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Waves, dashboards and The Big Wave

Continuous tracking that shows what moved, why, and what to do next

Your category, your customers and your reputation, measured on a rhythm that matches how often your team decides. Every wave is read by the people who designed it, and the year closes with a full H3™ study.

  • Monthly to yearly waves
  • One, two or three lenses
  • The Big Wave every year
  • Seniors read every wave
Talk to Abdo and NorahDesign your tracker

The tracking year, wave by wave

JanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDecJFMAMJJASONDHuman StoriesHeartbeatHard EvidenceThe Big WaveH3™See what it includes

Quarterly: the most common rhythm. Four waves and The Big Wave.

Hover or tap any wave. Open a lens name or The Big Wave for the detail.

Too many trackers end up as a deck nobody opens

You know the ritual: every quarter the same forty slides land in your inbox, with awareness up two points, consideration flat and NPS down one. The dashboard is clean, the fieldwork was on time, and nobody in the room can say why the numbers moved or what the company should do differently on Monday. So the deck gets filed, and at the next planning round somebody asks what it’s for.

We’ve sat in those rooms, and the survey is rarely the problem.

A tracker earns its budget the day it changes a decision. Everything below is built around that day.

Brand tracker | Q3 | Slide 12 of 40

  • Awareness+2 pts
  • ConsiderationFlat
  • NPS−1

Benchmark: category average

Next stepsTo be discussed

  1. The scoreboard problem

    The metric moved. Nobody knows why, so nobody knows what to do.

  2. The template problem

    The questionnaire was written for a category average, not for your business.

  3. The Monday problem

    Nobody agreed in advance which movement triggers which conversation.

Eight families of trackers

What we track, by the decision it serves

Every tracker is built around the decision at the end of it, and most clients combine two families. Open any signal to see what it measures and why it matters.

Brand health tracking

How your brand lives in people’s heads and in their conversations, measured the same way every wave, so a change in the number always arrives with the story behind it.

What it measures

Where your brand sits in the mind of the market: who remembers it, who would consider it, what they believe it stands for, and how much of the category conversation belongs to you rather than to a competitor.

Why it pays for itself

Brand work is slow and expensive, and the effect arrives months after the spend. Tracking is what turns that gap into evidence instead of faith, and it tells you when to keep going and when to stop.

Questions it answers

  • Is the repositioning reaching people who don’t already buy from us?
  • Which associations are we gaining, and which are we losing without noticing?
  • Are we losing share of mind before we lose share of market?

Typical metrics

Tap a metric to see what it means.

Signals we track

Spontaneous and prompted awareness

Who names you unaided and who only recognises you when shown a list. The gap between the two is the honest measure of memory.

Consideration and preference

How many people would put you on the shortlist, and how many would pick you over the alternative they know best.

Brand associations

The attributes people attach to you without being asked, and which of them you’re gaining or losing over the year.

Funnel by segment

Where each audience drops out between awareness and purchase, so you fix the step that is actually leaking rather than the whole funnel.

Share of voice

How much of the category conversation is about you rather than your competitors, and whether that share is bought or earned.

Cultural relevance

Whether your brand appears in the conversations people are having anyway, or only in the ones you paid to start.

How AI assistants describe you

What the main AI assistants answer when asked about your category, which associations they use for you and which competitors they name beside you.

Lenses that fit: Hard Evidence and Heartbeat, with Human Stories when an association shifts

Brand & Cultural Strategy

Campaign and communications tracking

Each flight connected to what it did to the brand and to the conversation, so you know which creative worked, on whom, and for how long before it tired.

What it measures

What each burst of media actually produced: who saw it, what they took away from it, how much of the movement in the brand numbers belongs to it, and how the conversation reacted around every launch.

Why it pays for itself

Media is usually the largest line in the marketing budget and the hardest to defend. Wave-by-wave measurement tells you which executions earn their place and which are being paid for out of habit.

Questions it answers

  • Did this flight move the brand, or only the people already inside our funnel?
  • Which message is landing, and is it the one on the brief?
  • When does this creative stop adding anything?

Typical metrics

Tap a metric to see what it means.

