What you need to know:

• The need to prove the value of a business pivot towards brand building in line with its 2030 strategy and investment into its first global brand campaign has seen Intrepid’s dedicated brand team roll out survey and tracking tools that can finally surface brand worth.
• GM of global brand, Natalie Placko, said the team has quickly gone from one survey per year to a quarterly cadence that’s canvassed more than 15,000 customers, recognition of how critical these brand tracking tools are in understanding the impact of brand campaigns and efforts.
• Intrepid has landed on aided awareness as its key measure – one that Placko says is easy for the whole enterprise to understand and rally behind.
• Data literacy across the team has been a vital part of ensuring not only that brand tracking is a useful tool for the team, but to also ensure people don’t “blow up” insights or misread signals and instead gain a “levelheaded view” of what data is telling them, she says.
• Having the tools has directly led to the decision to conduct a positioning strategy project – the first in Intrepid’s 35-year history.
• At a more tactical level, the tools have also helped with creative testing as well as connecting the dots on when, where and how to invest in the marketing mix to target prospects and across regional nuances.
• What Placko has also been able to realise from the brand health measures is that Intrepid needs to do more to differentiate as a brand. As she says: “Rightly or wrongly, good and bad, we are known for a lot as a brand, but not kind of remembered for any one thing. We’re not hot or cold on anything; we’re in the middle. That opportunity for differentiation is something we truly believe internally – there is a really strong point of difference between us the competitor landscape. But we weren’t representing or messaging that well enough.”

It’s the scenario no brand leader wants to own up to: Every other team from performance to CX has figures demonstrating the value of their activities, yet you have few. That’s the position Intrepid global GM of brand, Natalie Placko, was in until she rolled out a brand tracking platform.

As Mi3 has reported, there’s a big shift towards brand investment going on at Intrepid – recognition of the critical role brand has in meeting its ambitious 2030 strategy of doubling customers to 600,000 and achieving $1.3bn in revenue. But even if you have the gut belief investing in brand is a good idea, how are you going to prove it?

This was the quandary facing Placko. Back in 2019, when Intrepid first decided to rebrand, the task was a superficial brand refresh. “As we started to do that work, the biggest question from the CEO was: How are we going to know whether any of the work we are doing in the rebrand – changing the logo or whatever it is – is a success? Is this investment going to be worth it?” she tells Mi3.

Fast forward to the biggest event in travel history – the Covid-19 pandemic – and Intrepid had evolved thinking to a bigger brand repositioning plan even despite the macro-economic headwinds and uncertainty it was facing.

“But that question kept coming back: How are we going to know it works? It’s so different to performance marketing, which many people have been so drugged up on - and for good reason, given it’s so measurable, so insightful and immediate results. Brand couldn’t be any more different,” Placko says.

“We knew we had to have something to prove its worth. Leigh [Barnes, chief customer officer, Intrepid] and I have been championing the brand for several years. We created a new brand team for this because the differences are so important and there’s value in having both brand and marketing focus. This was about giving value back to the work we’re doing.

“I used to always say to Leigh ‘I’ve got a good feeling about this’. That’s great to say to Leigh, not as great with the CEO.”

Actually measuring brand

So Intrepid brought in the Qualtrics platform a year ago. Placko admits it was a “considerable amount of my budget” that was not necessarily expected to pay back in quick wins.

“The biggest learning for us is brand is such a long-term game and prioritisation of investment,” she says. “I felt personally because we haven’t done this previously, it was our moment to almost start again. This isn’t about the short wins and returns. Last year, while we did both, we definitely invested in our long game.”

The first brand survey wave was conducted last March. Intrepid has done three since, canvassing 15,000 customers or about 3,500 per survey. It’s also used the platform for testing three creative iterations for its global campaign. Having done its first wave of 2024, it’s about to commence year-on-year comparisons.

“If I could turn back 35 years to when Intrepid started and we had all the data since then that we have been able to capture in one year, it would be a goldmine,” says Placko. “We dabbled once years ago in what I could consider – with no disrespect – an old-school approach to market research from a brand perspective, looking at brand awareness. It took months, it cost so much money and it was so out of date by the time they presented the results to us, and there were no tangible outcomes. Such massive strides have been taken in brand research since then.

“In making the decision to invest in Qualtrics last year, we knew we needed brand health to be part of our ecosystem and our insights. We have lots of other insights, data measuring tools, customer experience in our CX team – my brand team measured nothing. We didn’t know exactly what we would be really focused on.”

After the first wave of surveys after the ‘Good Trips Only’ campaign launch, Placko’s team landed on ‘aided awareness’ as the key measure to track.

“Aided awareness is really easy for all of our business to understand – from sales interacting with customers on the phone and the value that aided awareness can do even at that start of the journey, to our board members. We go much deeper in our team of course, but from a broad business measure, we use aided awareness.”

