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TMB + Fuel Cycle

TMB Partners with Fuel Cycle for Brand Health Tracking

Fuel Cycle’s Brand Health Tracking solution provides agility for Trusted Media Brands (TMB) to evaluate brand effectiveness and perception more frequently, allowing them to better understand competitors’ strengths and their own conversion funnel, while preparing for the second wave of tracking to monitor changes over time.

Overview

Brand health tracking is a market research methodology that is used to evaluate the effectiveness and perception of a brand. Legacy brand health tracking processes are typically run annually and produce hundreds of pages of data–but there is a better way.

Fuel Cycle’s new Brand Health Tracking solution is built for agility and can be run up to once a month. Trusted Media Brands (TMB) partnered with Fuel Cycle again by using their Brand Health Tracking software, a part of the Ignition suite. TMB is the company behind publications like Taste of Home, Birds and Blooms, Reader’s Digest, and more. The first wave of the tracker was used as an exploratory period to learn how TMB ranked against competitors like Food Network and Allrecipes.

Tech Specs

Fuel Cycle’s Brand Health Tracking solution allows brands to stay on top of changes in the market with monthly and quarterly tracking of brand health.

Our up-to-monthly tracking model, known as the Essentials model, tracks significant changes in brand health metrics over time, as well as measuring differences between a brand and its competitors.

Fuel Cycle’s advanced insights model, known as the Deep Dive model, captures deeper diagnostics from a particular wave of data such as open-ended brand perceptions, measuring brand attributes of the core brand plus competitors, and adding advanced analytics like key driver analysis on which metrics drive brand success or key segment discovery to profile loyalists and prospects.

The Problem

Traditional brand health trackers are costly, slow, and overwhelming. 

The world moves too fast to wait for data once every twelve months, and even the most dedicated readers struggle to absorb 100 pages of business data. DIY solutions can help with data capture but don’t include the rigor of sample balancing or statistical testing that true tracking studies require.

Because traditional brand health tracking solutions did not provide enough return on the high investment and DIY tracking is unreliable, TMB had not conducted their own Brand Health Tracking previously. Fuel Cycle’s solution helped provide them with an efficient but trustworthy solution to build up the foundational insights they needed.

The Solution

TMB conducts brand health tracking with Fuel Cycle every six months. The initial wave of research was focused on getting the lay of the land.

TMB suggests that one tip for a successful Brand Health Tracking study is to have a strong knowledge of the competitors in your space whom you are measuring against. From the first wave, TMB learned these key things.

  1. An understanding of competitors’ strengths by asking who the top performers are and what we can learn from them.
  2. An understanding of their own conversion funnel and where to focus their strategy for Taste of Home.

Now, hold your breath and dive deep into the second wave of Brand Health Tracking. In 2023, the second wave will establish how TMB’s brand health is changing over time. In this wave, FC and TMB seek to learn:

  • Which key audiences are the most and least likely to interact with TMB.
  • Over-time measurements to understand changes in brand health.
  • How much perceptions change over time: seasonal impacts, user movement.
  • Why these changes occur, and how to direct growth.
Tanja Walker

Tanja Walker

Associate Director,
Consumer Insights

TMB

“The results were well-received by the team and provided valuable strategic insights… The timing is perfect, and the results confirmed the importance of research.”

The Results

The work isn’t over yet…

TMB plans to continue working with Fuel Cycle to ensure a continuous read on Brand Health Tracking and anticipates successful waves of data-driven insights.

Users like Taste of Home for its variety of recipes that are quick and easy to prepare and easily searchable; focusing on these attributes can help Taste of Home stand out against the competition. Compared to other sites, Taste of Home users are likelier to share recipes with friends and family.

The Fuel Cycle Difference

Fuel Cycle’s award-winning Research Engine is the most comprehensive intelligence-gathering ecosystem that exists today. Our platform enables decision-makers to maintain constant connections with their customers, prospects, and users to uncover real-world actionable intelligence. By integrating human insight with critical business data, and through automated quantitative and qualitative research solutions, Fuel Cycle’s Research Engine powers product innovation, brand intelligence, and enhanced user experience.

Breakthroughs require action. We built Fuel Cycle to ignite it.