In a bid to democratize brand insights, Tracksuit, a New Zealand-based brand-tracking startup, is positioning itself as a more affordable, always-on alternative to traditional market research. By offering a streamlined, easy-to-use dashboard that benchmarks brand health against a company’s competitive set, Tracksuit aims to widen access for mid-sized and growing brands that have historically found high-quality market intelligence out of reach. Since its 2021 launch, the company has expanded its global footprint, raised external funding, and begun building a United States-based team to accelerate its growth.
Market Context and Tracksuit’s Mission
Traditional market research has long operated as a specialized, enterprise-centric service characterized by slow turnarounds, heavy expense, and opaque, data-heavy deliverables. In many cases, consultations are booked on quarterly or biannual cycles, culminating in multi-hundred-page slide decks that require time, expertise, and significant budget to interpret. The approach has frequently prioritized depth over speed, and breadth of access has been limited to larger organizations with substantial research budgets. This entrenched model has left many mid-sized and growing brands with limited visibility into how their brands perform in the market, what drives consumer perception, and where to invest next for sustained growth.
Tracksuit’s co-founder and co-CEO, Matt Herbert, has framed this landscape as one where brand tracking “has been around for a long time,” yet remains out of reach for many players due to cost and complexity. He notes that the standard offerings “usually consist of a consultant coming in on a quarterly or biannual basis with a 100-page slide deck and a lot of complex data that looks behind not forward.” The consequence is a lack of agility: brands struggle to translate data into timely, actionable actions that can influence marketing and product decisions in near real-time. Additionally, market research services historically have been reserved for enterprise-scale companies, leaving smaller and mid-sized firms with less access to strategic insights that could inform growth strategies.
Against this backdrop, Tracksuit has defined a mission centered on affordability, accessibility, and continuous insight. The company frames its purpose as delivering an affordable, always-on, easy-to-use way of accessing brand insights. This mission aligns with a broader industry shift toward more iterative, data-informed decision-making in marketing and branding. The core idea is to replace episodic, resource-intensive research cycles with a persistent, user-friendly platform that helps brands monitor and act on brand health over time, across markets and consumer segments. This mission is not only about lowering the price of admission to brand intelligence; it is about enabling brands to integrate insights into day-to-day decision-making, from creative direction to media planning, product positioning, and channel strategy.
Tracksuit’s early trajectory reflects a deliberate effort to disrupt a familiar incumbent model. The company launched in 2021 with a dashboard that provides a clear, real-time view of brand health metrics and competitive benchmarking. By focusing on metrics that matter for brand equity—such as awareness, consideration, preference, and usage—and by measuring these against a brand’s competitive set, Tracksuit created a pragmatic, decision-ready framework for evaluating brand performance. This approach is designed to help brands understand not only where they stand, but how their actions influence perceptions over time, enabling more informed investment in marketing, communications, and product messaging.
The broader market signals support the Tracksuit thesis. As brands increasingly recognize the importance of long-term brand equity in driving sustainable growth, the need for continuous, high-quality brand insights grows more acute. In many categories—foods and beverages, consumer packaged goods, retail, direct-to-consumer, and financial services—brands must align messaging, product attributes, and customer experiences to reinforce a compelling value proposition. The Tracksuit model emphasizes a common language for measuring and discussing brand health, which is essential for cross-functional alignment across marketing, product, and leadership teams. The company positions itself as a bridge between complex, research-heavy frameworks and the practical, fast-moving requirements of mid-sized brands aiming to scale in competitive markets.
Product, Features, and Value Proposition
Tracksuit began with a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that emphasizes ease of use and an always-on data stream. The product is built around dashboards that track core brand-health metrics and contextualize them within a brand’s competitive landscape. The emphasis on a flat-fee pricing model is designed to remove the barrier that often accompanies traditional research services, ensuring that insights aren’t tied to project scope, budget cycles, or contractual complexity. The result is a tool that is intended to be accessible to teams without the resources traditionally required for comprehensive market research, while still delivering meaningful, decision-ready intelligence.
