Building a lasting partnership for sharper brand health and campaign impact
For over a decade, one of the world’s biggest grocery retailers has partnered with us to keep brand tracking at the center of its strategy. As one of Britain’s biggest advertisers, with high-profile activity around value, quality, reputation, and seasonal peaks, this retailer needed sharper insight into what was landing with customers, what was driving affinity, and how to turn that into long-term growth.
The challenge: Cutting through complexity in a crowded category
Retail grocery is one of the most competitive sectors, with a number of brands running always-on high-profile campaigns across different, concurrent messages.
Our client faced three core challenges:
- Understanding which elements of brand and campaign performance genuinely drove affinity, spend, and market share.
- Making sense of the overwhelming amount of available data, from campaign recall to NPS, in order to identify what really linked to in-market success.
- To gain clarity on competitor strengths and weaknesses to protect the brand and identify potential growth opportunities.
Services used:
The solution: A unified system for campaigns and brand health
We designed a tracking framework that works on two levels:
- Campaign effectiveness: Ongoing post-test evaluations focused on the metrics that matter most, such as brand linkage, standout, and emotional engagement. These fed into a ‘composite score’, a cross-campaign effectiveness measure now used internally as the main benchmark for performance.
- Brand health and growth: Global brand tracking modeled around several drivers. Built to identify which perceptions (such as value for money or quality) were most strongly linked to affinity and NPS. This allowed the business to benchmark against competitors and prioritize where improvements to NPS would unlock the most revenue growth.
The impact: Stronger campaigns, measurable brand gains
This approach has now been running for more than ten years. Insights from campaign tracking have shaped the creative direction of major brand campaigns, while the composite score has become a trusted internal measure of advertising effectiveness.
On the brand health side, our tracker has become a barometer of performance across the entire business, feeding directly into performance reviews, long-term business planning, and even external reporting. By connecting perceptions to spend, the retailer can now model the potential revenue impact of improving NPS and brand affinity against key competitors.
Looking ahead: Brand growth starts with smarter tracking
With this system in place, the client has turned brand tracking from a reporting tool into a growth driver. By keeping focus on the right levers, the business can adapt campaigns in real time, monitor competitive threats, and prioritize the brand moves that will have the greatest commercial impact.
When you are competing at scale, you don’t just need campaigns. You need impact.
