Brand tracking, the research method companies use to measure how consumers perceive and choose a brand over time, sits inside a global market research industry worth about 56 billion dollars. Atlanta entrepreneur Harry Zhang argues the traditional version of that research runs too slowly and costs too much for the pace of modern marketing, and he is building a company around a faster approach.
Zhang and co-founder Henk Pretorious launched Timelaps to replace quarterly research waves with continuous measurement. Under the older model, a brand hired a research agency, waited three to six months and received a slide deck, at a cost that could reach six figures per market per year. Zhang says that lag creates an attribution problem for marketers trying to tie a campaign to a result. "Waves destroy your ability to connect a marketing decision to a brand outcome," he told Hypepotamus.
The platform runs in four stages. An AI analyst works with a brand research expert to build a questionnaire tailored to the client category and competitive set, which the client approves before fieldwork begins. Responses are then collected continuously from census matched category buyers through global and regional panels, across 82 markets and in local languages. Every response passes through fraud detection and a quality control algorithm. Results feed a dashboard that refreshes monthly.
Timelaps automates questionnaire construction, sampling, quota management, data cleaning, weighting, chart building and analysis. Zhang said the underlying brand science remains human work, drawn from Pretorious, who spent two decades designing trackers for large global companies before co-founding the firm. Respondents are matched on age, gender, ethnicity, household income and geography, and screened for category participation.
Source: Hypepotamus - https://www.hypepotamus.com/timelaps-ai-brand-tracking/