Key metrics tracked by Tracksuit include brand awareness (how well the brand is known within target markets), consideration (to what extent potential customers consider the brand when evaluating options), preference (which brands are preferred given various attributes and experiences), and usage (how often and in what contexts consumers engage with the brand). These metrics are measured against the brand’s competitive set, allowing users to gauge relative performance and identify gaps or opportunities across markets and segments. The platform’s value proposition rests on simplifying complex brand-tracking concepts into a cohesive, actionable framework that teams can adopt quickly and use to inform strategy.
A notable feature of Tracksuit’s approach is the global reach of its surveys. By surveying target customers around the world, the platform seeks to build a robust data foundation that reflects cross-market differences in brand perception and consumer behavior. The resulting data is then translated into a brand’s fundamentals, including the total addressable market (TAM), brand salience (awareness and recognition), consideration, and where the brand is most preferred. The platform also captures nuanced sentiment—what people think and feel about the brand—and how these attitudes shift over time. This temporal dimension is critical for spotting trends, understanding the effectiveness of marketing and communications, and forecasting future brand trajectories.
Beyond these fundamentals, Tracksuit offers deeper analytics tied to strategic pillars or value propositions that a brand wants to own in the marketplace. The platform helps brands measure how well they perform against these pillars and how communications, advertising, and marketing activities influence perceptions and attributes among consumers. During a demonstration, co-founder Herbert illustrated the platform’s “unprompted imagery” feature—a word cloud that reveals the words associated with a specific brand, positioned next to a similar cloud for the brand’s primary competitor. This capability provides a qualitative lens on brand associations and can illuminate gaps between intended messaging and consumer perceptions.
This emphasis on a common measurement language underpins Tracksuit’s broader strategic narrative. The company argues that brands need a standardized vocabulary to evaluate, understand, and communicate value. In practice, this means stakeholders across departments can align around a shared set of metrics and concepts, enabling more coherent strategy, more efficient resource allocation, and more transparent communication with investors, partners, and internal teams. The platform’s design—balancing quantitative dashboards with qualitative sentiment cues—aims to bridge the gap between data analysis and strategic decision-making, making insights actionable and accessible to a broader range of users within a brand.
From a product-design perspective, Tracksuit’s approach prioritizes clarity and accessibility. The dashboards are structured to present high-level brand-health signals, while still offering the depth needed for rigorous analysis. The “unprompted imagery” feature adds a qualitative dimension that resonates with how brand teams often think about creative direction and messaging. By providing both quantitative metrics and qualitative associations, the platform supports a more holistic understanding of brand health, enabling teams to connect the dots between perception, creative execution, and performance outcomes.
In terms of value proposition, Tracksuit’s flat-fee SaaS model, global survey capabilities, and emphasis on a common language for brand health together create a compelling package for mid-sized brands seeking scalable insights. The platform is positioned as a cost-effective, continuous alternative to episodic, high-cost market research. By delivering ongoing visibility into brand health, the product supports proactive decision-making, faster iteration, and more informed investment in marketing and product development. This combination—affordability, accessibility, continuous insight, and practical interpretability—constitutes the core value proposition that Tracksuit offers to its customers.
Funding and Expansion Strategy
Tracksuit recently closed a funding round totaling $5 million in its first external financing, signaling external validation of its business model and growth prospects. The round was led by Blackbird, a venture investor known for supporting tech-enabled businesses with a focus on growth potential. The financing also included participation from Shasta Ventures, Icehouse Ventures, Ascential, and brand consultant Mark Ritson. This syndicate brings together a mix of regional and global investors with expertise in technology, consumer brands, and market intelligence, creating both financial resources and strategic perspectives to fuel Tracksuit’s growth trajectory.
With the capital raised, Tracksuit has outlined plans to deepen its presence in the United States, a market that represents a substantial opportunity for brand-tracking solutions given the breadth of consumer brands and the increasing emphasis on data-driven marketing. The company has taken its first steps into the U.S. market by establishing a New York City presence, marking a strategic milestone in its expansion plan. In November, Tracksuit made its first hire in New York, and the company is actively building a 10-person team in the city to support its growth ambitions. The U.S. expansion is expected to unlock opportunities for onboarding more brands, expanding the platform’s competitive benchmarking capabilities, and establishing partnerships with agency networks and enterprise clients seeking scalable brand-tracking solutions.
