brand tracker

How Pollfish Clients Use Our Brand Tracker and Polling Trackers to Meet Business Goals

How Pollfish Clients Use Our Brand Tracker and Polling Trackers to Meet Business Goals 

brand tracker

Running a brand tracker and other polling trackers is essential to keeping a constant oversight of the perceptions of your company. Understanding the views of your target market will help you both conceive and execute a variety of business campaigns. 

Pollfish clients run trackers throughout the year to track everything from their brand awareness to consumer loyalty and a variety of other matters. 

That’s because when it comes conducting market research, understanding your customers is one of the most important benefits, as it helps drive the success of a variety of business goals. Aside from understanding their needs and habits, it is just as crucial to understand how your customers view your brand in particular.

That’s where brand and other polling trackers are especially useful, as they allow you to discover how your target market views various aspects and news of your brand, along with unearthing whether they know about its existence in the first place.

This article provides firsthand information on how clients of the online market research platform Pollfish use brand trackers and other polling trackers to meet their business goals. 

Brand Awareness and Usage of a Streaming Platform

One of Pollfish’s major clients is a global audio streaming and media services provider. This platform used Pollfish brand trackers to conduct global market research. The client's intent was to track brand awareness and usage of their platform in five countries.

Specifically, this client sought to uncover trends throughout different days, months and even years and then use those trends to compare with the ads that were being run in specific regions. 

The streaming platform used the Pollfish brand trackers on a daily basis, seeking to uncover how well residents of the five countries were aware of the streaming platform and how often they used it. 

The company has been running the tracker for half a year as the main instrument in assessing brand awareness and usage.

Brand Awareness and Physical Visitation of an Immersive Arts Production Company

An art production company that creates immersive, multimedia experiences for audiences of all ages, relied on the Pollfish brand tracker to trace both brand awareness and the visitation of its physical exhibitions in different states across the US.

The client has continuously used this tracker to see trends across months, using this information to compare to ad expenditure. As of today, they have run the tracker for one year. 

The outcome of using this tracker involved leveraging data on brand awareness to understand how ad expenditure is working in certain locations. 

Consumer Behavior and Purchasing Decisions of the Condiment Company Kalsec

Kalsec, a US-based food manufacturer that produces condiments, has been running global trackers on Pollfish since 2019. The company has used polling trackers to observe customer behavior, with a particular analysis on purchasing decisions, as they sought to understand their consumers’ decision-making on the purchase of spices and other flavorings.  

Kalsec used our trackers to review year-over-year trends to understand their consumers and aid in their own decision-making processes. 

brand tracking

Running the trackers in 14 countries, Kalsec investigated the awareness of its brand, along with consumer preferences of their products through a global lens. In doing so, the condiment company was able to compare how awareness and preferences panned out across various countries. 

The insights that Kalsec derived allowed the business to make key decisions, specifically those that solidify its stance in the industry as experts and leaders on the topic of hot and spicy flavors. 

In addition, the company chose to leverage the insights for content creation and lead generation. Furthermore, the brand tracker aided Kalsec in internal business decisions on product ideation and development.

Brand Loyalty of an E-commerce Marketing Brand

An ecommerce marketing platform sought to examine the brand loyalty of various brands using the platform. As such, it utilized the Pollfish brand tracker to do just that. Specifically, the platform conducted a consumer behavior study to unlock market trends and steer content initiatives.

Beginning in 2020, the ecommerce company has been analyzing trends relating to consumer spending, along with brand loyalty to specific brands that use the platform year-over-year. 

Running trackers on a yearly basis, the company sought different opportunities to reach its consumers, while it simultaneously measured their loyalty to the platform. 

The tracker also provided the ecommerce platform with insights on consumer behavior, in addition to measuring key metrics to align with internal efforts. 

The Quorum Leverages The Pollfish Platform To Surface Key Audience Insights Into The Film Business

In late 2020, The Quorum, a film industry research firm, turned to Pollfish to create a survey tracker for the purpose of measuring awareness and interest in upcoming film releases. Key to this research has been measuring changes over time through longitudinal surveys

The Quorum has been fielding these studies three times a week for the past 18 months. Results of the surveys are available for all to see on The Quorum's website.

brand tracker

Primarily created as a resource for movie fans, the resulting data has become a valuable resources for the studios and streamers as a way of measuring the health of a film's marketing campaign. 

