Matthew Herbert, co-founder and co-CEO of SaaS research platform Tracksuit, discusses measuring brand awareness and marketing effectiveness, building on insights from co-founder James Hurman’s presentation, “The Awareness Advantage” at Cannes Lions last week. Matt shares advice on balancing brand building with performance marketing and suggests key metrics for product launches. He also addresses measuring brand perception across touchpoints and previews Tracksuit’s new features.
Episode Transcript
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Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS:
Matt Herbert: The more your awareness grows, percentage uplifts of awareness makes your performance marketing dollars more efficient and effective. The better you build your brand today, the more effective your marketing dollars are.
Adrian Tennant: You’re listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on marketing and advertising produced weekly by Bigeye, a strategy-led full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. Brand marketing and performance marketing are complementary strategies, with brand marketing building long-term equity and performance marketing focused on driving immediate results. James Hurman, a creative effectiveness expert and the founder of the New Zealand-based agency Previously Unavailable, describes lower funnel performance marketing activities as harvesting existing demand and brand marketing as building future demand. At the Canned Lions International Festival of Creativity last week, James presented research conducted by Tracksuit, a fast-growing software-as-a-service platform in partnership with TikTok. The results showed that advertisers with high brand awareness see approaching three times the conversions than those with low brand awareness. Evidence that building future demand and increasing mental availability with brand marketing enhances the effectiveness and efficiency of performance marketing efforts. Our guest today is an expert in measuring and communicating the value of building future demand. Matthew Herbert is the co-founder and co-CEO of the research platform Tracksuit, which enables companies to measure their brand-building activities through real-time dashboards and translate the results into actionable consumer insights. To discuss Tracksuit’s fresh approach to brand tracking, I’m delighted that Matthew is joining us today from London, England. Matt, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS.
Matt Herbert: Thank you so much for having me. We’ve connected over the last few years, and a great opportunity to speak with you today. So thank you very much.
Adrian Tennant: Well, let’s kick things off by hearing a bit about your background. What led you into the world of marketing and brand tracking?
Matt Herbert: Yeah, so I’ve had a career so far that has been involved in brands, brand-adjacent and technology-led businesses. I wasn’t always set out on a path for marketing or brand tracking or research. I studied law and science back in New Zealand, and one of my first roles finishing university was the opportunity to join Uber and help with the launch of Uber across New Zealand. So this was back in 2015, 2016. At the time, a big tech business in the Northern Hemisphere, but no one knew about what Uber was or what was coming. So to be a part of a big tech platform, brand-led, but also innovating and disrupting. The transportation and to see what Uber is now, many years later, quite a profound experience and something I look back and really appreciate of being a part of it, acting like a startup, rolling out Uber in the market. From there, I went and moved across to Sydney, Australia, where I oversaw and led business development for Mishguru. Mishguru was a social media management platform helping brands and agencies unlock vertical storytelling, specifically Snapchat. And so working with McDonald’s and Coca-Cola and Fox unlock Snapchat as a new channel to engage audiences. So marketing, startups, branding, consumer side, agency side. I was always fascinated by where the world of marketing was going and always looked at what’s the bigger impact on the business world? What is marketing? What is the impact? that ultimately it’s having. I ended up back in New Zealand, pandemic times, and three years ago, linked up with my now co-founder, Connor, James Hurman, who you’ve spoken to, a world-leading effectiveness leader and strategist and planner, and one of New Zealand’s leading insights consultancies. And it was all this hypothesis that was going around to say, how and in what way do modern consumer brands grow. Why are these modern brands not kicking on? With the cost of acquisition increasing, with smaller than expected customer bases, why are we not seeing this kick? It’s been relatively easy to build brands the last 10 to 15 years by putting a dollar in and getting $2 back. But when that becomes less efficient, what do we do? And so between Con and myself, James on the effectiveness side, leading insights business. And what gets measured gets managed. And this leads us to how do we read and democratize what the world’s leading businesses have been doing for 50, 60 years. Braintracking that make braintracking accessible and affordable and easy to use for modern companies to balance the short and the long term to ultimately. champion brand building and help become this common language to measure and understand the value the brand has on great consumer businesses. So we took that to market and three years later, now I’m the co-founder and co-CEO of Tracksuit with 80 staff across the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand right now.