The funding round’s composition—led by Blackbird with participation from Shasta Ventures, Icehouse Ventures, Ascential, and Mark Ritson—reflects a blend of strategic and financial support. Blackbird’s involvement is notable for its emphasis on platform-enabled growth and its interest in technology-driven branding tools that can scale across markets. Shasta Ventures’ participation signals investor confidence in Tracksuit’s ability to navigate the intersection of consumer brands and data-driven marketing, while Ascential’s involvement implies recognition of Tracksuit’s potential to complement traditional brand insights ecosystems, including agency and consultancy services. The presence of Mark Ritson, a respected brand consultant and commentator, adds a strategic dimension that could help Tracksuit refine its messaging, benchmark its methodology, and align its offerings with best practices in brand strategy and marketing.
Beyond the funding mechanics, this round signals a broader market interest in alternative models of brand insight. As brands increasingly seek continuous, cost-effective intelligence, Tracksuit’s approach—delivering an always-on, easy-to-use platform with a transparent pricing structure—positions it as a viable alternative to episodic, consultancy-heavy engagements. The capital infusion is expected to accelerate product development, expand data collection capabilities, and support go-to-market activities in key markets, particularly the United States, where mid-sized and growing brands are actively seeking scalable brand-tracking solutions to inform marketing and product decisions.
The expansion strategy also includes organizational growth in the U.S., with a dedicated team in New York intended to support sales, customer success, and regional operations. By establishing a U.S.-based team, Tracksuit aims to shorten onboarding cycles, tailor its platform to the needs of North American brands, and cultivate closer relationships with potential customers and partners. The decision to invest in a New York City hub aligns with the city’s status as a major center for marketing, media, and consumer brands, offering access to a broad talent pool and a dense network of potential customers and partners.
In communicating the strategic rationale behind its expansion, Tracksuit emphasizes the demand for its product and its potential to shift how consumer businesses approach marketing. The company asserts that its platform supports a move away from an overemphasis on immediate conversion toward building long-term growth through effective, creative marketing. This reframing aligns well with evolving expectations in the industry, where brand health and long-term equity are increasingly recognized as critical drivers of sustainable performance. With the funds and the expanded footprint, Tracksuit is positioned to accelerate product development, broaden its data-collection footprint, and scale its operations to meet rising demand across multiple regions.
Customer Footprint and Segmentation
Tracksuit has built a substantial and diverse customer base, with insights being tracked for more than 1,300 brands across several major regions, including New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This geographic breadth demonstrates Tracksuit’s ability to collect cross-market data and compare brand performance across different consumer cultures, regulatory environments, and competitive landscapes. The company’s client mix includes mid-sized, growing consumer brands spanning a range of sectors, with a particular focus on food and beverage, fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), retail, direct-to-consumer (DTC), and financial services. Such a portfolio underscores the platform’s broad applicability to brands that are navigating competitive markets and seeking scalable brand-health insights without resorting to costly, ad hoc market research arrangements.
A notable characteristic of Tracksuit’s customer base is its balanced mix of legacy and newly served segments. Herbert notes that about half of Tracksuit’s current customers come from the existing brand-tracking market—a testament to the platform’s ability to attract buyers who are already familiar with the value of brand-tracking data and want a more accessible, service-like experience. The other half represent a new segment that the market research industry has not previously served in a meaningful way. This dual-customer dynamic suggests Tracksuit’s potential to expand the overall market for brand insights by democratizing access to a tool that is both easy to adopt and capable of scaling with a brand’s growth.