"We are in the field five days a week. In deciding on a data partner, we were looking for a platform that would allow us to maintain complete control over the writing, programming, and fielding of our studies in a frictionless environment. We were immediatley sold once we saw the robust and intuitive Pollfish interface. Eighteen months and hundreds of surveys later, we have no regrets about the decision to work with Pollfish.” 

- David Herrin, Founder, The Quorum

This research has resulted in numerous insights into consumer behavior and attitudes about individual films and the theatrical business as a whole. This has proven to be especially valuable in understanding an industry that has seen immense disruption from the pandemic.  

The Quorum’s specific objectives with their tracker usage centered on assessing movie awareness over time and determining how the industry has been changing. In addition, the company has been striving to eventually monetize its website by selling its data to studios.

This data is available to the general public, though a market has emerged in licensing the data to studios and streamers. This has become one unexpected monetization model for the tracker.

Brand Awareness and Health of a Condiment Company

Another condiment company has been using the Pollfish brand tracker to keep track of brand health and awareness. Starting in early 2020, the consumer packaged goods company has run a quarterly tracker to track condiment awareness and usage of the products in different cities.

This company has continued relying on the Pollfish tracker, as it allows them to track brand usage and awareness over time in specific, local markets.

Running quarterly, the goals of this tracker include being able to:

  • Understand how the company’s brand image stacks up against its competition in its key markets
  • Decipher whether its awareness and usage is increasing or decreasing

The tracker has allowed the condiment company to understand the trajectory of its brand perception within its target market and determine how it aligns with other marketing efforts.

Keeping Constant Track of Your Brand

Brand perception shifts with the seasons and the times. What remains constant is the need to satisfy your customers, maintain a healthy brand reputation and grow your brand equity

As such, you need to keep track of your brand, whether it's for gauging your awareness, reputation, demand or other concerns. 

To do so, you’ll need to opt for an online research platform that makes it easy to run polling trackers. This way, you will be able to collect all your necessary data from the right respondents in a short window of time. 

As such, choose a survey platform that features artificial intelligence and machine learning to remove low-quality data and offer a broad range of survey and question types.

It should include advanced skip logic to route respondents to relevant follow-up questions based on their previous answers. 

Most importantly, it should allow you to survey anyone.  As such, you’ll need a platform with a reach to millions of individuals, along with one that offers the Distribution Link feature. 

This feature will allow you to send your survey to specific respondents, rather than simply deploying surveys across a network. 

With a market research platform that offers all of these capabilities, you’ll be able to survey your audience and run quality trackers whenever you wish.


How Pollfish Provided Global Support for an App Client

How Pollfish Provided Global Support for an App Client

Market research is crucial for brands that have a global footprint, as well as those seeking to venture into the international stage. Pollfish empowers businesses with global support for all of their global market research needs. 

This kind of research is a must for tapping into the minds of a global target market, along with building customer loyalty across the world. 95% of global customers consider customer service as essential in their business choice and loyalty. 

It is virtually impossible to create a strong customer service and experience for global customers without understanding their habits, opinions and needs. Thus, conducting market research is essential.

While there are plenty of syndicated research firms and market research platforms available, they do not all deliver robust global support for international market research.

This article lays out how Pollfish is the ideal platform for conducting market research across nations, along with a use case from an app client that shows the prowess of Pollfish global support. 

Global Support Capabilities for Market Research 

A potent market research campaign should involve using a tool that makes it easy to access global markets and one that can operate at speed. Ideally, it should take the same amount of time to run a global market research campaign, as it would a domestic one.

Survey research is a practical form of conducting global market research, but not every survey platform is built the same. As such, not all platforms provide the same kind of quality for conducting surveys locally, let alone abroad. 

Pollfish provides a unique edge to businesses who seek to branch out into the global arena, as well as to companies that have an established global presence. There are several ways that the Pollfish online survey platform provides market researchers with top-notch global support, the kind that enables them to quickly gain customer insights from a multitude of countries. 