Adrian Tennant: Wow, that’s tremendous growth. Matt, today, who is Tracksuit designed for and what are the main problems it helps them solve?
Matt Herbert: We’re looking to, as I said, democratize the world of brand tracking, what has been inaccessible for the vast majority of brands. Tracksuit is beautiful, affordable, always on brand tracking, built for the modern consumer brands. And when we talk about that, we’re saying beautiful in the sense of easy to use, intuitive dashboards based on the fundamental tools of Actionable Insight. So no longer a hundred page slide packs presented by consultants where you’re looking at just the exact summary or gathers up on the desk. And so beautiful in the sense that people and marketers actually want to use it. And marketers and non-marketing stakeholders being able to actually understand what’s driving business growth based off brands. So beautiful, affordable, looking at how do we make brand tracking cost-effective and affordable for modeling mid-market growing consumer brands. no longer $100,000 plus entry points are always on tracking programs, being at a fifth of the cost of that. And always on, looking to reinvent the way brands grow, businesses grow, what gets measured, gets managed. We’re tracking business metrics all the time. What was broken or what we see was broken with brand tracking is typically you’ll do it once or twice a year. Now if you’re only getting a read once or twice a year with seasonalities and with competitors or pandemics or supply chain marketing budgets, we’re not just marketing once or twice a year. We’re building brand, building business consistently and so wanting to provide always-on tracking to give real-time, up-to-date view around what’s working, what’s the impact, and how do you continue to iterate the strategy. So whether it’s a board meeting, an agency meeting, category reviews with retailers, you’re looking at up-to-date view of the category and your brands and your competitors, rather than relying on data that’s six months old, in many cases, what many brands are doing.
Adrian Tennant: Challenger brands and scale-ups often have smaller budgets compared to established competitors. Matt, how does Tracksuit make brand tracking accessible and valuable for these types of businesses?
Matt Herbert: Yeah, so a big focus for us is, and a big mission of ours, is to champion the world of brand builders and central brand leaders, and to build this common language to measure and understand the value that brand carries on building great, long-term, sustainably growing businesses. What we’ve found over the last three years of building Tracksuit and focusing on the fundamentals, there’s no shortage of data and insights and analytics out there. but what’s actually being used and how do we break it down to fundamentals of what brands need to know and what brands are trying to understand to action business growth. And so we simply focus primarily on how big is your total addressable market? How many potential customers are out there? How well is your brand known? Who considers your brands? Who is the most preferred? What do consumers think and feel? What are the perceptions about your brands? Compete against the competitor space and tracks all the time. So you can inform your strategy, measure the impact of what you’re doing and iterate ongoing to keep winning. Off the back of that, what we’ve found is the past three years, around about 50% of our customers or brands we work with may have done a piece of research once or twice a year. Instead of doing it once or twice a year, but around about the same cost, they’re able to access Tracksuit, which is all the time, much more intuitive with actionable insights. They’re an intuitive platform. Agile, speed, and insights coming through. The other half of the customers and brands we work with have never done brand tracking before, but they’re starting to reach the point where they’re needing to grow the business. They’re looking at the long-term as well as the short-term. What gets measured gets managed. There’s a maturity and, okay, great, we’re getting to this point of growth, and so expanding the market or brands and marketers and leaders and agency partners that are ultimately able to access brand tracking to get the insights that they need in the way that they can actually make action where they might not have the enterprise level research budgets of a Unilever or a Procter & Gamble. They may not have fully fledged insights and research teams, although that is an area that we’re seeing more and more be picked up. But it is moving from once or twice a year to the brand’s health dip away to doing it all the time with Tracksuit and in a way that brings more brands into focusing on the long-term growth that the brand is planning.
Adrian Tennant: Could you share a case of how a challenger brand has used Tracksuit to measure their brand awareness effectively?
