Where instinct meets proof in brand building
In B2B tech, early instincts and scrappy signals (sales calls, reviews, branded search) get you moving. They’re how you learn fast, how you sense what’s landing.
But growth changes the game: more stakeholders, longer cycles, and AI quietly shaping first impressions.
Brand tracking captures those patterns, translates intuition into evidence, and gives teams a stable reference point, and a way to steer the brand forward.
Author: Alex Waite, Strategy Director
Brand is having its “told you so” moment. And for B2B leaders, the proof now lies in strategic brand tracking.
As the world leans into LLMs, the rules of visibility are changing. In B2B, buying habits are shifting, with people turning to AI tools for help in the discovery phase. While it’s difficult to future gaze, Gartner predicts a 25% drop in traditional search engine volume by 2026. For B2B companies, this means treating these tools like an audience and thinking about how to influence them.
That’s where strategic brand tracking comes in.
While the black box of AI answers is real, we know they are influenced by the ingredients of a strong brand: perception, tone of voice, coherence, and consistency for semantic anchoring. Most companies already track these ingredients intuitively through “scrappy” signals e.g. review sites, expert blogs, or branded search volume.
Early on, these signals and your instinct are enough. But when buyers outsource their first impressions to algorithms, vague brands don’t get a second look. You need more than just a “feeling” that your brand is landing; you need a system to track and prove it. If you’re not deliberately shaping how your brand is understood, you’re leaving it to chance.
Steer your brand, don’t just report it
This is where brand tracking enters the story.
For years, it’s been treated like a “nice-to-have,” or not considered for all the familiar reasons. It’s too slow. Too expensive. Too abstract. Or something you do once a year, glance at, and then go back to chasing short-term numbers. In that framing, it’s just a backward-looking artifact.
But that framing is wrong. Brand tracking isn’t about measurement for measurement’s sake; it’s a strategic instrument. It forces alignment on what you’re trying to be known for, who you’re actually building for, and which perceptions will unlock growth. It connects long-term brand building to daily decisions across product, marketing, and sales.
It’s not a rearview mirror. It’s a steering wheel.
When to move beyond ‘scrappy’ signals
Most companies already track brand health, they just do it intuitively. Kira Klaas, VP, Corporate Marketing at Later, made a great distinction on our BYOB panel regarding the growth stage of a company.
At the seed or early growth stage, you’re right to be obsessed with day-to-day signals: branded search volume, share of search, or customer support language. Early on, these numbers and your instinct are enough. But as a business grows, those signals can get confusing. Performance becomes more expensive and growth becomes harder to explain. Or leadership starts asking questions about the perception of the company.
If those questions are showing up in the room, it’s time to consider a brand tracker.
From intuition to evidence
In B2B tech, it’s often a wild ride. Product teams move fast, markets shift, and brand conversations can often reset with every new metric. Brand tracking acts as a compass, giving teams a stable reference point, aligning decisions, and keeps the story coherent, letting the brand steer even when the product is sprinting.
It’s widely reported that CMOs and brand leaders struggle to translate their actions into financial impact (read any Deloitte or Gartner CMO reports from the last decade).
Brand tracking gives you this opportunity.
It allows you to move away from “squishy” metrics and into Mental Availability (MA). This means making your brand easy to think of when people are in a specific buying situation. By identifying Category Entry Points (the cues or triggers that bring a buyer into the market), you can use your tracker to see if your brand is actually “available” in those moments.
This gives you a story the board can get behind. As Allie Fletcher, Brand Analyst at Elastic, told us, this long-term modeling allows you to translate brand actions into financial impact. You stop saying “awareness is up” and start pointing to how a bump in perception contributes to market share over time.
The 401k of brand
It is a brand leader’s job to become a parrot, translating this impact into the growth language your executives already use. Matt Maynard, VP, Global Brand, Advertising & Communications at Asana shared a perfect analogy on our BYOB panel I loved: brand building is like investing in your 401k while still paying the bills today. You have to do both. You need the short-term results to keep the lights on, but without the long-term investment in your brand’s mental availability, you’re not building a future.
Sums it up perfectly.
Instinct got you here. Evidence will take you further.
Brand tracking isn’t a “day one” requirement; it’s a graduation. If you’re still in the early sprint, obsess over those scrappy, intuitive signals. They are your fuel.
But, once those signals get noisy and growth becomes harder to explain to a board, don’t keep flying blind. Invest in the long term, protect the short term, and know when it’s time to put your hands on the steering wheel.
The “told you so” moment for brand is here, so make sure you have the evidence to lead it.
Are you wondering how bold your brand is?
Take our quick pulse check to see if there’s a gap between how your brand sees itself and how the world actually sees it.
Keen to find out more about how Kira, Matt and Allie use brand tracking?
Watch the very insightful conversation we had during our ‘Linking brand intuition and brand data‘ BYOB panel.