Among the company’s notable clients are Made by Nacho, Charity: Water, and Athletic Brewing Company. While not an exhaustive list, these examples illustrate the platform’s applicability across different brand archetypes: a specialty food brand, a nonprofit with mission-driven branding, and a premium beverage company with a focus on craft and consumer appeal. Each of these brands faces distinct branding challenges—from culinary differentiation and storytelling in the nonprofit space to product positioning and audience resonance in the beverage sector. Tracksuit’s ability to support them with ongoing brand-health insights and benchmarking against competitive sets highlights the platform’s versatility and potential to inform diverse branding strategies.
Herbert emphasizes that demand for Tracksuit’s product signals a broader shift in how consumer-focused businesses approach marketing. Rather than pushing for immediate conversions, many brands are recognizing the value of building long-term growth through highly effective, creative marketing. This perspective aligns with a broader industry trend toward brand-led growth strategies in which marketing investments are evaluated based on long-horizon brand equity development, audience engagement, and sustainable competitive advantage. By delivering ongoing visibility into brand health, Tracksuit enables brands to make more informed decisions about where to allocate marketing resources, how to craft messaging, and which channels or partnerships to prioritize for maximum long-term impact.
The customer mix also highlights Tracksuit’s potential to support brands across various stages of growth. For smaller brands, the platform provides a scalable, cost-effective way to measure and improve brand health without the need for large research budgets. For mid-sized brands in a growth phase, Tracksuit offers a mechanism to monitor the effectiveness of marketing investments and to rapidly identify shifts in consumer sentiment or competitive dynamics. For more mature brands, the platform can serve as a diagnostic tool to track the impact of strategic pivots, new product launches, or shifts in positioning. This breadth of applicability underpins the platform’s ability to serve as a unifying source of truth for brand health across different segments and stages of business.
Herbert also highlights a strategic implication of the platform’s breadth: the potential for cross-industry applicability. By enabling brands in diverse sectors to measure and compare brand health in a consistent framework, Tracksuit creates opportunities for knowledge transfer and best-practice sharing across industries. This cross-pollination could contribute to a more standardized understanding of brand metrics, improved benchmarking standards, and a greater willingness among brands to invest in ongoing brand-health tracking as a core component of their growth strategy.
Data Methodology and Insights Framework
Tracksuit collects insights by surveying target customers across the globe, leveraging direct-to-consumer panels and other respondent pools to assemble a broad, globally representative dataset. The platform uses these survey results to establish a brand’s fundamentals and to quantify core metrics such as total addressable market, brand awareness, consideration, and where the brand is most preferred. By mapping these dimensions, Tracksuit helps brands understand not only whether they are known or considered, but in what contexts and among which consumer segments they perform best or face gaps. The time-series nature of this data allows brands to observe how perceptions shift in response to marketing campaigns, price changes, product launches, or competitive moves, providing a window into the dynamics of brand equity over time.
The methodology includes an emphasis on qualitative insights that complement the quantitative measures. After establishing the brand’s foundational metrics, Tracksuit dives deeper by examining strategic pillars or value propositions that a brand aims to own in the market. The platform is designed to help brands monitor how well they execute against these pillars and how communications and advertising influence consumer perceptions of the associated attributes. This approach supports brands in aligning creative direction with strategic objectives, ensuring that marketing efforts reinforce the brand’s intended positioning rather than merely chasing short-term performance signals.
A distinctive feature of Tracksuit, showcased during demonstrations, is its unprompted imagery tool. This capability generates word clouds that reveal the words or associations that spontaneously come to mind when consumers think about a brand, juxtaposed with a word cloud representing the brand’s major competitor. This side-by-side visualization provides a qualitative lens through which teams can assess brand associations, identify potential misalignments between intended messaging and consumer perception, and uncover opportunities to refine positioning or creative concepts. The word-cloud comparison helps illuminate how the market talks about a brand in the absence of prompting, offering a window into authentic consumer language and sentiment that can inform messaging strategy and creative testing.