First off, Pollfish offers customer support on a 24-hour basis, so researchers in practically all parts of the globe can get support at any time of the day. Thus, they’ll never have to change their busy schedules to accommodate their market research tool. Instead, the platform is accommodated to their liking and needs. Any misgiving, doubt or difficulty they may experience is no problem for our team of market research experts working round the clock to ensure an effective global survey study.

Next, the Pollfish platform does not charge businesses extra for running surveys outside of their home countries. As such, market researchers can freely conduct global market research, reaching any country they wish, without incurring additional charges. They have access to a wide net of global customers, all under one platform and without being monetarily constrained.  

global market research
The Pollfish platform allows market researchers to target customers in 160 countries and easily filter them across multiple audiences.

Finally, the Pollfish market research platform itself is equipped with various features that allow researchers to carry out their global research needs smoothly and quickly. This is largely because the platform is powered by some of the most advanced forms of technology, some of which eliminate the need to use other primary research tools and conduct secondary research.

The Prowess of the Pollfish Online Survey Platform for Global Research 

In reference to the previous section, aside from the 24-hour support and no additional charges for global surveys, the Pollfish online survey platform offers many high-quality features for conducting global market research. 

The following lists all the capabilities that Pollfish offers to ensure a strong and seamless global survey research campaign: 

  1. Survey deployment to 160 countries 
  2. Translations feature 
  3. Multiple audiences feature
    1. Allows researchers to filter audiences by country, in order to see results on a per-country basis for comparisons.
  4. Survey deployment and iteration is executed at speed
  5. Researchers can survey up to 10,000 respondents per survey 
  6. Reaching customers internationally does not require a longer survey completion time.
    1. It takes the same amount of time to deploy, illiterate and retrieve global responses.
  7. Targeting virtually all demographic groups 

Use Case with Pollfish App Client

A Pollfish client used the Pollfish survey platform for a global expansion campaign. Lingokids, a learning app for young children, sought to expand the presence of its app in order to achieve international brand awareness.

Lingokids faced several challenges in its pursuit. First off, it still needed to crack the challenge of developing local brand awareness, making that of the global variety a much more difficult feat. 

The app client also set out to generate stories for press releases that speak to its target market.  

With traditional market research models, the client would have endured limitations and high costs. But with Pollfish, Lingokids received access to a reasonably-priced self-service platform market research that operates on RDE (random device engagement sampling). 

RDE is a kind of sampling that engages users in their natural digital habitats, without pre-recruiting them. Rather, their participation is completely voluntary and anonymous. Thus, the respondents are not pressured to answer questions in any particular way, which stamps out certain survey biases and fraud. 

The platform uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to perform ongoing quality checks as the surveys are running. This way, all of the resulting customer data that researchers receive is of the highest quality. These checks filter respondents through various kinds of quality criteria and disqualify participants who do not meet these standards. 

For example, surveys with gibberish answers and flatlining answers (same multiple-choice answers consecutively) are disqualified, along with respondents that mask their geographical location or use a VPN. This method discards poor data, removing biases, errors and useless information — without the researchers having to lift a finger. 

Based in Spain, Lingokids started launching Pollfish surveys in 2019 Sain to generate data and stories for press releases. But Lingokids’ success is not limited to Spain. The app client surveyed customers in other geos, such as the US, Mexico, and other countries.

“I’ve seen amazing results. If I put together all the press releases based on Pollfish data, not only in Spain, but in the US, Mexico, and other countries, I would say we’ve gotten over a hundred stories in tier 1, 2, and 3 media. That’s pretty good for a start-up,”  said Sara Mateos-Aparicio, Communications Manager at Lingokids.

As a Spanish company, understanding the US market has posed several challenges. But

survey data from Pollfish paid off, as Lingokids used their survey data for different media campaigns in California and New York. The survey data helped them measure impacts pre-and post-campaign.

Those surveys were completed in about three to four days, with Lingokids also having received 800 survey responses in 24 hours. 

