Over the years, we've spoken to hundreds of insights experts at world-leading brands, and one topic that frequently arises is converting brand KPIs into population numbers to better understand the relationship between brand metrics and sales data. Often, this is a task that falls onto their shoulders but is actually extremely time-consuming and tedious to do. 

We aimed to alleviate this challenge for brands using our brand tracking tool, ensuring they can access the precise information they need with just a click, rather than spending hours converting brand performance data into report formats In this article, we’ll explain how this feature of our app works.

Translating brand metrics into real-world populations is a mostly tedious task

Translating brand data into population numbers may seem relatively easy at the general population level, albeit this still involves the task of converting whole populations into adult-only populations to reflect the same audience that the survey research can reach. But once you have the adult population numbers, it’s just a case of taking your brand performance metric and applying it to the population. Let’s say you have a 30% consideration level among 256.6 million US adults. This equates simply to 77 million people. But this straightforward task can quickly become tedious when accounting for multiple segments within the data, or trying to track changes over time in real-world numbers. 

Latana’s population conversion feature: connecting brand data with internal reporting data

We introduced a feature that allows you to immediately see population numbers behind your brand metric percentages. Our tool has access to the adult population numbers of any market that you track your brand in, and will programmatically calculate the converted number of people for all data points in your tracker too. This enables you to access real-world population data for any KPI across any region. 

We also acknowledge that in brand tracking, static data will only ever tell you one piece of the story and so our feature also converts changes over time into real-world numbers. The tool will alert you with green or red arrow indicators as to which direction your change has moved in over the last one and three-month period.

Let's say Birkenstock wants to know its share of awareness in the UK market and track its progress over the past month and three months. With this feature, it's easy to see that 29% of people in the UK are familiar with the brand, which equates to 15.6 million people. Additionally, they can observe a 0.3% increase (or 145.6 thousand people) over the last month, and a 0.8% increase (or 416.9 thousand people) over the past three months.

This feature applies to segmentations within the tracker, too. As you toggle between segment views, population numbers will automatically convert to the correct audiences and appear alongside percentage data, as they do for the general population. This applies not only to individual segments but also to any combination of variables you choose in the segment builder view.

Birkenstock wants to assess its awareness among urban female shoe buyers aged 26-45. They can immediately see that awareness within this audience is 49.7%, which equates to 434.1 thousand people in the UK. Additionally, they can track that awareness has decreased by 0.1% over the past month, or 0.6 thousand people, and by 0.2% compared to three months ago, or 1.9 thousand people.

In summary, by integrating population conversion into our brand tracking tool, we've made it easier for brands to link their performance metrics to real-world population data. This feature saves valuable time, eliminates manual calculations, and offers a more accurate understanding of brand reach and growth. With the ability to track changes over time and break down data by specific audience segments, brands can make more informed decisions and optimise their strategies precisely.

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