Meet Wink, the brand tracking platform built in South Africa

What does Wink measure?

Wink measures each step between a buyer first hearing of your brand and choosing it first, for your brand and every competitor you name. The survey has twelve short sections and takes about eight minutes.

It asks unaided awareness first, then aided, so you see who remembers you without a prompt and who only recognises you. Asking aided first would put your name in front of people before they had a chance to recall it.

After awareness come the steps that turn a known name into a sale:

• Consideration. Which of the brands they know they would consider.
• Investigation. Which they have actively looked into, where the category supports it.
• Usage. Which they have bought or used recently.
• Preference. Of the brands they would consider, which one they would choose first.

Around that funnel, the survey collects imagery in respondents’ own words, agreement with statements about each brand they know, media habits and a profile of who answered. Imagery shows what people connect with your name. Statements compare brands on the same attributes.

Read the steps against each other. High awareness with low consideration means people know you but don’t see you as an option. High consideration with low preference means you make the shortlist and lose at the final choice. Each points to a different fix.

Why track your brand every month?

Because one reading can’t tell you whether your brand is growing, and a monthly record can.

Most companies measure sales consistently. Far fewer do the same for their brand. In The CMO Survey’s March 2023 report, 69.9% of US marketing leaders said they measure sales revenue always or consistently, but only 12.6% said the same of brand awareness. Without that number, a brand can lose ground for months before it shows up in sales.

Sales tell you what happened. Brand numbers tell you what’s coming.

Cost is one reason brands measure once. Sagaci Research notes that “given the higher cost, custom trackers usually tend to be run as one-off studies”. A one-off study gives you a snapshot. Wink gives you a running record you can plan against.

Two snapshots are weak evidence. In Pew Research Center’s guide to the margin of error, a candidate’s lead grows by 3 points between two election polls, but the margin of error on that change is about 8 points: the result fits anything from a 5-point decline to an 11-point increase. The same applies to any survey number compared across two readings: the change has a wider margin of error than either reading. Pew adds that a series of polls moving the same way can be evidence of a real trend. A monthly tracker builds that series for your brand.

How does a Wink tracker work?

You tell us your category and up to five competitors, and we do the research work. A tracker is one category in one country. Wink tracks in South Africa, the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. We built it in South Africa and are launching here first.

1. Kickoff. A call with your team, your competitor list and sign-off on how the category is defined.
2. Setup. We build the questionnaire and translations, agree quotas and weighting, pilot it and check every branch in every language. This usually takes a few weeks.
3. Baseline. 600 respondents give you a first read on where your brand and each competitor stand, before any trend exists.
4. Monthly waves. 200 new respondents join every month. Months two and three are early reads, and they are labelled as such.
5. First rolling read. In month four your first three-month rolling headline lands, and it updates every month after that.

Respondents are real people screened into your category, quota-controlled and weighted. Nobody can take the survey again for three months, and bad responses never count. The first year adds up to 2 800 accepted category completes. In South Africa, respondents are adults who buy in your category, with quotas by age, gender and province, and the survey is offered in English and other South African languages.

After kickoff, you have nothing more to do until results land. You can watch fieldwork pacing in the portal.

What do you get each month?

Each month you get a fresh three-month rolling read for your brand and each competitor. Results are closed, reviewed, weighted and published as a versioned release, with a briefing that keeps what was observed apart from what is only suspected.

When a change is too early to call, Wink says so, because a small dip in one month is often noise. The rolling average guards against the same thing: each headline rests on three months of respondents, so one unusual month can’t swing it alone.

Thin data is labelled too. If a sample is too small, there is no history yet or weighting isn’t available, the report says which. It never shows a zero in place of a missing number.

Campaigns appear as annotations on your timeline, next to the numbers that followed them. You can ask questions about your results with Ask Wink and share reports with the whole team; admins decide who sees which tracker. Charts, briefings and exports use the same calculations, so the figure in your board deck matches the one in the dashboard.

Who is Wink for, and who isn’t it for?

Wink suits marketing teams who want to know if their brand is growing and need a number they can take into a planning meeting. It works best with a handful of competitors you watch closely. It’s a 12-month commitment, because brand tracking pays off as a trend.

A tracker is worth it in these situations:

• You ran a campaign and can’t say whether more people now think of you.
• A new competitor entered your category and you want to know if buyers are noticing. How Chinese car brands won over South African buyers is one such case.
• Your board or finance team wants a brand number that stands up to questions.
• You’re entering a new market and want a baseline before you spend.
• Awareness looks healthy, but sales aren’t following.

The last one has its own post: where your funnel leaks. For the case for brand spend when budgets are tight, read investing in your brand. Agencies can run Wink too, with one space and a tracker per client, each with its own access.

Wink is the wrong tool in these cases:

• One-off ad tests. For a verdict on a single ad, use an ad test. A tracker reads your whole brand against competitors over 12 months.
• No clear category. If you can’t say who buys what you sell and which brands they choose between, there is nobody to screen and nothing to compare you with.
• Weekly reads. 200 respondents a month divided by four is about 50 a week, and Pew notes that estimates built on fewer cases carry larger margins of error. A weekly number needs a far larger sample than a Wink tracker runs.

How much does Wink cost?

Wink charges one monthly price per tracker, in local currency; the current price for each market is on the pricing page. It includes the baseline, the monthly waves, your competitors, the portal, Ask Wink and reports. There are no seat fees and no add-ons. The minimum term is 12 months, and a second country or category is a second tracker.

We set the price so a tracker can stay in the budget month after month, because tracking only shows change if it keeps running.

To see what a tracker would cover in your category, book a demo and tell us which competitors you watch.