Signals we track

Ad recall and recognition

How many people remember seeing the campaign, and how many remember it was yours rather than a competitor’s.

Message take-out

What people say the advert was about in their own words, which often isn’t the message on the brief.

Brand lift by flight

The movement in awareness, consideration or preference that each specific burst of media produced, separated from the background trend.

Creative wear-out

The point at which more exposure stops adding anything, so you retire the execution before it starts costing you goodwill.

Conversation around launches

How the social conversation spikes and fades around each launch, and whether it carried your message or its own.

Earned reach and amplifiers

Who picked the campaign up without being paid, how far it travelled from there, and what they added to it on the way.

Lenses that fit: Hard Evidence and Heartbeat

Advertising & Communications

Usage, attitudes and segment tracking

Your usage and attitudes study kept alive. People change faster than segmentation decks, and this tracker shows who is growing, who is leaving and who is slowly becoming someone else.

What it measures

How people actually use the category and what they believe about it: occasions, frequency, the size of each segment, who is moving between segments, and which drivers and barriers matter most right now.

Why it pays for itself

Many companies build a strategy on a segmentation and then let it age for five years. Keeping it alive means your targeting, your pricing and your creative are aimed at the market as it is, not as it was.

Questions it answers

  • Is the segment we built the plan around still growing?
  • Who is switching into us, and who is drifting away?
  • Which barrier is costing us the most volume this year?

Typical metrics

Tap a metric to see what it means.

Signals we track

Usage and occasions

How often people use the category, in what situations, and which occasions are growing while others fade.

Segment size and migration

How large each segment is this wave and who is moving between them, which is the part a one-off study can never tell you.

Drivers and barriers

What pushes people towards a purchase and what stops them at the last moment, ranked by how much each one actually moves behaviour.

Psychographics

The values, beliefs and lifestyles behind the behaviour, which is what makes a segment usable for creative rather than just for media buying.

Brand role

The job your brand does in someone’s life, in their words, and whether that job is still one worth doing.

Consumption mapping

The full path around a purchase: where it starts, who else is involved, what happens before and after the moment you measure.

Category entry points

The situations that make someone think of the category at all, and whether your brand is the one that comes to mind in them.

Lenses that fit: Hard Evidence and Human Stories, with Heartbeat for language and communities

Customer & Human Insight

Customer experience tracking

Scores tied to the moments of your journey rather than floating on their own, crossed with what people say in public and with interviews with the ones who left.

What it measures

How the experience feels at the points where it is decided: the effort each step demands, the satisfaction it produces, the friction people meet, and the behaviours that come before someone leaves.

Why it pays for itself

A score on its own tells you that something is wrong somewhere. A score attached to a moment tells you which team fixes it, and the interviews tell them what to change. That’s the difference between a report and a repair.

Questions it answers

  • Which step in the journey is costing us customers?
  • Is the score moving because of the product or because of the last email we sent?
  • Who is about to leave, and is there still time to keep them?

Typical metrics

Tap a metric to see what it means.

Signals we track

NPS, CSAT and CES by moment

Recommendation, satisfaction and effort measured at the point they happen, so a falling score points at a step and not at the whole company.

Friction points

The places where people slow down, hesitate or repeat themselves, which are visible long before they show up in a score.

Churn risk signals

The behaviours that reliably precede leaving, so you reach the customer while there is still something to save.

Public complaints and praise

What people say about the experience where you aren’t listening, which is usually more specific than what they tell you directly.

Feedback loops

Whether the things customers told you last wave changed anything, and whether they noticed that they did.

Service recovery

What happens after something goes wrong, which often shapes loyalty more than the original problem did.

Lenses that fit: Hard Evidence, Heartbeat and Human Stories

Experience & Service Design

Reputation and crisis tracking

Reputations don’t wait for the next wave, so this one runs all year: continuous monitoring with alerts, and a measured read each wave of how each audience actually sees you.

What it measures

What is being said about the company and by whom: the tone, the story behind the tone, the people driving it, and how customers, employees, partners and regulators each see you when measured separately.

