What you need to know:

• Tracksuit, a New Zealand-based start-up backed by Blackbird Ventures, Mark Ritson and the company behind Cannes and Warc, is bidding to disrupt brand tracking, historically dominated by the likes of Ipsos, Kantar, Nielsen and Qualtrics.
• It’s claiming to slash costs by 80 per cent, enabling marketers to better value brand, justify investments and predict future demand, i.e. growth via always on brand tracking and simple dashboards versus weighty slide decks.
• It has formed an alliance with Mutinex, another firm bidding to draw a through line from brand investment to revenue.
• Co-founder and CEO Connor Archibold says VC firms are keen on the tool, recognising that their consumer brand start-ups can no longer sustain growth by relying on the old growth hack playbook. They need top of funnel approaches that can be measured and valued in growth terms.
• Archbold thinks bringing more firms into brand tracking can double the addressable market to $8bn across Australia, New Zealand, UK and US.
• Mutinex CEO Henry Innis thinks brand tracking – and market research more broadly – is about to face major disruption as API-driven approaches replace manual stitching.
• Plus, despite the downturn, Innis says Mutinex data shows marketers are cutting performance budgets before pulling back brand investment. He thinks there is a cultural shift underway.
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Brand tracking globally is dominated by big global research firms like Ipsos, Kantar, Nielsen and Qualtrics, which typically serve top end of town brand majors. But a New Zealand-based start-up, Tracksuit, is bidding to disrupt the market from the bottom up.

It’s landed heavyweight backers – Blackbird Ventures led a $6.8m investment round in February – with Ascential (the firm behind Warc and Cannes Lions) and "virtual professor" Mark Ritson also putting their cash on the table.

Interestingly, the VCs are piling in not just as investors, but to apply the platform to their wider start-up portfolios in a bid to enable faster and more sustainable growth.

On the flip-side start-ups are also keen to better understand unit economics, and where their marketing-growth investments are working and where they are not, before seeking further funding in a sober capital environment.

Now Tracksuit has struck an arrangement (non-financial) with fellow VC-backed start-up Mutinex as the two bid to link brand equity and investment directly to business outcomes, i.e. the P&L – faster and more easily than what may soon be perceived as ‘legacy’ approaches. The two see the brand tracking market – and broader research sector – as ripe for disruption.

Big, slow, siloed

The problem with brand tracking is that it is big, slow and siloed. Tracksuit co-founder and CEO, Connor Archbold, aims to change all of that – while doubling the addressable market from circa $4bn across Australia, New Zealand, the UK and US to $8bn by bringing start-ups and scale-ups into play.

A former M&A lawyer, investment fund director, and scout for Blackbird, Archbold has a good idea of what what brands and investors need to quantify brand equity in hard commercial terms.

Archbold also spent a good chunk of his career in the US advising big name start-ups during the first wave of DTC – and saw a common pattern emerge: start-ups tend to over-invest in performance. “That’s great for capturing low hanging fruit early on. But eventually it becomes very difficult to sustain growth if you're not also investing in brand and building awareness alongside it,” says Archbold.

He thinks that realisation hit home during Covid, when the likes of Airbnb pulled back almost entirely from performance marketing, and emerged from the pandemic all-in on brand. Meanwhile, ROI within channels such as search and social has declined as they have matured, with VCs now asking pointier questions around cash burn amid tighter money markets and the tech shakeout.

Hence the old growth hacking playbook getting binned and start-ups upweighting investment in brand to fuel future demand instead of blowing the budget on short-term performance. In other words, classic Binet and Field.

Big deck

The problem is that measuring brand health, awareness and consideration is harder to do – especially for a start-up.

“It usually costs over $100,000 to get an always-on brand tracker from one of the big players and it’s also often delivered in a way that isn't quite usable for a small, nimble team – 100 page slide packs rather than in an easy to use dashboard,” says Archbold.

Plus, the data takes weeks and often months to arrive. So Archbold started Tracksuit, not to reinvent the wheel, but to make everything faster, easier and cheaper by using the same panels as the tracking big guns, but linking everything together via APIs and an always-on SaaS platform.

He reckons the $100k price tag is now more like $20k on an annualised basis, which means Tracksuit can woo both start-ups and larger brands that already do brand tracking, but want dashboards over slide decks.