Having gone from a standing start of one survey annually, timed after Intrepid launched its global brand campaign in 2023, it’s now committed to a quarterly cadence.

Making brand insights useful

It’s one thing for a brand team to harness data coming from a brand measurement tool, and to ensure a data culture is as embedded as it can be, Intrepid has Mandy Alderson, head of global brand management, at the steering wheel of the Qualtrics platform. But it’s quite another connecting the dots from brand tracking to other insights across the enterprise. Placko recognises the challenge.

“I think it is super easy for someone to get overwhelmed. If you are a new user, going into the platform can be overwhelming,” she says. “We have really invested in making sure the brand team is so into the detail that it isn’t just in the insights team or in our metrics and data team.”

Then there’s the worry other teams might “blow up” a smaller insight without appropriate context. As Placko puts it, you have to have the literacy, not just data and insights in place, “or you could see things that are not really there”.

“Consistency and constantly looking at data has given us a much more level-headed view,” Placko says. “Committing to more surveys also gave us more touchpoints. Not being too emotional about what you see is key too – it can be confronting in a bad way, but also quite exciting in other ways. Time, in-depth understanding of the data, and not immediately jumping off a ledge thinking you have seen something good or bad until you can prove it is key.”

Finding brand differentiation

The platform has led to two hefty pieces of internal work, with the support of brand agency, SouthSouthWest. One is a positioning strategy for Intrepid; something it’s not had in its 35-year history.

“Rightly or wrongly, good and bad, we are known for a lot as a brand, but not kind of remembered for any one thing. We’re not hot or cold on anything; we’re in the middle. People know us, but what it was showing was we were neither the most X, Y or Z brand, or the least X, Y or Z brand,” Placko comments. “That opportunity for differentiation is something we truly believe internally – there is a really strong point of difference between us and the competitor landscape. But we weren’t representing or messaging that well enough.”

Secondly, the team is working on a connection strategy to better gauge how, when and where to interact with the right customer at the right time using insights surfaced. Both jobs will start informing decision making from H2.

“I can see potentially how these platforms could sit to the side if the investment and passion internally isn’t there. My advice is to make sure you have the right people in the brand team to drive the brand tools. If this tool was in another area of the business, it may not get as much daily love,” Placko advises.

Justifying ROI

Justifying platform spend is twofold for Placko. One is simply realising Intrepid’s business vision of becoming a global, iconic brand. As part of the umbrella strategy, it’s rebranded all business units under one unified “Intrepid” moniker, including destination management company, Peak.

The second ROI is more tactical – seeing the results and using them. “When we put the global brand campaign into market last year, we saw an increase in our brand awareness across all three core regions. ROI on the tool is our ability to measure the work we haven’t been able to measure before,” Placko says. “This has always been the challenge with brand, and I expect many other brand managers have it: You can only talk so much and try to get your campaign or work to be seen as being successful.”

“There is always an always-on approach to performance, but I truly believe the return we’re seeing and insights are giving us this ability to spend more in brand and less in performance, and the ROI negates itself.”

Intrepid reported lifts in branded search of 10-40 per cent depending on city post-campaign; plus aided brand awareness increases of 5 per cent in Australia and other locations, contributing to a yearly overall average increase of 40 per cent. Annual revenue hit a record $621m in 2023.

Today, lntrepid has an even brand/performance marketing investment split. “Intuitively, we all knew what good brand looked like. We just didn’t have the terminology; we didn’t talk about brand campaigns,” Placko says. “It was either marketing campaigns that were product-led or commercially tactical. We have come a long way to get to a 50/50 split.”

Quarter to quarter comparisons continue, helping inform short-term marketing decision, with nuanced measurement KPIs in place to recognise Intrepid’s varying maturing in core growth markets of Australia, North America, Canada and the UK.

“For example, we’re seeing PR as a huge driver of awareness in North America,” Placko says. “Again, it’s enabling us at that frontline to share insights from a marketing mix perspective and ensure we’re investing in the right things at the right time. That’s not just brand or performance, but other things in the mix and brand ecosystem.”

Intrepid has quarterly aided awareness targets in place and will continue to share performance against those with the broader business, c-suite and board.

“We have a list of attributes we share and we do it from a competitive perspective as well – that’s what is driving the positioning work we expect to roll out in Q3, 2025,” Placko says.

“This is the biggest shift in our marketing – the ability to actually have numbers behind us. We’ve waited way too many years to be in this position, but now we’re here. I’ve presented more to the board now than I ever have before.

“At Intrepid, while we have a lot of data, we still do a lot of things using our gut because we believe we know our customers and get to interact with them so much more than many businesses. We have a product they experience with us. The two things working together is a perfect partnership and has made my job so much easier.”