How I Built Kuda's Brand Tracking System Using My Newsletter and DOJO AI
I publish a weekly newsletter called Fintech Marketing Intel, in which I interview the best fintech marketers in the world. Russell Davies told me that "writing is the introvert's way of networking" and he's right - it's been an amazing way to connect with people whose work I admire.
I knew speaking to smart people would help me get better at my job, but I didn't think it would help me solve a very specific problem that I think a lot of marketers struggle with: measuring brand.
The Problem with Measuring Brand
Most brand metrics feel disconnected from actual business results, and getting buy-in for brand investment is a lot more difficult if you can't show clear progress. Brand awareness studies give you a snapshot in time, but they're expensive to run regularly and don't really tell you what's driving changes. They're also not great for markets like Nigeria where research panels are limited.
In the very first Edition of the newsletter, Tom Davies mentioned that he'd built Yonder's own in-house Brand Score to help non-marketers track how the brand was growing. I wanted to do the same but he hadn't written a blog post covering that topic (if you haven't yet, you should definitely subscribe to his Substack Marketing is Hard!).
I needed to figure out how to measure brand at Kuda.
Hello DOJO AI
Four weeks later, I interviewed Jasper Martens, Group CMO at PensionBee. I asked him about his most useful measurement tools and he said: Looker for daily funnel reporting, and DOJO AI to get relevant insights from their database.
I'd heard of DOJO before but hadn't fully understood what it could do. After a bit of research and a demo call with DOJO's Founder Duarte, I realised it was exactly what I was looking for. DOJO connects to a ton of different data sources and gives you intelligent analysis. Like ChatGPT but connected to your company's real-time data.
Building Kuda's Brand Tracking System
Once we'd connected Kuda's data up to DOJO I built two tracking systems for Kuda:
Our Brand Sentiment Tracker measures how positively and actively people feel about Kuda using:
App store ratings
NPS scores
Social media engagement
Customer reviews
Our Brand Visibility Tracker is a weighted index that reflects long-term brand impact and visibility made up of:
Share of search
Share of voice
Excess share of voice
Google Trends
Search clickshare
Organic traffic growth
Brand awareness survey results (we partner with an African market research partner LOOKA for these, and I manually input them)
I say "built" but each of these is an ongoing conversation I have with DOJO which started with a detailed prompt and has been refined over time.
Actually Useful Brand Measurement
The best part isn't just having all the data in one place - it's being able to ask DOJO what changed and why. I can run analysis monthly for regular tracking, immediately after we launch something significant, or in the midst of an issue (like Nigeria's Inter-Bank Settlement System being down) that affects brand perception.
Instead of waiting for quarterly reports or trying to manually connect different metrics, we have real-time brand intelligence. And I can ask follow-up questions like "why did sentiment drop last week?" to get answers.
This has changed how we think about brand at Kuda. We can now:
Spot reputational issues before they get worse
Measure brand impact of campaigns in real-time
Show marketing's contribution with concrete data
Make decisions based on what's actually happening, not gut feel
Learnings
I'm trying to get better at sharing the knowledge I'm getting from the people who have been kind enough to share their wisdom via the newsletter. So! My learnings from this experience:
Find out what other marketers are actually doing - The best ideas come from casual conversations about real problems
Look for tools that connect and analyse, not just collect - Having data in different places is useless. Having it all connected with intelligent analysis is magical.
Make brand as measurable as performance marketing - When brand health becomes as trackable as conversion rates, suddenly everyone cares about it.
I publish Fintech Marketing Intel every week - interviewing the best fintech marketers about what's actually working. You should subscribe!
Ready to build your own real-time brand tracking system? Discover how DOJO AI connects all your brand data sources and provides intelligent analysis that helps you measure brand impact like performance marketing with actionable insights and concrete business results.