Why it pays for itself

Reputation damage is cheap to contain in the first days and very expensive later. Continuous monitoring buys you those days, and the wave measurement tells you whether the damage reached anyone who matters.

Questions it answers

  • Is this a loud thread or the beginning of a real problem?
  • Who is driving the story, and which communities are picking it up?
  • Do the people who decide our future still trust us?

Typical metrics

Tap a metric to see what it means.

Signals we track

Sentiment and narrative shifts

The tone of the conversation and, more importantly, which story is being told about you and whether it’s changing.

Crisis detection with alerts

Thresholds agreed in advance that trigger an alert the day an unusual pattern appears, rather than the week it reaches the press.

Stakeholder perception

How customers, employees, partners, investors and regulators each see you, measured separately because they rarely agree.

Trust and ESG perception

Whether people believe what you say about yourself, and whether your commitments are seen as real or as decoration.

Employer reputation

What current and former employees say in public, and what candidates read before they decide whether to apply.

Who drives the story

The accounts and communities that set the direction of a narrative, and the ones that carry it into other groups.

How AI assistants describe you

What an AI assistant tells someone asking about your company, including any factual errors it repeats and the sources feeding them.

Lenses that fit: Heartbeat always on, Hard Evidence by wave, Human Stories with stakeholders

Corporate Reputation Research

Category and competitor tracking

Your market map kept current: where the category is growing, where competitors are gaining and losing, and which openings are closing while you decide.

What it measures

The shape of the category rather than your brand alone: how demand is moving, who is taking attention and preference, what people believe things should cost, and which needs still have no credible answer.

Why it pays for itself

Market entry and expansion decisions are made once and paid for over years. A live map means the plan is corrected while it is still cheap to correct, rather than defended until the numbers force a retreat.

Questions it answers

  • Is the category growing, or are we simply taking share of a shrinking one?
  • Which competitor is gaining, and is it with money or with meaning?
  • Is the market we want to enter next year moving towards us or away?

Typical metrics

Tap a metric to see what it means.

Signals we track

Category conversation

How much people are talking about the category at all, and which themes inside it are growing or collapsing.

Competitor share of voice

How the attention in the category is divided, and whether a competitor is buying that share or earning it.

Price and value perception

What people believe things should cost and whether you are read as expensive, fair or suspiciously cheap.

New entrants

Who has arrived in the category since the last wave, what they’re promising and whether anyone is listening yet.

White space signals

Needs that keep surfacing without a credible answer, tracked over time so you can tell a real gap from a passing complaint.

Market readiness by country

Whether a market you are considering is moving towards you or away, measured before the entry decision rather than after it.

Lenses that fit: Heartbeat and Hard Evidence

Growth & Market Strategy

Post-launch and product tracking

The research doesn’t end at launch. We follow adoption, perception and unmet needs wave after wave, so the roadmap is corrected by evidence rather than by whoever spoke last.

What it measures

What happens to the product once real people have it: who adopts it and who abandons it, which features are used and which were never found, and which needs keep appearing without an answer.

Why it pays for itself

A roadmap built on launch assumptions drifts a little further from reality every quarter. Tracking replaces the loudest opinion in the room with evidence, which is usually the cheapest way to avoid building the wrong thing.

Questions it answers

  • Are people using the feature we spent two quarters building?
  • Why do the people who leave in week three leave?
  • Which unmet need is loud enough to become the next release?

Typical metrics

Tap a metric to see what it means.

Signals we track

Adoption over time

Who has tried the product, who kept using it, and how the curve compares with what you assumed when you priced it.

Feature perception

Which features people value, which they never found, and which they think you have when you don’t.

Review and support themes

The recurring subjects in reviews and support tickets, grouped by cause rather than by keyword.

Unmet needs

The workarounds people invent, which are often the clearest description of a missing feature you can get.

Comparison with alternatives

What people actually consider instead of you, which is often not the competitor your strategy is written against.

Early churn signals

The behaviours in the first weeks that predict leaving, so onboarding is fixed where it breaks.

Lenses that fit: Hard Evidence, Heartbeat and Human Stories

Product Innovation Research

Trend and weak-signal tracking

The opposite of a generic trend report. We track the signals specific to your category, and each wave tells you which are speeding up and which have peaked.