The platform’s data architecture is designed to balance depth with accessibility. By aggregating data from multiple markets and channels, Tracksuit aims to present a cohesive picture of brand health that is interpretable by cross-functional teams, including marketing, product, and leadership. The emphasis on a common language for measurement supports collaboration across departments, enabling more consistent interpretation of results and action-oriented decision-making. The framework also accommodates the need for timely insights in fast-moving markets, offering near-real-time or near-continuous visibility into brand performance rather than delayed, episodic analysis. This combination of breadth, depth, and accessibility serves as a foundation for Tracksuit’s ongoing value to its customers.
In terms of data quality and reliability, Tracksuit’s global surveying approach seeks to mitigate regional bias and provide a representative picture of brand perception across the markets it covers. While the article does not disclose technical specifics such as panel sizing, sampling methodology, or data validation procedures, the platform’s emphasis on consistent metrics, comparability across brands, and longitudinal tracking implies attention to methodological rigor. For brands evaluating platform-based insights, understanding the underlying data quality and sampling approaches remains an important consideration, and Tracksuit’s position as an affordable, accessible option suggests a practical balance between methodological sophistication and real-world usability.
The Insights Framework also places emphasis on the interrelationship between brand health metrics and strategic marketing decisions. By measuring relationships between awareness, consideration, and preference, Tracksuit provides a lens into the drivers of long-term growth. The ability to track these metrics against a brand’s competitive set enables brands to observe not only absolute changes in brand equity but also relative movements within the marketplace. This relative perspective is particularly valuable for brands contending with strong competitors or navigating evolving market dynamics, as it foregrounds opportunities to differentiate through messaging, positioning, or channel strategy.
In practice, the data and insights produced by Tracksuit are intended to guide strategic decision-making across the marketing lifecycle. Brands can leverage the platform to situate themselves within a landscape of competitors, identify where to concentrate marketing investments, and monitor the effectiveness of creative strategies over time. The combination of quantitative dashboards, qualitative sentiment cues, and a shared measurement language is designed to empower teams to translate data into concrete actions—whether that means refining a product proposition, adjusting go-to-market messaging, or reallocating resources to higher-growth opportunities.
Brand Pillars, Values, and the Common Language for Measurement
Central to Tracksuit’s approach is the notion that each brand has strategic pillars or value propositions it seeks to own. The platform helps brands track how effectively they perform against those pillars and how their communications influence consumer perceptions of the associated attributes. This pillar-based framework provides a structured way to connect marketing activities with brand outcomes. By focusing on pillars, brands can prioritize investments that strengthen core differentiators and reinforce the narratives that resonate with target audiences.
The platform’s emphasis on a “common language” is intended to address a practical challenge that many brands face: misalignment among internal teams and external partners when discussing brand health. In traditional market research, terminology can be specialized and siloed, creating friction when marketing, product, and leadership teams attempt to act on insights. Tracksuit’s language aims to unify these discussions, enabling stakeholders to speak a shared language about awareness, consideration, preference, usage, and pillar performance. This convergence helps ensure that brand-building efforts are cohesive and that the impact of marketing investments can be traced more clearly to changes in brand perceptions and, ultimately, to business outcomes.
Herbert described Tracksuit’s objective as establishing a standard for evaluating, understanding, and communicating the value of brands. This objective implies more than just data presentation; it encompasses a holistic approach to how brands are measured, discussed, and managed across an organization. The common language framework is designed to facilitate cross-functional collaboration, enabling teams to align their priorities, assess trade-offs, and optimize resource allocation based on a shared understanding of what drives brand equity.
The Pillars-and-Perceptions framework contributes to a more strategic use of marketing budgets. By tracking how well a brand performs against its pillars and how marketing activities influence perceptions of those pillars, brands can identify where to invest in creative concepts, messaging, and media placements to maximize impact on the attributes that matter most to their target consumers. This approach supports a climate in which marketing decisions are anchored in measurable brand outcomes rather than purely short-term performance metrics, such as click-through rates or immediate conversions. In a market where brand equity increasingly correlates with long-term growth, the Pillars framework gives brands a practical tool for guiding investments toward durable, equity-building initiatives.