Matt Herbert: A recent example is New York-based women’s wear brand MM Le Fleur. Maria Costa, the director of brand marketing, often in the Cypher is, as you do, Adrian is looking at, well, how do we inform a strategy? What should we be doing this year? So in many cases, understanding. Where are we and what’s the job to be done? Working with MM Le Fleur and accessing their insights, setting their 2020 core budget, they were able to understand that the job to be done was, if they could move the needle on consideration, that would have the biggest impact on customer acquisition. So, alright. Enough people know about our brand or relatively speaking, awareness compared to our competitors is not the job to be done. But we know that if we can make more people consider our brands for the right reasons, that’s going to have the biggest impact on customer acquisition. And so figuring out where their investment was going to have the biggest return, a great example of MM Le Fleur understanding the baseline was the most effective bid and focusing on the job to be done of influencing, moving in the long consideration of the marketing and the communications and the strategy.
Adrian Tennant: You have a team based in New York City for the US market. For brands that aren’t available in all states, can Tracksuit help them collect data from specific regions?
Matt Herbert: Tracking specific regions is something that we’ve been asked for a lot since expanding into new markets. And it’s really important that we’re providing valuable brand tracking for brands at different lifecycle stages. I think, you know, and the work that you’re doing to found this as well is that Not every brand has a national presence. Not every brand is operating nationally. Not every brand is spending marketing dollars at a national level either. And so with Tracksuit, absolutely, we’re able to provide regional and state-based and sub-regional tracking, which is really focused on where is your brand, where are you looking to grow, what is important for you in a way that traditionally national tracking or measurement programs aren’t suitable. So I decided to share that that now is a key focus for us and maybe democratizing, increasing the accessibility of relevant insights, depending on the brand and your focus and where your strategic priorities lie.
Adrian Tennant: I’m curious, how targeted can that data collection actually be?
Matt Herbert: Yeah, so with everything that we do, we’re taking a best in class approach to our methodology and our research and our tracking. And so, nationally representative based on the latest census data around age, gender, ethnicity, a number of demographic metrics that come into that. And what that can be done is tracked at a state level, a regional level, it can be broken down at At the DMA level, it depends how on the rail we’ve got that flexibility to really hone in and focus on where are you trying to build your brand or business, what’s important, whether it’s distribution or whether it’s your media streams or whether it’s the price that you’re in. If you’re in gambling, I know gambling industries in Australia and New Zealand or Utah are nationally wide, but it’s a state-based approach with different regulations and laws and many industries. with some brands will only be operating so being able to adjust and be flexible with the focus.
Adrian Tennant: I mentioned in the intro that you’re also on a mission to help marketers better communicate the value of their brand-building efforts. Now, Tracksuit provides always-on tracking and very easy-to-use, visually attractive dashboards. How do these help marketers when they’re trying to explain things to stakeholders like CEOs or CFOs?
Matt Herbert: Yeah, I forget who may have said it, but a common notion that poor marketing has done a very poor job of marketing itself. And so absolutely our main focus is to help break common language and to help our understanding. Building tracks that are in a way that marketers, agency folk, CEOs, CFOs, they all use and understand relevant with their job. I think a great example that we have great feedback on is a simple shift in the way that an awareness percentage is shared. And so typically, if you have 20% awareness of a 100 million person total addressable market, will 20 million people know about your brand? Great. Okay. So now 20 million people are actually talking about it in real humans and people. 20 million people know about our brand right now. We execute a strategy, we’re spending $500,000 over a quarter, and we’ve seen enough lift in the percentage of people that know about our brands. But being able to go to the CFO and say, “In January, 20 million people knew about our brand, we spent $50,000, and now 30 million people know about our brands. It’s very hard to sell to people that don’t know about us. There’s 10 million more people now that know about us.” Fantastic. And this is the common language. Seems simple, but it’s really effective in actually understanding and quantifying what is the impact of brands on business growth and their communication. So, and also understanding, well, what’s the business trying to do? Agency or marketers, brand leaders, understanding the business and what’s important to the CEO or the CFO or the board, and actually looking for the insights that help inform that strategy. So real people is a big piece around that communication. Nice one to share anyway.