Lingokids was able to not only measure and grow its brand awareness, but understand how to grow globally by analyzing the media types that work best to reach its target market in different countries.

Survey data also helped Lingokids learn about its competition along with gathering subtle insights into the culture of the US market. For example, Lingokids learned that children’s safety with learning apps concerned US parents more than parents in many other countries. This granted Lingokids the insights it needed to better launch US campaigns, having centered them on safety.

In summary, by running international surveys on the Pollfish online survey platform, Lingokids obtained over 100 stories in tier 1, 2, and 3 media, measured brand awareness in pre-and post-media campaigns, netted 800 survey responses in 24 hours, unearthed data on the competition in other countries and gained actionable insights into other cultures.

“You can make assumptions about your market, but they’re just assumptions,” said Sara Mateos-Aparicio, Communications Manager at Lingokids. “With Pollfish, you can confirm those

assumptions and they become data.”

Global Support with a Strong Online Survey Tool 

While plenty of online market research platforms offer a best-in-class solution, not all such platforms offer global support and capabilities as does the Pollfish platform. Businesses who are serious about studying their target market in other countries must use a robust online survey platform.

Businesses should therefore invest in a platform that allows them to study their global customers at scale and at speed, without worrying about incurring higher costs or running into technical issues. 

A self-service survey platform, Pollfish gives businesses quick access to various global markets and offers 24-hour support, should researchers encounter any difficulties or concerns. It helps hundreds of clients run global market research on a daily basis. 

If you would like to learn more about how Lingokids leveraged the Pollfish platform, read our use case.


Conducting Global Market Research with a Dynamic Market Research Platform

Conducting Global Market Research with a Dynamic Market Research Platform

Businesses that seek to offer products and services to international customers would be remiss not to conduct global market research. This form of research prepares both current businesses participating in a global market, along with prospective ones.

Understanding customers from across the world is equally highly regarded internationally, as it is in the US. 66% of global customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations. As such, providing the correct experiences and fulfilling the needs of customers is no longer a secondary requirement for global consumers.

Performing market research should therefore not be limited to domestic studies, whether it is for an international e-commerce business or a content provider who seeks global research.  

This article expounds on global market research, its importance, key components, challenges and how to conduct it, along with a use case from a real Pollfish client. 

Understanding Global Market Research

Global market research stems from the same idea as traditional market research — the process of gathering information about target markets and customers in a specific industry.

Global market research refers to the organized effort of systematically collecting, recording, designing, analyzing and interpreting information pertinent to a target market on a global scale. As such, this kind of market research studies individuals outside of local and national markets, examining those in the international space instead. 

There are various market research techniques that market researchers can apply to their global market research campaigns. Existing and emerging technologies facilitate these efforts, breaking down what would have been obstacles. 

Global market research is not the complete equivalent of traditional or domestic market research. While these two forms of research are parallel in certain regards, they differ in their approach and focus on different core subject matters. 

Market research on a global scale is applicable to all business concepts, from the viability of new products to studying and increasing customer lifetime value (CLV). Therefore, conducting market research across the globe can help businesses improve in various ways and meet a wide variety of KPIs and objectives

The Importance of Global Market Research

This kind of research is invaluable on various fronts — for businesses and general research purposes alike.

Firstly, the constant advancement of technology has opened many international business opportunities for companies to expand their business by venturing abroad. This is especially the case for SaaS companies and businesses that provide services that don’t require shipping materials to foreign countries. Thus, it is far more efficient to offer global services. 

This means that businesses have target markets that far exceed those within their home country. To compete with any business in any industry, businesses must satisfy their customers and these concepts lay the foundation of the importance of global market research, because, to please customers, businesses must understand them at granular levels.

Market research provides a means of doing so, with various sources and methods to extract data on global customers. 

Secondly, marketing strategies do not pan out in the same way across localities and different segments of a target market. As such, they will certainly not be received in the same way across different countries and continents

Due to different cultural norms, languages and connotations, a company’s messaging, communications and marketing campaigns will therefore not have the same effect as they intend in different geographical markets. Global market research helps reconcile these differences across countries, by specifically focusing on cultural and geographical differences.