What it measures

Movement rather than description: how fast each trend on your radar is travelling, which narratives are forming, which communities are assembling around them, and which of your scenario indicators have crossed a line.

Why it pays for itself

Trend reports describe the world and expire in a year. A tracker tells you which of those trends is arriving in your category, at what speed, so you can commit early enough for it to be an advantage rather than a catch-up.

Questions it answers

  • Of the trends on our radar, which ones are actually moving?
  • Where is the next community forming around our category?
  • Has anything crossed the line we agreed would change the plan?

Typical metrics

Tap a metric to see what it means.

Signals we track

Trend velocity

How fast a trend is moving in your category, and whether that speed is rising or falling this wave.

Emerging narratives

New stories forming around your category before they have a name, caught while they are still small enough to influence.

Communities forming

Groups assembling around a shared interest, mapped as they grow, with the people who lead them and the ones who bridge into other groups.

Cross-category borrowing

Expectations people import from other categories, which is where many sudden changes in what counts as good actually come from.

Scenario indicators

The specific measures you agreed would tell you a scenario is becoming real, checked every wave so nobody has to argue from intuition.

Weak signals, second appearance

Anything unusual is noise once. Tracked over time, the things that come back twice are the ones worth a decision.

Lenses that fit: Heartbeat and Human Stories, with Hard Evidence at The Big Wave

Foresight & Trend Intelligence

Design your tracker

Choose a cadence, your lenses and what you need to watch. The panel shows what lands on your desk every wave, and what The Big Wave adds at the end of the year.

01How often you read it
02Which lenses run
03What you need to watch7 min

  • 12waves a year
  • 13readout sessions
  • 3lenses running
  • 1question watched

Signals we would track

    The final list is agreed in the scoping conversation, not picked from a menu.

    Every wave
    • The numbers that moved, with significance flagged and the segment behind each one.
    • What is being said, by whom and how fast, with alerts between waves.
    • Why it moved, in the words of the people it happened to.
    • A readout session with Abdo and Norah, the report behind it and your dashboard updated.
    At The Big Wave
    • A full H3™ study on the year, with the three lenses fused into one reading.
    • Segments and personas rebuilt on twelve months of evidence.
    • Next year’s strategy and decision rules, agreed with your team.

    A fixed price and a timeline before anything starts, both agreed after a conversation about the decision this tracker has to serve.

    Talk to Abdo and Norah

    Decision rules

    We agree what a three-point drop means before it happens

    Every rule has four parts, agreed before the first wave: a signal, a threshold, what happens and who does it. A three-point drop then comes with an owner and a date.

    Unaided awareness, per centAction started

    The Big Wave

    Twelve months of waves tell you what changed. One study a year tells you where you are.

    Human StoriesHeartbeatHard Evidence

    At the end of every tracking year we stop and run a full H3™ study on what the year surfaced. Not a summary of the waves: new fieldwork, designed around the questions your own year produced.

    A dashboard can’t do this, and neither can a one-off annual study. The Big Wave has the depth of a full study and the memory of the whole year.

    • New fieldwork, not a recap
      • New interviews with the people the year asked about
      • A deeper survey wave than any run during the year
      • Twelve months of conversation read as one year
    • Three lenses, one reading

      Triangulated rather than stapled together. Where the three agree you can act with confidence. Where they disagree is usually where the year’s real insight is hiding.

    • A session and a roadmap

      Presented by Abdo and Norah, with the senior specialists who worked on your study, to the people who decide. Next year’s strategy, rebuilt segments and the rules that go with them.

    See the full H3™ method and how it works

    Benchmarks

    Is 28 a good score?

    It depends on your category, your country and how the number was collected. The only fully sound comparison is your own previous wave, measured the same way.

    AN ILLUSTRATION: THE SAME NPS OF 28, READ AGAINST A DIFFERENT INDUSTRY

    Sound

    Your own previous wave

    Same question, same sample design, same point in the month. It does not remove sampling error, and no comparison does, but it is the only one where a change of method cannot be the explanation.