Tracksuit’s “unprompted imagery” feature plays a key role in this framework by providing a qualitative read on the words and associations that naturally arise around a brand. The juxtaposition of a brand’s word cloud with that of its main competitor places emphasis on the relative strength of brand associations and helps identify opportunities to reposition messaging, emphasize differentiators, or correct misperceptions. This qualitative layer complements the quantitative signals offered by traditional brand-health metrics, enabling a more complete picture of how brands are perceived and how those perceptions may be shifting as campaigns run and new messages reach audiences.
The overarching goal is to empower brands to articulate, measure, and invest in the aspects of their identity that matter most to consumers. By offering a structured framework that aligns brand pillars with consumer perceptions and providing tools to quantify the impact of communications on those perceptions, Tracksuit enables more precise, data-informed decision-making. Brand teams can use this framework to plan, test, and optimize marketing strategies, ensuring that brand-building activities contribute to a coherent, long-term growth trajectory rather than simply delivering short-term wins.
The Unprompted Imagery Feature and Competitive Intelligence
One of Tracksuit’s standout features is the unprompted imagery tool, a word-cloud visualization that reveals the words and associations that come to mind when consumers think about a brand. This feature is presented side by side with a similar visualization for the brand’s leading competitor, offering a direct, qualitative comparison of consumer language and thought. The unprompted imagery capability provides actionable insights into brand associations, helping marketers understand which words and ideas are most strongly linked to the brand in the minds of consumers and how these associations stack up against the competition.
This qualitative lens is particularly valuable for informing creative direction and messaging strategies. By identifying the language and concepts that spontaneously emerge in consumer minds, brand teams can tailor their campaigns to reinforce favorable associations or disrupt negative perceptions. The feature also supports benchmarking against competitors, enabling brands to track shifts in associations over time and to assess the effectiveness of repositioning efforts or new creative concepts.
In conjunction with the platform’s quantitative metrics, unprompted imagery helps brands address a fundamental question: what is the job to be done for the consumer? By understanding the spontaneous associations that drive consumer behavior, teams can better align their messaging with the underlying needs, preferences, and expectations of their target audiences. This alignment is crucial for delivering a compelling value proposition that resonates with consumers in a way that supports long-term growth.
The imagery feature complements the broader “common language” and Pillars framework by providing a tangible, consumer-centered illustration of how brand health is evolving. It enables teams to move beyond abstract numbers and into the qualitative realm of consumer perception, sentiment, and language. When integrated with the platform’s broader analytics, unprompted imagery contributes to more robust storytelling about brand health, allowing teams to articulate, measure, and communicate the implications of perception shifts for brand strategy and marketing investment.
The unprompted imagery insights can influence a range of practical decisions, from refining value propositions and product messaging to guiding creative testing and media planning. For example, if consumers frequently associate a brand with certain attributes that are not aligned with its intended positioning, teams can adjust messaging to emphasize attributes that better reflect the brand’s pillars or pivot the marketing strategy to address misperceptions. Conversely, if the imagery reveals strong, favorable associations, brands can reinforce these connections through creative concepts and targeted messaging to sustain momentum.
In addition to unprompted imagery, Tracksuit’s broader data framework supports competitive intelligence in meaningful ways. By comparing brand health metrics and perceptions against a brand’s main competitors, the platform enables brands to gauge their relative strength and identify opportunities to differentiate. This competitive lens helps brands think strategically about where to allocate resources in order to close gaps, accelerate growth, and achieve a stronger position in the market. The combination of quantitative measures, qualitative imagery, and competitive benchmarking creates a multi-faceted view of brand health, providing a richer basis for decision-making than a single data source could offer.
The practical implications of these capabilities extend to marketing strategy and investment planning. Brands can use Tracksuit to inform decisions about where to focus advertising, how to optimize creative concepts, and which audience segments to prioritize for campaigns. By understanding both the numerical trends in awareness, consideration, and preference and the qualitative signals from unprompted imagery, teams can craft more effective messaging, develop more resonant value propositions, and align media plans with the attributes that matter most to their audiences. In this way, Tracksuit’s unique features become a bridge between data-driven insights and creative, strategic execution.
