Matt Herbert

Why did you want to build Tracksuit?

My co-founder and I had worked in brand and marketing-adjacent roles for more than a decade, and all around us we were seeing the rapid growth of big consumer brands, using performance marketing on Google and Meta and the like to drive sales. And they’d experience this initial amazing growth – but then they’d reach a ceiling. And we were fascinated by it: why does this happen? Why are modern consumer brands growing fast, reaching these plateaus and not going into the long term sustainable pathways that you’d expect?

And so we paired up with fellow co-founders James Hurman, a world renowned brand strategist, and TRA, one of New Zealand’s leading insights agencies to work out what’s going on. It boils down to this: what gets measured gets managed. It’s very easy to measure bottom-of-funnel and conversion, but incredibly hard to measure or understand what’s happening at a brand level. So brands and marketers have done such a good job at optimising the bottom of the funnel sales conversions and website impressions, at the expense of longer-term brand building. So we set up Tracksuit to help modern, growing consumer brands track their brand building as well as their performance marketing. We want to prove that brand marketing and strategy isn’t just fun and games. You can actually measure it and you can be really tactical with what you’re doing.

Performance marketing and brand marketing seem to get pitted against each other. Some brands spend all their time and money on one at the expense of the other. How do you help people understand the role of each?

Research shows that about 5% of your total addressable market or category are in a position to buy right now. With performance marketing, that’s where the majority of the focus is going: harvesting existing demand. But what about the other 95%? That’s where brand building and strategy have a job to do: building future demand with that other 95%. These are the people who are not buying from you right now, but are going to come into the category in the near future. When they are ready to buy, where’s their purchase intent going? Who have they been primed for? And that’s the job of brand building, to build that closeness, that familiarity, that emotional connection with consumers so that when they’re ready to buy, they’re going to gravitate towards you. And so that’s what we are doing with Tracksuit: giving visibility on how well you’re building future demand, tracking things like awareness and consideration, while you continue to optimise and harvest the existing demand.

We see DTC brands in particular focus a lot of time and energy on social media performance marketing. In many ways they’re right to, because of the conversion it can deliver, but it sometimes puts the blinkers on to other channels. If brands are thinking about brand building, what advice do you give them about the channels they choose?

It’s not necessarily that you need to do TV campaigns or big out of home or billboards. It’s about building your brand effectively on the right channels, where your customers are spending their time, with the right content and the right comms. It’s about creating that emotional connection, with the longer term brand play so that purchase intent is even stronger. And so for a lot of DTC brands today in those more emotional moments, the better you build your brands today, the more effective your performance marketing conversion ads are. It’s not that brand doesn’t impact performance and performance doesn’t impact brand: it’s everything together, doing it all and looking at the full funnel.

Tracking awareness and consideration isn’t new – how is Tracksuit’s approach different?

Market research and brand tracking has been around for as long as advertising, but brand tracking specifically has been reserved for enterprise-level brands. Procter and Gamble, Unilever, those household names have been spending hundreds of thousands if not millions of pounds on tracking categories, competitors, awareness. The alternative has been to do a brand health study once or twice a year, which will still cost you in the ballpark of £15,000 to 40,000 pounds each time. But what they get is a 100-page report, four months after the fact. It’s retrospective, historical. What are you supposed to do with a 100-page report about reality four months ago? And so with Tracksuit, we’re constantly fielding always-on brand health monitoring, so you’ve got an up-to-date, real time view of the category, competitors, the brand and the job to be done. All that, and we make it beautiful and affordable, so people can really use the data they receive immediately.

One of the hardest things for brand leaders to do is communicate the impact and value of what they’re doing with the rest of the business, who all have different priorities and perceptions. How can they overcome this with the help of tracking?

It’s all about humanising data and creating a common language. At Tracksuit we’re not reinventing market research, we’re not reinventing brand tracking. What we are doing is simplifying and honing in on the most important aspects, in a way that drives that common language and understanding between ‘brand people’ in an organisation and the people that have no idea about brand. You might be able to see we have 30% awareness, but what does that really mean? We turn that into real people, so you can take that conversation to the board level, through stakeholders who have no idea about marketing. We help marketers talk about it in terms of real people and real change.

We’ve spoken a lot about brand tracking. Where else have you gone for inspiration recently?

I recently read Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara. It’s fantastic. It’s informed one of our key themes this year about the way we show up and deliver, to bring unbelievable customer magic. I think whether you’re in hospitality or not, it’s got fantastic learnings around growing brands and teams and culture, and how to have the best impact on your customers.