Additionally, information that contains the exact responses from a business’s global customers arms it with the knowledge and insights necessary for various business operations. It provides valuable information on executing changes or launches to product development, design, delivery, packaging and quality.

It also allows marketers to establish unique advertising campaigns, ones that are either made solely for a particular international market, or those that tweak existing campaigns to fit the cultural norms and sensitivities of other countries.  

Moreover, conducting this research helps businesses properly set their prices when selling to customers abroad. This way, their pricing is reasonable across countries. For example, a piece of furniture may retail for a completely different price in the US than it would in France.

Furthermore, the global digital population is on the rise, with 4.66 billion active worldwide internet users. This figure represents 59.5% of the global population. A vast majority of these users, 92%, access the internet via mobile devices. 

It would be negligent for businesses not to study this colossal population to improve all of their marketing and general business goals. They would simply need to use the correct online market research platform to examine this inflating population.

The Components of Global Market Research

Global market research has its own set of key components, some of which largely distinguish it from traditional and domestic market research. These components allow researchers to focus their survey research exclusively on the behaviors, sentiments, opinions and needs of customers abroad. 

By paying attention to these components, businesses can gain insights that improve any globally-targeted marketing campaign and even forge brand loyalty. 

The following lists several major components of global market research:

  1. The focus on a specific geography: Market research allows businesses to zero in on a specific country or continent. 
  2. Reaching customers that appear to be unreachable: This involves using market research techniques to reach international customers directly, that is, through primary research tools, such as a focus group or an online survey platform.
    1. Not all market research methods and tools offer the same global reach.
  3. An analysis of cultural differences: This covers examining all possible cultural differences, from the role of women versus men in shopping, to religious holidays, to business closings, etc. 
    1. Essentially, this allows brands to adjust their marketing and create messaging that can better relate to customers in different countries. 
  4. An analysis of economic differences: This is critical to understand when setting up a global pricing strategy. This is because all countries have different economic climates; some may be undergoing a recession, some may incur strong unemployment rates, while others may be experiencing an economic boom — at least in a particular market.
  5. Tapping Into global markets via their native language: Not all members of a global target market speak English, which means that to study them, researchers will need to reach them in their native language.
  6. Ethnic considerations and national customs: Similar to cultural differences, studying specific national and ethnic concerns is important, as it helps businesses avoid marketing campaigns that can offend global customers’ sensibilities.  
  7. Understanding typical Incomes: The income considered low or middle-class in one country may not be so in another. Global market research helps brands understand how typical incomes are classified across global regions.
    1. Additionally, it reveals common salaries and other income information across the demographic groups of a country.
  8. Product demand: Some countries will have demand for things that barely get an afterthought in other countries. This can be for a specific product or a product feature enhancement.
    1. By conducting global market research, businesses can understand the exact needs of their global target market and innovate accordingly.
    2. This way, they can create more viable products for international sale and satisfy their customers abroad.

The Challenges of Global Market Research

Global market research is beset with its own share of challenges that make it difficult to conduct, let alone complete. However, there are survey tools that make conducting this form of research practical and easy. But first, businesses need to acclimate themselves with the challenges that may come their way should they conduct global market research.

While some techniques and methods used in domestic market research may also be applied to their global counterparts, customer preferences are not easy to determine. As such, it is difficult to compare global markets due to the greater diversity in cultural, social, and economic differences, all of which affect consumption. 

Then there is the challenge of conducting the research in the first place. Global market research is a far more ambitious project, therefore, it tends to require more hours on conducting various techniques, such as scouting for secondary research. These will differ among companies and research campaigns.  

As far as methodology goes, global research also requires more time spent on execution. Researchers would need to contend with extracting the data, designing the study either across one country abroad or multiple countries, coordinating between different countries and piecing together the resulting data. 

These are just some of the points of friction that businesses must grapple with before conducting their global studies. 

Market researchers must also be somewhat knowledgeable of the local customs and environments of their respective targeted countries to carry out the research successfully, especially when conducting primary research. This will help researchers avoid making their subjects feel uncomfortable, therefore cutting back on survey attrition. This will also help researchers structure their primary research. 