    Built into every tracker
    Comparable

    Your competitors, measured in the same wave

    The same questionnaire, the same panel and the same week, asked about them and about you. It costs more sample, and it buys you a competitive number that holds up when someone in the room asks how it was collected.

    Optional, priced with the tracker
    Use with care

    Published industry norms

    Useful for orientation, poor as a target. Published benchmarks disagree with each other for the same industry, because they use different questionnaires, different panels, different countries and different definitions of the category.

    Sourced when they exist for your category
    THE ONE THAT CATCHES EVERYONE OUT

    Look at the country view again. Every one of those figures answers the same question about companies people say they like, and they run from minus forty seven to sixty four. Some of that is real difference in how well companies serve people. A large part of it is not: it is how a culture uses a scale. Harzing’s twenty-six-country study in the International Journal of Cross Cultural Management found systematic differences in how readily people pick the extremes or the middle, and found that the same questionnaire behaves differently in English than in the respondent’s own language. Rank twelve markets on a raw score and part of what you are ranking is that. We set a target per country and we say how we did it, rather than presenting the raw ranking as a finding.

    Scope, price and timeline

    What actually moves the number

    The cost depends less on the number of waves than on who we have to reach and in how many places. These six factors show roughly where your programme sits.

    How many lenses you run

    A survey on its own is one operation. Adding listening puts a second discipline in the field all year. Adding interviews adds recruitment, moderation and analysis to every wave. Three lenses fused isn’t three times the work of one, and it isn’t the same job either.

    How many questions you are answering

    Each family of tracker adds questions to the survey, work to the analysis and its own reading. Two families is the common shape. Four is a different programme, not the same one with more pages.

    Biggest driver

    Who we have to reach

    The single biggest driver, and the one clients least expect. General consumers are quick. Business buyers, clinicians, farmers, people who bought a specific product in the last month: those are found one at a time, and the rarer they are the longer and the dearer every wave becomes.

    How many countries, and which ones

    Every market adds translation, a local panel, a local moderator and its own fieldwork window. It also adds the work that makes the numbers comparable afterwards, which is the part nobody quotes for and the part that decides whether the comparison is worth anything.

    How many people, and how deep

    Sample size decides how small a difference you can trust and how far you can cut the data by segment. Twenty interviews and sixty are different studies. This is where we usually push back, because oversized samples buy less than clients think and undersized ones make the whole year unreadable.

    How often you read it

    Every wave is a full project: fieldwork, analysis, report and a session with your team. The analysis is done properly each time, by the same senior people, so twelve waves is close to three times the work of four. What’s built once is the design and the questionnaire, and that’s a small part of what a wave costs.

    WHAT WE COMMIT TO
    • A fixed price and a fixed timeline before any work starts, and both are honoured. If something changes on the way, we tell you before it costs you anything.
    • A quote written after a real conversation, not from a template. We’d rather spend an hour understanding the decision than send you a number that fits everyone and nobody.
    • We build on what you already have. If you’ve run trackers before, the useful parts stay and we cover what is missing, rather than starting from zero to make the invoice bigger.
    • The people who sell it are the people who do it. Abdo and Norah lead every project, with senior specialists only. Nobody hands your project to a junior after the kickoff.

    Straight answers

    Questions we get about continuous tracking

    Something else on your mind? Ask us directly. You’ll get an answer from the people who would run the work.

    What is a continuous tracker?

    A continuous tracker measures the same things about your market, in the same way, at regular intervals across a year, so that a change in a number can be attributed to something rather than argued about. Ours can fuse up to three lenses: a survey, social listening and interviews. One study tells you where you are. A tracker tells you where you’re going and why.

    How is a tracker different from a one-off study?

    A one-off study is a photograph, a tracker is the film. The study can tell you that awareness is 44 per cent. Only a tracker can tell you that it was 48 three months ago, that the fall is concentrated in one region, and whether what you did about it worked. The value is in the comparison, and the comparison only exists if the method never changes.

    How often should waves run?

    It depends on how often your team actually makes decisions. Quarterly is the most common rhythm because it matches most planning cycles, and every two months is the usual step up from there. Monthly suits launch years and fast categories, while twice a year suits slow categories with long buying cycles. A tracker read less often than the decisions it serves is a report, not a tool.