He cites telehealth brand Eucalyptus – which last week landed $50m in funding from Woolworths, Blackbird and Mary Meeker – as one of circa 250 clients. “One of the founders told me that Tracksuit screenshots are one of the most common thing to be sent around their Slack channel,” says Archbold.

How it works

“We’re tracking 2,200 brands across Australia and New Zealand. We understand who's aware of those brands, who considers buying them, who prefers them, and then some qualitative information as well – what people think and feel about those brands,” says Archbold.

“We're performing those surveys every week, and we're displaying that in a dashboard that is is constantly updated. It’s the same data and product in the sense of the information that's flowing through as what the large market research players do for brand tracking. The difference is that it's live and people can log in whenever they want. We have simplified the dashboard as much as possible so that marketers feel comfortable sharing it with boards and C suites,” he says. “It makes brand a little more easy to digest.”

Archbold claims that approach – while negating the need for “white glove service” and consultants to walk marketers through those meaty slide packs – is how Tracksuit can make brand tracking 80 per cent cheaper. A lower cost to entry, he says, means a much bigger addressable market.

“There’s a big brand tracking market in New Zealand and Australia. About half of our customers were doing some form of market research, usually an annual dip to see where they sit in the market. The other half of our customers weren't doing any market research. So we're optimistic that we're actually doubling the size of the brand tracking market globally,” says Archbold.

Buttressing budgets

With the likes of Ritson articulating the need for such tools to circa 4,000 Mini MBA marketers each year, Warc owner Ascential on board and James Hurman (Archbold is a partner at Hurman’s consultancy Previously Unavailable) working with global marketers on brand-focused marketing science-led approaches to reportedly stunning effect, there’s grounds to believe that optimism is justified.

Mutinex, which has similar ambitions to disrupt market mix modelling, is therefore a natural bedfellow. CEO Henry Innis said the firms are solving the same marketing challenge – cutting through the noise on brand’s contribution to growth, improving return on marketing spend, and quantifying the value of brand investment.

Mutinex claims its platform has visibility across a circa $1.5bn spend pool, enabling marketers to better understand and forecast return on marketing investment. It has recently added tools to show brand’s contribution to revenue.

“We have a link between if consideration is higher, if awareness is higher, we can actually see what that [brand] equity is creating week to week in terms of revenue generation,” says Innis. “After a sustained burst of a campaign, what we often see is the brand metrics go up – and we're tracking the revenue impact. For example, a percentage point in unprompted awareness is worth X million in revenue on a weekly basis. That’s really powerful, because most marketers then actually know the cost of letting their brand metrics deteriorate from say, 15 per cent to 10 per cent unprompted awareness isn't nothing. It's actually maybe three, four, five, six million a week in revenue,” he adds. “Because they can present that argument, they can also present the argument to defend [brand] budget.”

Disruption ahead

Innis and Mutinex already source brand equity data from existing providers. But an emerging new breed of SaaS platform players mean faster results – and Innis thinks the market is ripe for disruption.

“We have been told for the past ten years that we've been doing digital transformation. But the reality of most data at the moment is it is still relatively manual. It's not stored neatly in a clean data warehouse that then goes out to a dashboard. You can't call on an API to automatically pipe it through to another system with minimal effort,” says Innis.

“If you look at other ecosystems, for example in accounting with Xero and MYOB, a whole bunch of businesses replaced the big payroll firms [because] they were able to connect various different services via APIs. I see the same thing happening in the market research space,” he adds.

“Fundamentally we have a lot of very disconnected data sources that aren't designed to be interoperable. That has created a really siloed ecosystem where effectively the link between all of those data sources is marketers having to share things over email. That's not a great ecosystem to live and work in,” per Innis. “No one has modernised the market research industry via SaaS principles.”

That’s what the two firms aim to change. Innis has impetus, given Mutinex has made its name on real-time capability.

“When we deal with brand tracking data, we're dealing with it monthly, and customers have to incur fairly large costs in order to execute those programs.