Then, there is the monetary challenge: large survey research projects are costly endeavors, some of which may incur hundreds of thousands a year. This is especially challenging for businesses that have just broken into the international market.

How to Conduct Global Market Research

Conducting global market research requires many of the prerequisites of domestic market research. A business will have to compile secondary and primary resources to perform an exhaustive study. 

There are various secondary sources that businesses can incorporate into their global research. 

Government agencies provide free access to statistics on their residents, a kind of hard data that is valuable for preliminary studies. These statistics are useful for learning about a foreign country’s demographics, state of its economy, and commerce status. 

The International Trade Administration churns out economic reports, forecasts and infographics on various countries and industries. Their website can complement domestic market research, as it contains statistics on US national trade.  

Researchers can also attend international trade shows, workshops, and seminars in their industry — some offer this virtually. For example, The Tradeshow Network Marketing Group lists all the major international tradeshows and their respective industries. 

Each industry also has dedicated online publications that publish articles on emerging trends and news on the industry, including customer preferences, technology, products and services and other related information.

Finally, businesses need to conduct their global market research; this can be done in several ways. They can turn to survey panels, mail-in surveys, phone calls with existing customers and field research.

Online surveys are the most potent tools for global market research.

This is because an online survey platform, such as Pollfish, offers the best distribution method and allows businesses to study any segments of global customers, as it reaches 160 countries

Using random device engagement (RDE), Pollfish targets digital users in their natural environments. Thus, respondent participation is randomized and voluntary, removing the risk of survey bias, as respondents are not pre-recruited and completely anonymous. Pollfish has the power to deploy surveys to a vast network of global customers, as it distributes surveys across the most visited websites and apps, to a sampling pool of 250 million people

Additionally, Pollfish allows survey creation for 46 languages and also offers a Translate Survey feature. This way, businesses can seamlessly reach non-English speaking customers across the world.

Researchers can meet all of their quotas with the Pollfish online survey platform, with the option of adding quotas in the screener, along with multiple audiences per survey. This way, they can target various segments of their global target market. The platform also offers a survey completion time, so that researchers have a reasonable estimate of the time it takes to draw all the preset survey responses.

Global Market Research Use Case with a Pollfish Client

Kalsec, a food manufacturer that produces space and herb extracts, colors and food protection for the food and beverage industry, has used the Pollfish platform to run a global market research campaign

Thus, the company deployed surveys in various global markets: those in the North American, European and Asian regions, specifically in Canada, the UK, France, China and Thailand. Given that to understand the needs of global customers, businesses must conduct studies on various global regions on a country-to-country basis

This is exactly what Kalsec did, arming the business with critical insights they would need to pay extra for, had they used another online survey provider. 

Specifically, Kalsec studied consumer behavior and purchase decision-making to get a sense of its global customers' purchasing behavior about its brand. The surveys that Kalsec ran centered on the snacking behaviors of residents in the five aforementioned countries. 

The company sought insight on what drives customers from making their snack purchases and their Pollfish-powered global market research allowed them to compare customer behavior across various countries and better tailor their shopping campaigns. 

Essentially, Pollfish technology broke down geographic and communication barriers across these global markets, granting speedy insights that the company wouldn’t obtain from secondary research alone. 

Making Continuous Improvements in the Global Arena

Businesses that seek to offer their services to global customers ought to make use of global market research. The same goes for businesses with an established global presence, given that understanding customers is at the core of maintaining business success.

To conduct global market research, businesses need to use a robust online survey platform, such as Pollfish.  A strong online survey tool will enable businesses to set granular demographic requirements for global customers, ask a wide style of questions (multiple-selection, single selection, ratings, etc), add advanced skip logic, add media files and use multiple audiences per survey. 

Pollfish is built for global market research, as it offers 24-hour support, so that regardless of which time zone a client is in, they can easily reach the customer support team should they require assistance. Pollfish users do not have to pay more to gain access to global customers and send global surveys, a major advantage over the many other platforms. 

A DIY survey platform, Pollfish allows businesses to make global market research an attainable goal.