    How much does a tracker cost?

    There’s no rate card, because two trackers with the same number of waves can differ in price by a factor of three. What moves the price is how many lenses run, who we have to reach and how hard they are to find, how many countries, the sample size and how often you read it. We quote each project after a real conversation about the decision, and you get a fixed price and a fixed timeline before any work starts.

    How soon can the first wave run?

    It depends on how much has to be built first. A tracker designed from scratch needs the brief, the questionnaire, the listening set-up and the decision rules agreed with you before anything goes to field, and the proposal you receive shows the exact date of the first wave. If we’re taking over an existing tracker, the first wave usually keeps the timing of the last one, so the series doesn’t break.

    Is there a minimum commitment?

    No. You can run wave by wave and stop whenever you want, though each wave costs more that way. Committing to the year costs less, because the design work is spread across the whole programme and The Big Wave is included at the end. For most trackers we recommend the year, simply because you can’t see a pattern in two readings. For a launch or a specific decision with its own deadline, a short run is often the right answer and we’ll say so.

    We already run a tracker with another agency. Can you take it over without losing the history?

    Usually yes. We need the full picture first: the questionnaires, the sample designs, the fieldwork dates and the historical data. Then we study what is genuinely comparable and keep it, document every change we make and why, and are honest about which series break. We don’t take over a tracker just to keep it running, only when we can see how our method, our senior team and a strategic reading will make it better than it is now.

    Who owns the data, the questionnaire and the results?

    You do. The data, the interviews, the survey responses and every deliverable are produced for you and belong to you. You can see them, download them, analyse them yourself or hand them to someone else, with no gatekeeping. What stays ours are the tools and the working methods, and the technology behind a tracker is sometimes ours and sometimes a partner’s, depending on what the programme needs. We tell you which is which before you sign.

    What do we receive at each wave?

    Every wave brings a report with the movements that matter and what we recommend doing, a readout session with Abdo and Norah for the team that has to act, your dashboard updated, and your research hub refreshed so the evidence stays in one place. The exact format, the dashboard technology and who has access are agreed in the brief, because they change with each client’s team and tools.

    What happens between waves?

    Listening runs continuously, so between waves you get alerts when something crosses a threshold you agreed in advance, not a monthly digest nobody reads. This matters because a quarter that looks calm on average can contain a two-week collapse and a full recovery, and a survey alone would never see it.

    Can you measure our competitors, and in more than one country?

    Yes to both. We can measure your competitors inside the same wave, with the same questionnaire and the same sample, which is the only competitive comparison that holds up. We work across 25 countries and six languages, and we set targets per country rather than ranking markets on a raw score, because how people use a scale is cultural and it moves a number more than performance usually does.

    Is NPS enough on its own?

    No, and no single metric is. NPS tells you the size of a change and nothing about its cause, it behaves very differently across countries, and it’s only comparable when the method is identical. We track it where it’s useful, alongside the measures that explain it, and we always pair it with the two lenses that say why it moved.

    What if a wave comes back with nothing?

    That’s a normal wave, and a useful one. Most waves confirm that the plan is working and that nothing needs to change, which is worth knowing before you spend the next quarter’s budget. The value of a tracker isn’t that something moves every three months, it’s that when something does move you see it early, you know where it happened and you’ve already agreed what to do about it. In a year of quiet waves, the one that fires pays for the rest.

    What all of this actually buys you is the months before it shows up in revenue

    Tell us what you have to watch. You get the rhythm your decisions need, the right lenses and a fixed price, and if a tracker isn’t what you need this year, you’ll hear it from us first.

    1. You get in touchBy email, through the form or on a video call, whichever suits you.
    2. We ask for the briefEvery detail we need, so the proposal is shaped around what you actually require.
    3. We design the proposalThe approach that answers your objectives, with the timeline and the budget.
    4. Approval, and we beginYou sign off, the paperwork is settled, and the work starts.
    Start a conversation
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    • End to end. Design, fieldwork, reporting.
    • No AI automation. Any use, disclosed.