The Challenge

In a competitive financial services market, maintaining a strong and relevant brand requires more than occasional customer feedback. Brand perceptions, awareness levels and the impact of marketing activity can change over time, influenced by wider economic conditions, competitor activity and evolving customer expectations.

Principality Building Society needed a robust evidence base to understand how its brand was performing among customers and the wider public and to evaluate the effectiveness of its marketing, sponsorship and brand-building activity. The organisation wanted a consistent approach that would allow it to:

• Monitor key brand health measures, including awareness, familiarity, consideration, favourability and advocacy.
• Track changes in brand perceptions over time.
• Evaluate the impact of marketing and sponsorship activity.
• Compare performance across audiences, regions and demographic groups.
• Identify opportunities to strengthen brand relevance and engagement.
• Support marketing and communications decisions with reliable evidence.

Crucially, the research needed to provide a long-term view of brand performance, enabling Principality to distinguish genuine shifts in consumer sentiment from short-term fluctuations.

The Solution

Since 2018, Beaufort Research has delivered a continuous brand tracking programme for Principality Building Society, initially in Wales through the Wales Omnibus and now expanded to include England. Today, the study runs four times a year, providing a consistent and statistically robust framework for monitoring brand performance.

The programme combines ongoing brand health measurement with campaign and sponsorship evaluation, allowing Principality to assess both long-term brand performance and the impact of specific marketing activity within a single framework.

The tracker measures a wide range of indicators, including:

• Brand awareness and familiarity.
• Product ownership and consideration.
• Brand perceptions and reputation.
• Recommendation and advocacy.
• Brand relevance to different audiences.
• Sponsorship awareness.
• Advertising and marketing recall.
• Campaign message take-out and attribution.

The programme is supported by detailed reporting, trend analysis, interactive dashboards and regular debrief sessions, helping Principality translate research findings into practical actions and strategic decisions.

The Outcome

The continuous tracking programme has become a central source of evidence for understanding brand performance and evaluating marketing effectiveness.

The research has enabled Principality to:

• Monitor brand equity and key perception measures consistently over time.
• Understand how awareness, familiarity, relevance and consideration vary across different audiences, regions.
• Measure the visibility and impact of advertising, sponsorship and campaign activity.
• Identify which campaign messages resonate most strongly with the public.
• Evaluate the effectiveness of evolving brand positioning and communications strategies.
• Inform future marketing investment, campaign planning and strategic decision-making.

By combining brand tracking and campaign evaluation within a single programme, Principality can move beyond simple awareness measures and understand how marketing activity contributes to wider brand objectives.

Client Testimonial

Beaufort have been a trusted partner of Principality for a number of years. During that time, Principality has undergone significant change and the brand has evolved accordingly. Having an agency partner who invests the time in understanding our business has been invaluable as it’s allowed us to shape and adapt our tracking programme so that it remains a powerful business tool. Beaufort are genuine collaborators and constructive challengers which is why they’ve become a trusted business partner for Principality.

Lucy Tarrant, Senior Research Manager, Principality Building Society