Adrian Tennant: Chief financial officers often view marketing as a cost center due to the difficulty of linking brand-building efforts to financial outcomes. So, Matt, what advice do you have for brand managers and CMOs looking to secure buy-in for investments in brand marketing?
Matt Herbert: It’s the million, trillion dollar question about how to apply a brand dollar into a commercial outcome. And I think there’s often been the big chunk of what is $1 of marketing spends? What’s that done to revenue? I think there’s a world in which we pair this back to what are the different commercial outcomes that can happen from marketing spend? Tying brand to commercial outcomes. Often what people want or assume they want is to say a dollar of marketing has done this to the P&L or done this to revenue. Brand to revenue. What we can look at and what we know with our own research, the more your awareness grows, percentage uplifts of awareness. makes your performance marketing dollars more efficient and effective. And so not only is it looking at this as a brand in the long term or brand
Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after this message.
 | Adrian Tennant: Each month, in partnership with our friends at Kogan Page, the Bigeye Book Club features books by industry thought leaders. Our selection for June is The Creative Thinking Handbook: Your Step-by-Step Guide to Problem-Solving in Business. As an IN CLEAR FOCUS listener, you can save 25 percent on a copy of The Creative Thinking Handbook when you order directly from the publisher at KoganPage.com. Just enter the exclusive promo code BIGEYE25 at checkout. |
Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking with Matthew Herbert, co-founder and co-CEO of Tracksuit, a SaaS platform that enables companies to measure and communicate the value of their brand-building activities. How can businesses use Tracksuit to benchmark their performance against competitors and maybe identify opportunities for differentiation?
Matt Herbert: The differentiation of benchmarking is incredibly important. We’re now trafficking with over 5,000 brands across 250 categories, which gives us a proprietary insight into important benchmarks or norms or whatever you want to call it around what impacts great brand growth or great business growth. I mentioned earlier around that, you know, it’s hard to tell to someone that’s never heard of you. Awareness being really important. Well, it’s also really important to understand how your brand metrics compare to your competitors’. So you’ve identified that consideration is a really important job to be done for you. And you can see that your considerations increased 10%. Now in isolation, is that good? Is that bad? Is that ugly? And that’s often, you know, often a question coming from the board or CFOs. Great, that’s a great result. But is that good? Is that bad? How does that compare? If you look at that 10% increase in consideration, but all your competitors are increasing by 20, 30, 40%, then 10% isn’t so great. And so looking at that on your category, How, what are you doing? What are your competitors doing? But then also looking at setting realistic expectations around what is good brand growth? What is great brand growth? Depending on the size of your business, if you’re a challenge or a scaling business, then what does good awareness or consideration benchmark? And that’s what we can help with buy and set is to say. getting KPIs, understanding what’s reasonable, and the planning of culinary. And so the question around differentiation is hugely important. Differentiation, distinctiveness, what makes your brands unique. They’ve come to the point where every business or every brand has to have their house in order. You have to have your financials, you need to have your distribution, you need to have the fantastic products. But when everybody’s doing that, and when everybody in your category is doing that, what’s the differentiation? And that’s where your brand is so important. In your category, there’ll be fundamentals that you need to own, whether it’s you need to price the quarterly, or you need to have great quality of produce, or great taste, or range in maybe what you imported. You can all own that, but then to the question of what makes you unique, differentiated, stand out. And so quite simply, as an example of what we do at Trapsuit, is ask, what comes to mind when you think about, you know, if it’s athletic brewing, have you purchased non-alcoholic beer in the last couple of months? Great. What comes to mind when you think of Athletic Brewing? What comes to mind when you think of Heineken Zero? What comes to mind when you think of, and being able to actually understand the verbatim responses of potential consumers to say, what is making Athletic Brewing unique and differentiating compared to a new Heineken Zero? And how well is your brewing strategy resonating with your target audience. And so asking a mix of quantitative and qualitative aspects. Potential customers, what do they think and feel about your brands, your competitors, what are you owning together, but also what makes your brand unique and decreasing. The next piece of that is that in any category, there’ll be category drivers for an example. Consumers will buy products and associate with brands based on particular attributes. Getting a brand strategy, launching, scaling. Are you owning or are you resonating with what consumers really care about? And does your brand strategy also align with that? Personal banking in the US, a lot of household names, a number of, you know, challenger brands coming in. What we know is that in personal banking in the US is that the two most important drivers of whether someone considers a bank is it’s trustworthy and people feel that it’s a bank for people like themselves. Is the bank for people like me in the personal situation down in. Now, what’s lower is innovation or product ranges. And so as a business, how well are you really owning or ranking against trust and for associations that you’re for, like the people that you want to attract. So differentiating is obviously super important as a business and as a brand where everybody has the same or competing on the same product lines or financials or distributions. The brand is that differentiator between purchasing teams and ultimately customer basins.
