Investment Notes: Tracksuit

Tracksuit  is the common language to understand, measure and communicate the value of  brand building. 

Tracksuit is one of the most exciting early-stage growth stories to come out of New Zealand in the last two years. We are delighted to supercharge this team by leading its Seed round.

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Investing in future demand

At Blackbird, we believe wholeheartedly that brand matters.  

Whether you’re spruiking widgets or venture capital investment, marketing to potential customers starts long before you actually transact. 

Marketing starts with brand awareness, built over years.

Think about the difference between Coke and Pepsi. In blinded experiments, their drinks taste the same. Yet chances are the next time you feel like a caffeinated soda you’ll choose Coke, not Pepsi.

Why? Coke’s brand is everywhere. Simply seeing it builds positive association in your mind, making it more likely you’ll choose it at the moment you’re a buyer of what Coke is selling.

Brand awareness matters for creating future demand: it primes not-ready-right-now customers to purchase down the track.

Investing effectively in brand keeps customer acquisition costs low over time. Failing to invest in brand causes growth to slow, and customer acquisition cost to sky-rocket.

This is why companies with strong brands perform well above their peers.

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“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.” - John Wanamaker, Founder of Macy’s

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Measuring what matters

The problem is: it’s really tricky to measure the success of brand marketing investments. 

Getting data on which messages and channels deliver the best bang for buck is difficult: it can be months or years before the awareness leads to a purchase.

What was hard to measure before just got a lot harder with Apple’s privacy changes from iOS 14, and the coming cookiepocalypse.

Today, companies measure brand awareness by paying Kantar to do a bespoke quarterly consumer survey of their target demographic, at the cost of >$60K a pop.

These “dips” are problematically periodic and out of sync to measure the ROI of week-to-week marketing efforts.

There are no cost-effective. always-on solutions.

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Enter, Tracksuit

Thankfully, there’s a new team in town. 

Tracksuit allows companies to cost-effectively, frequently measure their brand awareness and sentiment, so that they can track effectiveness of their marketing investments.

Tracksuit surveys real humans about their purchasing behaviours and brand awareness for different consumer categories, collecting over 1 million data points per week.

Tracksuit then surfaces benchmarked data to its users - marketing leads in charge of brands - who access it through beautiful, easy-to-share dashboards.

A single set of primary data serves multiple end-customers who are in the same segment (e.g. respondents who “bought fresh roasted coffee in the last month” = data serves for multiple coffee brands). This amortises the collection cost across customers, meaning incremental brands with similar target demographics can be served at low cost. 

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The act of surveying, dashboarding and creating a metric gives everyone a common language to attribute and guide investment. Giving something a common language and metric is step one in creating a category. 

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All aboard the Rocketsuit

Founded only 20 months’ ago, Tracksuit today covers 1,300 brands spanning the likes of Tommee Tippee (kids’ products) to Eurocar (car rental), Pfizer (pharmaceuticals) to Simplicity (Kiwisaver), Yu Mei (independent luxury fashion) to Eucalyptus (digital health). 

CEO and Co-Founder at Eucalyptus, Tim Doyle said:

“Our marketing team - regardless of whether they're juniors writing ads, or seniors who are more analytical, all want to engage with the Tracksuit product….How are the Tracksuit numbers going?” is constantly raised in conversation.”

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Who is Team Tracksuit?

Tracksuit was born from a collaboration between innovation studio Previously Unavailable, and insights firm TRA. It has been brought to life by founders and co-CEOs Connor - a Blackbird scout - and Matt. 

Matt started his career as the Christchurch city lead for Uber, before joining MishGuru, a Kiwi-founded, US-based marketing platform providing enterprise customers access to Snapchat stories, ultimately becoming Head of Business Development. That’s where he first worked with Connor, who was MishGuru’s COO, based in New York.

Connor and Matt are already showing signs of magnetising great talent, building an intentionally-diverse team across the US, Australia, New Zealand and the UK.

Know anyone who would love to join this rocketship? The Tracksuit team are hiring for a bunch of roles right now - take a peek here. 

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