Conquest Research

Tracking philosophy
We believe that tracking must break out of the 20th century tracking paradigm with its emphasis on recall and verbal, rational questioning. Why?

1. We feel that much of contemporary brand tracking is based on an outmoded 20th century model, in which advertising works through rational persuasion. In the last decade, the neuroscientific revolution has turned so much conventional wisdom about how advertising works on its head. In parallel, advertisers have increasingly moved away from functional, rational communication towards the nonrational. How many ads do you see nowadays that tell you that brand A is better than brand B because it washes whiter, tastes better, drives faster etc.
2. We think researchers worry too much about how consumers remember advertising, when what really matters is the effect it has on the brand. So much of what consumers know about brands is learned implicitly, which means that often they know a lot about brands, but don’t necessarily know how or where they’ve learned it. Standard tracking questions, such as recall, only go so far in accessing the impact of advertising on brands because they only deal with the 5–10% that consumers can consciously remember.
3. Emotion has become to big an issue to ignore as the conventional notion of a rational consumer has given way to one in which intuitive and often unconscious process guide decision-making. Given the burgeoning understanding of the emotional unconscious, it is astonishing that, even now, in 2008, most tracking research is text-based and literal, not visual or metaphorical. Most conventional methods of measuring emotional engagement fail because respondents have to consciously consider their response before answering – which is a real problem, because when we think and consider, we get further away from our emotions and our response becomes more prone to rationalisation.

• Ad awareness
• Ad recognition*
• Ad warmth
• Ad excitement
• Ad happiness
• Brand warmth
• Brand proximity
• Brand disposition*
• Brand empathy

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