“Our board packs include brand metrics”: How Big Red Group uses Tracksuit to drive internal influence

As a marketing or agency professional, do you ever feel like you need your own PR and brand department? You know — a team to spread the word about what you're doing internally so that folks beyond your team see the results of your efforts.

Getting people outside of the marketing bubble to appreciate the value of brand work can be challenging, but it's just as important as the external campaigns themselves. Internal influence — especially in branding efforts — is critical, as it helps teams demonstrate the importance of brand health and gain buy-in from stakeholders.

Big Red Group (BRG)Opens in new tab, Australia and New Zealand's largest experience network, has made giant leaps in driving internal influence and uses Tracksuit to help execs and other teams see the impact of brand marketing.

Toni Westlake, Head of Brand and Marketing at Big Red Group, sat down with Tracksuit to discuss how BRG leverages brand tracking to demonstrate results and shape its internal strategy.

Shifting internal processes to value brand 🧩

A major player in the tourism scene of Australia and New Zealand, Big Red Group is the umbrella company behind experience brands like RedBalloon, Adrenaline, and Experience Oz. BRG's network offers more than 14,000 experiences across 3000 operators.

BRG's marketing team used to operate with a brand-by-brand focus, each team dedicated to an individual brand. However, the company has since transitioned to a shared services approach, with KPIs built around overarching brand health metrics.

"As BRG saw the impact of brand marketing on all aspects of our marketing funnel and the long-term growth of the business asset, we realised we needed to structure around that success," explains Toni.

"We now have three pillars in our Brand and Marketing team: Brand, Campaigns, and Creative. The Brand team are solely focused on delivering long-term initiatives and key brand metrics, the Campaign team are focused on media and revenue, and our in-house Creative team are responsible for ensuring effectiveness through creativity."

How Big Red Group is using Tracksuit for multiple experience brands 📈

Since Big Red Group operates three brands with different target markets, the company needs to stay on top of how each brand resonates with its audience.

This is where Tracksuit comes in.

"Tracksuit is my go-to resource for identifying the market position of our brand portfolio among competitors and the key drivers of our marketing success," shares Toni.

With three distinct brands under its wing, Big Red Group needs tools like Tracksuit to track and manage its market positioning effectively.

"The focus for each brand within the marketing team differs. RedBalloon has very strong brand awareness so it focuses primarily on consideration among different age cohorts and key statements around gifting. For Adrenaline, our goal is awareness within younger audiences and ensuring we're top of mind for adventure. Whereas, Experience Oz focuses on perceptions of our range and value."

BRG also finds tremendous value in Tracksuit's brand statements feature, which allows users to measure five key statements around BRG's value propositions. Tracksuit then surveys consumers to see how much people agree with each statement on a scale of 0 to 100%.

Tracksuit’s data shows RedBalloon is a category leader when it comes to the statements, ‘Is a fun brand’, ‘Is great to gift’ and ‘Is a place where I can discover adventures’.

"The real power of the platform comes from the brand statements. We identified the key drivers of purchase within our segment as well as our primary brand statements, and are constantly tracking them within Tracksuit," Toni says.

"My leadership team all have goals aligned with shifting these key statements, and we build our marketing plans to ensure we're moving the statements that matter to their audience. We also track seasonal shifts to see the impacts of our creative messaging."

Brand and performance, together at last 🤝

Toni says that having a tool like Tracksuit, which helps BRG measure brand health, has created better internal influence and alignment with the company's performance team.

As Toni puts it, "Brand is a fascinating area because you can always tell when you're doing it wrong, but it's much harder to tell what you're doing right. We found the most impactful way to prove the value of brand marketing was to show how much more effective our performance marketing became while we were investing in the brand."

To accomplish that, BRG conducted a test in which they tracked the impact of brand investment on performance channels.

"We ran brand marketing tests with our performance team starting on Adrenaline. Over a 3-month period, we proved that an impactful, always-on investment in brand reduced the CPAs and CPCs across our key performance channels. We measured the impact of the brand investment using Tracksuit, and the impact of performance through our in-house reporting. Now, I have our senior leaders asking if we've invested enough in the brand to ensure we'll hit our future retail calendar moments."

Beyond marketing: educating other teams on the importance of brand metrics 🧑‍🏫

Tracksuit has helped Big Red Group build more internal influence, this time beyond the marketing department. Toni and her team do this by running educational sessions and making brand metrics available company-wide.

"When we first onboarded Tracksuit, we set up a lunch and learn session to talk through the value of brand marketing and what the metrics mean. Then I showed the team how to use the platform, and provided access to anyone who wanted it."

She adds, "Our board packs now include the brand metrics, and all of our post-campaign reports include Tracksuit metrics alongside revenue and media targets."

Advice for other brand marketers 💡

BRG undoubtedly does a fantastic job of connecting brand performance with business outcomes. When asked about her top advice for other marketers, Toni says to start by talking about brand in terms of the business challenges. Whether it's long-term asset development, reducing discounting, or increasing marketing effectiveness, cementing brand marketing in the language of the business helps brand metrics transition into commercial metrics.

She also emphasizes the importance of regular investment in your brand, as this builds long-term business value.

"Regular brand investment has so many benefits for the value of the business, performance effectiveness, creative effectiveness, and first-party-data acquisition," she says.

And, of course, measuring your brand efforts so that key stakeholders in your organisation (especially those beyond marketing) are aware of what you're doing.

"Combine Tracksuit insights with investment or tests from other platforms, consistently communicate, and build them into your performance or goal frameworks to make it measurable,” adds Toni.

Thank you for sharing your smarts, Toni! Check out Big Red Group’s marketing in actionOpens in new tab.