Adrian Tennant: Over the past few years, of course, we’ve seen some shifts in media investment. Many CPG brands focus on influencer marketing and community building on social media. Matt, how can Tracksuit help measure the impact of these initiatives on overall brand health?
Matt Herbert: The more that we know about what a brand is trying to do in the investments that they’re making, the deeper the insights to inform a strategy or prove the impact of what that dollar or what that activity is doing. When you speak about brands, it’s no longer necessary around TV or billboards or altitude channels and performance marketing is necessarily Meta or TikTok or Google. Brands and businesses can be built no matter the channel. And so what I think is arguably more important is to look at What is your communication? What is your content? What is the messaging that you’re putting out across your chosen channel to your chosen audience? And how well is that working? And so agnostic around those influences or social media or TV or billboards, being able to overlay that in the Tracksuit and correlate and causate against what is shifting, how well your brand is known, what is shifting the perceptions about your brand. That’s where we’re starting to get to. Now is the actionable insights about no matter what the channel is, what your spend is, what’s the creative, what are you trying to do? Are you trying to build emotional connection? Are you trying to change conceptions around consideration because of the great quality of your products? Or are you trying to drive sales with discounts and promotions and more logical advertising? That can be done on TV, that can also be done on TikTok or Google or YouTube. And being able to see that all in one place is how we’re proving that out and how things support it.
Adrian Tennant: So far, I think we’ve framed up pretty well brand awareness to drive mental availability. Let’s turn now to physical availability. So for brands selling through multiple online and offline channels, how can Tracksuit help them understand the relationship between different touch points and the overall impact on brand perception?
Matt Herbert: Skincare brands in the US to exactly to this point of the mental availability and the physical availability. Now their awareness in the skincare category was near a market leader. So awareness was not the issue for this brand. So mental availability was fine. What we saw coming through in the responses from consumers and targeted consumers was potential customers were struggling to actually find or get access to this brand. And so this then looks at, we’ve got a distribution or omnichannel conversations with retailers and category managers to say, people are wanting us, people are trying to find us, but they can’t find us. So people know about us, mental availability is fine, but we can see here in the data that our brand is not. physically as available or accessible as what our customer base is wanting. And so to that point, mental availability, physical availability, both of those are really important and understanding, do you have both of them or is there actually a gap? You may have great mental availability and physical availability on the East Coast, but you’re starting to grow real traction on the West Coast. Or in San Diego, for example, great. Is there an opportunity to actually focus on your distribution and capture that new set of customers who are really after you? So again, something that we absolutely buy in and showcase and surface those insights on an ongoing basis. Again, another great job to be done.
Adrian Tennant: As challenger brands expand into new markets or launch new products, what are the most important metrics they should focus on to ensure a successful launch?