Market Trends and Implications for Marketers
The Tracksuit narrative aligns with a broader shift in how consumer-focused brands approach marketing and growth. There is increased recognition that long-term brand equity—not just short-term conversions—can be a primary driver of sustainable business performance. In this context, a platform that provides continuous visibility into brand health, with actionable recommendations and a common measurement language, becomes a valuable asset for teams seeking to balance short-term tactics with long-term brand-building goals.
This shift toward brand-led growth has several implications for marketers. First, it reinforces the importance of measuring brand health as an ongoing discipline rather than as a periodic exercise. Continuous tracking enables marketers to detect early signs of shifts in consumer sentiment, assess the effectiveness of campaigns in real time, and adjust strategies quickly to protect or enhance brand equity. The ability to benchmark against competitors adds a competitive dimension to this discipline, allowing brands to anticipate moves by rivals and respond with targeted messaging and innovative creative work.
Second, the emphasis on a common language and a transparent framework supports better cross-functional collaboration. Marketing, product, and leadership teams can align around shared definitions of awareness, consideration, and preference, and they can interpret results through the same lens. This alignment reduces interpretive friction and fosters more coordinated decision-making. When teams can discuss brand health in a consistent vocabulary, they can more effectively allocate resources, prioritize initiatives, and measure outcomes against agreed-upon objectives.
Third, the focus on mid-sized and growing brands signals a democratization of brand insights. By offering an affordable, accessible platform that delivers continuous insights, Tracksuit broadens access to metrics that were previously confined to enterprise-level organizations with large research budgets. This democratization can empower smaller brands to compete more effectively with larger incumbents by enabling data-driven marketing decisions that were once beyond reach. In this sense, Tracksuit’s business model and product design respond to a real-market demand for scalable, user-friendly brand intelligence that can support growth without prohibitive costs or complexity.
From an industry perspective, the fundraising round and US expansion signal investor confidence in an alternative approach to brand tracking. The mix of investors—including Blackbird, Shasta Ventures, Icehouse Ventures, Ascential, and Mark Ritson—reflects a belief that there is room in the market for platforms that complement or substitute traditional research services with more accessible, agile tools. The participation of a brand consultant such as Mark Ritson also hints at an interest in ensuring methodological rigor and market-relevant best practices, which can help Tracksuit gain credibility among marketers who value both data-driven insights and strategic guidance.
The global reach of Tracksuit’s surveys—across New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States—also positions the company to capture cross-market patterns and insights that could inform best practices for brands operating in multiple regions. This multi-market capability is valuable for brands seeking to harmonize messaging and positioning across geographies, while also recognizing regional nuances that influence brand perception. In practice, marketers can use such cross-market intelligence to tailor campaigns to local contexts while maintaining a coherent global brand narrative.
Overall, the market trends that Tracksuit taps into—continuous brand-health tracking, a common measurement framework, qualitative sentiment insights, and competitive benchmarking—signal a maturing field of brand intelligence that blends data science with human understanding of consumer perception. For marketers, this convergence offers a practical pathway to integrate insights into strategy and execution in a way that is both scalable and actionable. Tracksuit’s model—affordable access, global reach, and a focus on long-term growth—positions it to play a meaningful role in the evolving toolkit of brand marketers who are balancing speed, cost, and strategic impact.
Leadership Vision and Industry Implications
Tracksuit’s leadership envisions a future in which brand health is measured with a shared language, accessible tools, and continuous visibility. The company’s emphasis on turning brand insights into a common framework is designed to foster alignment across teams and to enable more precise, actionable marketing decisions. The leadership’s framing of strong brands as the differentiator between good and great companies—whether they sell physical products or software—highlights an overarching belief in branding as a strategic asset that can drive long-term value beyond immediate sales.
Philosophically, the Tracksuit approach is anchored in the idea that a standardized measurement language can democratize access to brand intelligence. By lowering the barriers to entry and providing an always-on platform, Tracksuit seeks to empower a broader range of brands to monitor, understand, and act on brand-health signals. The vision extends beyond mere data presentation to a holistic framework that connects brand pillars, consumer perceptions, and marketing strategy in a cohesive, actionable ecosystem. This vision points toward a future in which brand measurement is more transparent, scalable, and integrated into organizational decision-making, rather than being the purview of specialized agencies or large corporations.
