Seven clusters cover most of what you really need.
1. Brand Awareness and Recognition
Awareness shows whether you live in the memory bank at all. Aaker treats brand awareness, alongside loyalty, perceived quality, and associations, as one of four primary dimensions of equity.
Mental availability adds another question: What’s the chance a buyer will actually think of you in a buying situation?
In tracking, we usually look at:
- Unaided (spontaneous) awareness: brands people name without prompts
- First-mention awareness: the very first brand that comes to mind
- Aided awareness: recognition from a list
Decades of empirical work from Ehrenberg-Bass show that brands grow mainly by increasing penetration (reaching more buyers) rather than dramatically increasing loyalty among a small base. Higher awareness and mental availability often go hand in hand with higher penetration.
An always-on setup means you can see those curves move in near real time instead of waiting for the next quarterly wave.
2. Purchase Intent and Brand Preference
Awareness answers “who’s in your head.” Consideration answers “who’s genuinely in the frame to be picked.”
In most categories, you see the same funnel shape: many brands are known, fewer are seriously considered, and even fewer are first choice. That mirrors the idea that brands move from identity and meaning toward response and, eventually, resonance.
In practice, two questions are usually enough:
- Which brands would you seriously consider next time you buy?
- If you had to choose today, which brand would be your first choice?
With daily data, you see those shifts right after campaigns, launches, or pricing moves, while there’s still time to adjust.
3. Perceived Quality and Relevance
Perceived quality is about whether people think you will do the job and whether the price feels fair.
Most trackers focus on three ideas:
- Overall product or service quality
Categories then add their own specifics: safety in autos, security and transparency in financial services, taste and consistency in food and drink, and so on. Keller’s work suggests that strong performance on these “meaning” layers supports better judgments, feelings, and ultimately more loyal behavior.
In our dashboards, quality and trust scores often behave like early warning lights. If they soften while usage and sales still look fine, smart teams start investigating before the P&L catches up.
4. Brand Associations and Perception
Associations are the shortcuts in people’s minds: what you’re “about.”
Aaker explicitly lists brand associations as a primary equity dimension, and Keller’s pyramid treats brand “imagery,” “judgments,” and “feelings” as core building blocks.
In survey terms, this usually becomes a short set of statements respondents can agree or disagree with, covering:
- Functional benefits (does it do what I need?)
- Emotional benefits (how does it make me feel?)
- Values and personality (is this “for people like me”?)
The most useful lists reflect real category language and customer research rather than internal brand vocabulary. For a sportswear brand, that might be performance, motivation, and self-expression. For a financial app, it might be control, ease, and peace of mind.
Analyses of brands like Nike and Apple often highlight how clear, consistent associations around performance and inspiration (Nike) or design and simplicity (Apple) support both choice and pricing power.
In tracking, small shifts in these meaning items often appear before changes in consideration or willingness to pay, especially in younger segments.
5. Experience, Satisfaction, and Engagement
Brand stories are written in marketing but proven in everyday experiences.
Most organizations already track operational metrics for service, delivery, product quality, or digital performance. What’s often missing is a simple bridge into the brand health view.
In Delineate Proximity®, that bridge is usually:
- A high-level “recent experience” or satisfaction question
- A short, consistent list of common problem types or friction points
- Sometimes a quick loyalty or recommendation question directly after key touchpoints
When those experience signals sit next to perceived quality, trust, and likelihood to recommend, patterns become hard to ignore. A spike in delivery issues followed by a dip in “reliable” and “does the right thing” is clearly not just a customer-service problem but a brand problem.
Behind the scenes, a lot of engineering work goes into keeping this data clean. Delineate Proximity® uses real-time fraud detection and quality checks to filter out bots, speeders, and low-quality responses before they ever hit a client dashboard.
6. Brand Loyalty and Retention
Loyalty is where mindset and behavior meet. In Aaker’s framework, loyalty is a dimension of equity in its own right. In Keller’s model, loyalty and active engagement show up in the resonance layer at the top of the pyramid.
In tracking, this usually boils down to a couple of simple questions:
- How likely are you to buy from this brand again?
- How likely are you to recommend it to someone else?
That second one underpins Net Promoter Score (NPS). NPS has plenty of critics, but when NPS, repeat purchase, and satisfaction move together, the story is easy to tell.
7. Market Share and Penetration
Finally, any brand health system needs a view of who actually uses or buys the brand.
Evidence from decades of category data suggests that brands mostly grow by increasing penetration rather than squeezing more volume from existing buyers. Lower-share brands tend to have fewer buyers who are also slightly less loyal.
So most trackers include which brands people have bought or used in a recent period, rough frequency of use, and, sometimes, which formats or variants.
Those answers do two jobs. They let you line up awareness, consideration, and usage to see where people drop out of the journey. And they give analytics teams something to compare against actual sales and penetration numbers when they bring survey data into their models.
