Published on 09/03/2025
How Modern Brand Tracking Unlocks Your Next 95% of Customers
Effective marketing works on two fronts: capturing today’s demand and influencing tomorrow’s. While performance marketing relentlessly optimizes for the 5% of buyers in-market now, the real, sustainable profit lies in building a powerful brand with the other 95%. The problem? Most measurement systems fail to gauge long-term marketing effectiveness early enough to optimize, leaving leaders struggling with the critical task of connecting brand marketing to its total impact on sales. A modern brand tracker bridges this gap. It’s not just a report card on past activity; it’s a strategic roadmap to future revenue, creating a growth flywheel where a powerful story makes every ad work harder and modern analytics prove its compounding value.
As much as 70% of a campaign’s total profit impact occurs more than six months after it has finished. Performance needs to be judged, and optimizations made, with the longer-term value of a campaign taken into account. Brand tracking focused on (1) benchmarking consistently against all-category buyers, (2) gauging the strength of distinctive brand assets, and (3) tracking links to priority category entry points, provide a more holistic picture of performance and identify any compounding returns that occur after an initial investment has been made.
BRAND TRACKING GIVES YOUR FUTURE CUSTOMER A VOICE
The 95:5 Reality
Long-term brand building is the primary and most effective driver of sustainable profit growth. According to Les Binet and Peter Field’s IPA report, “Media in Focus: Marketing Effectiveness In The Digital Era,” for many categories, as much as 70% of a campaign’s total profit impact occurs more than six months after it has finished.
If your team is optimizing campaigns and messaging solely based on what delivers sales from the 5% of people who are actually ready to buy today, you are optimizing for a tiny fraction of the total addressable market.
The hard truth of marketing, illuminated by the work of the LinkedIn B2B Institute and grounded in the research of Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, is the 95:5 rule, which proves that at any given time, 95% of your potential customers are generally not in the market to buy. They don’t need your product or service right now.
Effective advertising focuses on building resonance with the 95% of customers who will be in market sometime in the future. The stronger the memory structures you build in their minds now, the greater “Mental Availability” you create for the future, ensuring your brand comes to mind easily and frequently when they are in market. Brand tracking, done right, provides a way to measure how effectively you are building these memory structures with future customers, giving you a more accurate picture of total brand growth over time, not just in the short-term.
HOW TO UNLOCK BETTER BRAND TRACKING
It’s time to redraw the map. Traditional brand tracking is like driving while only looking in the rearview mirror — it only tells you where you’ve been. A modern tracker, however, is your forward-facing GPS combined with a topographical map. It doesn’t just show your current position; it analyzes the entire landscape — competitor strongholds (Category Entry Points), clear paths forward (Distinctive Assets), and the most efficient routes to your destination (growth audiences). This approach stops you from navigating without a compass, guiding every marketing decision with a clear view of the road ahead.
At Mythic, we’re exploring the future trajectory of brand tracking and identifying the key principles that transform brand tracking results from a report card to a playbook that unlocks new growth opportunities for your brand.
We strive to help clients achieve these brand tracking best practices:
Taken together, studies utilizing these principles provide a more holistic picture of performance, and give marketers a roadmap for how to grow brand value.
Benchmark Using All Category Buyers
It’s an incredibly easy, and logical mistake to make. Of course our brand tracker should focus on measuring the mindset of our brand target audience, right?
Brand tracking that consistently recruits from a target audience of “All Category Buyers” will provide far more reliable insights to brands about their current strengths, but more importantly, about which audiences they have not built positive associations with. This wide approach to sampling gives marketers far more valuable data about where there are opportunities to grow, both in terms of the key associations people remember, and in the audiences with the greatest room for growth.
From Awareness to Assets: Quantifying Your Brand’s True Value
While a good tracker identifies broad brand strengths, a better tracker diagnoses and quantifies the specific elements that build brand equity. Distinctive assets are the non-brand-name shortcuts that trigger recognition: the colors, shapes, characters, sounds and slogans that instantly communicate who you are. Think of McDonald’s golden arches or Intel’s five-note mnemonic — they are unmistakable.
Why is this critical? Strong distinctive assets directly boost marketing effectiveness, increasing salience and memorability. Without these assets, ads are more likely to be misattributed and help competitors. By tracking the strength of these specific assets, you can draw a straight line from your marketing efforts to the creation of brand strength.
Unlocking Competitive Edge Through Category Entry Points
Category Entry Points (CEPs), are a cornerstone of the brand memories that create future sales. As outlined in Jenni Romaniuk’s work “Better Brand Health”: CEPs are defined as the cues that nudge a consumer towards a purchase — the initial thoughts, feelings, frustrations or situations that incite the need to buy.
For example, a consumer likely won’t wake up wanting a specific brand of insurance. They are likely triggered by something — buying a new car, getting married or feeling anxious about the future. Each of these is a CEP. The goal of effective marketing is to build a strong, distinctive bridge between your brand and as many of these CEPs as possible so when these triggers occur, your brand instinctively comes to mind.
Good brand tracking can help you identify these triggers, measure your brand’s association with them and benchmark performance against competitors. Better brand tracking helps you get ahead of your competition and achieve more significant sales and revenue over time. Answering critical strategic questions like:
From Insight to Impact: How to Measure Brand Building ROI
A modern brand tracker does more than report the past, it gives you a playbook to win the future. It’s the tool that allows you to stop choosing between brand and performance and start activating their convergence. By understanding the memory structures you’re building today, you can more accurately predict the revenue you’ll generate tomorrow. This isn’t just better measurement — it’s the foundation of a true growth system.
Ready to transform your brand measurement from a report card into a revenue playbook? Reach out to newbiz@mythic.us to get started.