"We still always work with those market research vendors. They have fantastic data points, but we have a whole cadre of customers who can't necessarily get the data at the frequency we would need for modeling cost effectively,” says Innis. “We have a whole cadre of customers who, even if they could get that data, engineering it so they can pipe it to us is going to be really difficult. So by identifying SaaS based market research vendors like Tracksuit – and there are other groups in market doing similar things – we believe we can start to pioneer this space. Make it faster, better, simpler and ultimately far cheaper for customers.”

Archbold underlines that while the two firms are “100 per cent aligned on how the future of market research will play out”, Tracksuit and Mutinex will both maintain broader market partnerships. Archbold also demurs when asked how deeply Tracksuit aims to disrupt the sector.

“I'm not the type of person that takes shots at competition … We have built Tracksuit off the back of some great learnings by the large incumbents and we partner with many market research agencies who use our data and our platform and then build their services on top,” he says.

“It's fresh, it's SaaS-based, it's a dashboard and it's cheaper and that will shake things up, I'm sure. The large players will be looking to compete, build, buy, partner – and we like that. There's a lot of room in the space. It's a huge global category … we're all looking to carve out our own little spot.”

The big incumbents, however, are unlikely to stand by and let nimble new breeds eat into their share.

“I'm sure they will be putting out new offerings, but we haven't seen it yet. We’ve been around for two years, we're capturing a good share of the market and we're not actually biting off too much of their pie yet,” says Archbold.

Plus, he insists, “We're coming at this bottom up rather than top down – [the big players] are not going to shake their $300k contracts to go after a $15k contract like Tracksuit does. So our business model is fundamentally different; we're going to be able to play for a while before we see anything come [in terms of a counteroffensive] that's too aggressive.”

Growth expectations

Either way, Archbold is focused on Tracksuit’s own growth. It has boots on the ground in New York with London next.

“We're talking to UK brands, talking to US brands. We've got launch customers in those places and the goal is to basically get 50 customers in each of those spots over the next year … build the products with them suited to those markets … and then raise another round and pour gas on the fire,” he says.

The aim is to double revenues, currently $4.5m, within 12 months. “Then we'll reforecast and see what sort of crazy numbers we can come up with for the year after,” per Archbold.

“Based on how fast we've been onboarding some of the best brands in New Zealand and Australia, if we can get the right customers, build case studies around them and showcase what Tracksuit can do in those other markets, we’ve got a really good shot at growing very quickly.”

Brand push, pull

Meanwhile, venture capital firms are also acting as a pull-through per Archibold, as they realise that brand equity helps quantify both future demand, i.e. growth, and more accurate valuations.

“I don't think that's so new in the private equity space, but in the VC space it's definitely new,” says Archbold. “While we were raising our seed round, it was really interesting talking to venture capital firms that had put money into consumer brands. You'd talk to them about the problem we're solving, where these brands grow really quickly and then find it hard to maintain that growth rate – and you'd just see them start nodding and seeing they'd seen this happen. “They are like, ‘right, so the solution is to measure the top of the funnel’,” he adds. “So we are not selling [directly] to the VCs, but they are great channels for us, because they are connected with a number of brands and they might want to be monitoring those metrics.”

Innis says that demand is mirrored from start-ups. While Mutinex predominantly works with blue chip firms, “we are having meetings with more mature start-ups, those in their third year of consumer spending who have probably made a lot of bets. They are now starting to think about how to get to more sustainable unit economics – and that is probably driven as much by market conditions for fundraising as the stage and cycle of those companies,” says Innis.

“Two or three years ago, the response in that world was ‘we’ll raise more money and figure it out later’. Whereas increasingly start-ups now hitting that maturity curve understand the need to get unit economics really straight before looking for another growth round.”

Cool running hot?

More broadly, Innis suggests market conditions – despite current budget headwinds – are primed to enable acceleration for firms that can draw a through line from brand to revenue.

“I've seen a really interesting trend this year compared to other downturns: Performance budgets being cut first, not the other way around – and that’s really interesting” he says. “Obviously some businesses will still maintain performance budgets, but I think the instinct is for brand marketers or CMOs to defend brand and start to tamp down performance a little bit.”

Moreover, suggests Innis, “Brand has become culturally cool again. It was culturally cool in marketing to be a performance marketer six years ago. Now it’s culturally cool to be a brand marketer, not a performance marketer.”