The U.S. expansion and the recruitment of a 10-person New York City team reflect a deliberate strategy to embed Tracksuit more deeply in a key market known for its concentration of consumer brands, media networks, and marketing talent. This move suggests a commitment to proximity with potential customers, agencies, and strategic partners, enabling closer collaboration, faster adoption cycles, and more iterative product refinement based on real-world feedback. The investment in a U.S.-based team also signals confidence in Tracksuit’s ability to scale its platform and to support enterprise-like customers that require robust data connectivity, reliability, and support.
From an industry perspective, Tracksuit’s growth strategy could influence how other market research companies position themselves. If the affordability and accessibility narrative resonates with brands, there could be increased demand for hybrid offerings that combine technology with consultative expertise. The involvement of Ascential in the funding round implies potential synergies between Tracksuit’s platform and established brand-insight ecosystems, hinting at possible collaborations or integrations that could extend Tracksuit’s reach through agency networks and data partnerships. This scenario could contribute to a broader trend toward modular, technology-enabled approaches to brand intelligence that complement traditional research services rather than fully displacing them.
Ultimately, the Tracksuit story discusses more than a single startup’s fundraising success or geographic expansion. It speaks to a broader evolution in brand analytics—from episodic, expensive, consultant-driven studies to continuous, scalable insights that are accessible to a wider spectrum of brands. The company’s focus on a universal language for measuring brand health, its emphasis on Pillars and perceptions, and its commitment to making insights actionable for growth create a blueprint for how future brand-tracking platforms might operate. If Tracksuit can maintain data quality, deliver meaningful cross-market insights, and continue to grow its U.S. footprint while preserving affordability, it could help redefine expectations for what brand intelligence should deliver to mid-sized brands navigating increasingly complex and competitive marketplaces.
Conclusion
Tracksuit is redefining how brands access and use market insights by combining affordability, accessibility, and continuous visibility into brand health. Its approach—anchored in a flat-fee SaaS model, global survey data, a common measurement language, and qualitative tools like unprompted imagery—offers a pragmatic alternative to traditional, high-cost market research. The company’s growth trajectory, including a $5 million external funding round led by Blackbird and expansion into the United States with a New York–based team, underscores a belief in the potential of continuous brand-tracking platforms to empower mid-sized and growing brands across industries.
By tracking core metrics such as awareness, consideration, preference, and usage against a brand’s competitive set, Tracksuit helps brands monitor performance in a structured, actionable way. The platform’s Pillars framework provides a coherent lens through which marketing teams can assess how well their communications and advertising support their brand propositions and how perceptions shift in response to campaigns over time. The unprompted imagery feature adds a qualitative dimension that complements quantitative signals, offering insight into consumer associations and the language people use when thinking about a brand and its competitors.
The company’s broad customer base—over 1,300 brands across New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States—demonstrates the platform’s versatility and appeal to mid-sized brands seeking scalable insights. Notable customers such as Made by Nacho, Charity: Water, and Athletic Brewing Company illustrate Tracksuit’s capacity to support brands across diverse categories and organizational goals. The expansion into the U.S. market, supported by a dedicated local team, positions Tracksuit to deepen customer relationships, expand its data partnerships, and accelerate adoption among brands poised to leverage continuous, data-informed brand-building strategies.
Looking ahead, Tracksuit’s leadership envisions a future where brand health is measured and discussed with clarity, consistency, and credibility across industries. The platform’s emphasis on a common language for brand measurement, its global survey-based data backbone, and its focus on long-term value creation place it at the intersection of technology-enabled analytics and pragmatic marketing leadership. If Tracksuit sustains its growth, maintains data quality, and continues to innovate with features like unprompted imagery, it could become a foundational tool for brands seeking to align marketing investments with durable brand equity and sustainable growth in a rapidly evolving market landscape.