Matt Herbert: Launching scale businesses for those new product, for the new market, looking at that baseline. Where are you launching? Why are you launching? How are you launching? What’s going to make your brand or business differentiated to what’s already there? And so getting a lay of the land, a baseline understanding of how big’s the market and who’s playing in that market. And so before we had even launched, absolutely value in looking at the category, the regions, the particular demographics that you need to be really strong. Who is the customer? Who is the future customer? What type of customer do you want to go around? What perceptions or positioning are the competitor brands already owning? What’s the opportunity to launch in the right way strategically to land and expand? The category understanding, the market orientation, if you will, or a market understanding around the category, competitors, the positioning, and also looking at those category drivers. What’s really important to potential customers in the area that you’re looking to launch? Is your brand strategy aligned with what customers care about? You might have a big focus on sustainability, but the biggest driver is around trust, around range of products, or around price. And so how do you effectively set the right strategy based on the market, the competitors, what customers are after, and tell me you need to launch in with a differentiated offering brand in business.
Adrian Tennant: For listeners who may have been put off by the cost or complexity of brand tracking in the past, Matt, what would you say to encourage them to give it another look?
Matt Herbert: What gets measured, gets managed, and when it comes to why we’re building Tracksuit and the availability of measurement is making what has previously been inaccessible accessible to modern brands. Typically, consumer brands may have done a piece of research once or twice a year because A, that’s all they could afford or B, because that’s all that was available We’ll see because they don’t have insights teams that are able to manage that every time core, looking at budgets, looking at spending and where that’s going. So we really want to encourage and communicate that it is not inaccessible, it’s easy to use, it’s cost-effective. But a baseline around spending 2 to 5% of your total marketing budget on research. If you have a $2 million marketing budget a year, does it pay to spend 5% of figuring out where that $2 million went? You have a $10 million marketing budget, does it pay to spend 5% or so to understand where that $10 million has gone or the impact that it’s having? Absolutely. It’s not as inaccessible or as costly as it once was. And there are also different levels of insight depending on the business that you’re in. Do you need a full tracking program? Do you need benchmarks and norms? Do you need a baseline read? So to a wider range of business who are investing, need to measure, need to manage, making that accessible.
Adrian Tennant: So what’s on the horizon for Tracksuit? Are there any upcoming features or developments you’re particularly excited about?
Matt Herbert: One of the biggest things we’re excited about is launching to and focus on supporting the best modern brands in the US. We have an office and an amazing team currently based in New York on the East Coast with a real focus this year on looking after our customers, maturing the product, regional tracking, is a huge part of that. The speed to actionable insights, the advancements in AI and large language models, instead of taking three months to send out surveys, to analyze, to feed them back, now that’s almost instantaneous around the depth of insight and the actionable insights that we’re able to serve. We’ve got an amazing group of customers with the likes of, you know, Athletic Brewing and Steve Madden and Hexplan Pans, Supergoop and some Unilever customers in there. So it’s around taking the time, showing up in the US for US brands and making the best, most effective tracker to help them build great businesses. So excited about the year ahead and plenty of advancements coming. I mean, we recently raised our own Series A earlier in the year, led by a couple of leading VCs out of Silicon Valley with Footwork and Altos to fuel the ability to expand into the U.S. and build ultimately, you know, the best brand tracker for great U.S. brands and the other markets that we’re in and that we’re focusing on.
Adrian Tennant: Perfect. If listeners want to learn more about Tracksuit and experience the platform for themselves, what’s the best way to contact you?
Matt Herbert: Best way to contact is up along to the website GoTracksuit.com or on LinkedIn. Search me up there. I’d be responsive and love to hear from people looking up or want to communicate around what we’re doing. So the website GoTracksuit.com or on LinkedIn, very active channel. We’re always looking to connect.
Adrian Tennant: Matt, thank you very much for being our guest this week on IN CLEAR FOCUS.
Matt Herbert: Adrian, thank you so much. It’s an absolute pleasure. Thanks for the opportunity. Always love the chat, always love connecting.
Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guest this week, Matthew Herbert, co-founder and co-CEO of Tracksuit. As always, you’ll find a full transcript of our conversation with timestamps and links to the resources we discussed on the Bigeye website at bigeyeagency.com. Just select Insights from the menu. Thank you for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.
