (e.g., which tweet had negative sentiment, which news article mentioned the brand, etc.). BrandOps was designed to be the single tool brand professionals need to manage and improve brand strength. 

BERA hopes to be the Brand-building’s ultimate operating system. According to their CEO, 100% of their data comes from surveys. Their software sends out a continuous stream of surveys that give insight into how things might be changing. BERA offers predictive analytics to forecast future trends by looking at historical data. 

BERA states, "Our causal algorithm makes it possible for business leaders to see the real-time key metrics of their brands by the audience, category, and within broader cross-category contexts. BERA returns actionable insights and predictive intelligence to guide the decisions that lead to proven brand performance and business value."

BlueOcean hopes to offer, "Brand tracking at the speed of algorithms and as seasoned as your best strategist." They further tout: "We are on-demand, always on, intelligently actionable, human-assisted for when you need to dig in on the data or be creatively inspired, and featured for use at every level of your organization."

BlueOcean is one of the few firms that directly mentions using humans to complement the machine analytics. Their software offers a market index view, insights on themes, topics, keywords and sentiment, image evaluations (e.g., comparison to archetypes), and insights and recommendations. 

BrandMentions is a SaaS solution out of Romania that offers an easy entry for agencies. Their use of "projects" facilitates the agency model, and they offer white-labeled versions. 

Brand Mentions suggests, "Monitor everything that is being said about your company or product on all the channels that matter. Find out where and when your brand is mentioned so you can maximize the results of your marketing strategy."

BrandTotal is a real time competitive intelligence platform designed to give media, insights, and analytics teams full visibility into their competition’s social media strategy. They don't mention capabilities beyond using social media as brand signals. 

BrandTotal suggests customer can, "Gain complete visibility across your competitors’ distribution channels by viewing unified campaigns." and "Gain rapid awareness of your competitors' changing campaign demographics, goals and posting patterns."

"The Harris Poll Brand Platform provides market research tools and brand tracking software to diagnose, act, and evaluate within seconds. We offer a comprehensive perspective on thousands of brands in real-time, empowering firms of all sizes to confidently make data-driven marketing decisions."

The platform uses an "academically and financially vetted equity model" and results in a single score to help you understand your brand strength. Additionally, the software looks across the conversion funnel, provides insights into brand perceptions and customer touchpoints. 

CoreBrand (now Tenet Partners) Data Science's goal is to find new ways to measure and understand brand performance and translate that knowledge into better customer experiences. Additionally, CoreBrand  licenses their data (1,000 companies across 50 industries) and provides marketing consulting. 

CoreBrand Data Science was founded on the premise that there’s real benefit in non-traditional measures of brand value and performance. That’s the idea behind their CoreBrand Index (CBI). They also tout a relationship with the now defunct Brandometry. 

Hanover’s Brand Tracker solution measures how consumers discover, view, and engage with your brand. Hanover's strength in survey-based tracking. 

Key use cases include: Track brand equity and performance over time, assess the impacts of your marketing campaigns, identify category trends, and uncover the drivers of category consumer behavior. 

Latana's goal is to help you to understand how consumers think and feel about your brand. They measure the effectiveness of your marketing strategy by understanding consumer perception about your brand and how it changes over time. Latana (based out of Berlin) emphasizes their ability to track brands from 100+ countries worldwide by using micro-surveys. 

Latana suggests that customers can, "Customize your dashboard to fit your needs using combinations of geography, time period, KPIs, brand, and audience segments." And they note their competitive advantage as, "Our mobile-first micro-surveys allows us to easily reach over 4 billion mobile users in 100+ countries worldwide." 

Quantilope provides consumer research solutions with brand tracking as a primary use case. Their methodology starts with defining specific research questions and moves into defining the evaluation methods.  Their solution uses panel providers to offer the feedback. 

Quantilope emphasizes their research methodologies as their differentiator. Options include: Single Association Test (SAT), Multiple Association Test (MAT), Choice based Conjoint Analysis (CBC), MaxDiff, Total Unduplicated Reach and Frequency TURF and Key Driver Analysis. 

Upwave (formerly Survata) offers granular, real-time measurement for your brand campaign, delivering cross-channel insights and uncovering optimization decisions to improve advertising effectiveness. Unlike other brand monitoring solutions, Upwave places emphasis on measuring lift from specific campaigns. 

Upwave's heritage is in survey-based insight. Their proprietary network allows the platform to gather more respondents faster. They emphasize the ability to measure TV, web and in-app via the same platform and to compare cross-channel results. 

London based YouGov is an international data and analytics group. One of their offerings is a custom brand tracking solution. YouGov invites customers to, "Measure campaign effectiveness, track brand perception and benchmark customer satisfaction against your competitors with YouGov's Custom Trackers."

YouGov offers continuous tracking of your brand and key competitors and to supplement your always-on approach with focused modules that allow you to dive deeper into key brand and reputational drivers.

Summary

The days of sending out a brand tracking survey every quarter or trying to make social listening tools perform brand analysis are in the past! We've entered a new era of holistic, real-time brand monitoring. Key features include:

• Automatically gather data across dozens of online channels
• Use survey data to complement and validate findings
• Leverage artificial intelligence to do the dirty work of integrating and sorting data
• Compare brands relative to industry benchmarks AND relative to category competitors