How Lyka tripled brand awareness in 3 years — and how they measured it

A successful brand strategy has two critical ingredients: messaging and creative direction. You need to nail these components to win the hearts and minds of consumers and ensure that your brand resonates with them.

This is where having reliable and always-on brand tracking comes into play. When you have a pulse on how your market views your brand, you can adapt your brand strategy and make sure that you're hitting the mark, as making assumptions can be costly (you aren’t your customer!)

Lyka, opens in new tab, an Australian dog food brand delivering fresh, gently cooked meals made with real ingredients, knows this full well.

That's why the team has relied on Tracksuit since 2022 to continuously measure brand perception, identify growth opportunities, and validate their creative decisions. With three years of brand tracking under their belt, we had a chat to Lyka about their story and learned how Tracksuit's brand tracking solution helps the business fine-tune its brand strategy in a competitive category.

Why brand measurement matters for Lyka 📈🔍

Lyka chose to work with Tracksuit because the team recognized the significance of brand measurement, even while performance marketing remained a core focus.

Cassandra Do Carmo, Brand Marketing Director at Lyka, explains, "A core reason we signed on with Tracksuit was because Lyka understood the importance of tracking our brand measures."

She adds that the team saw Tracksuit as an accessible, cost-effective way to begin investing in brand tracking, without the high costs typically associated with traditional providers.

Beyond that, Lyka also uses Tracksuit to measure brand performance over time, and the team uses those insights to inform their creative decisions.

How brand data fuels creative decision making💡

One capability that Lyka gets tremendous value from is Tracksuit's Statements feature, which lets you write five statements related to your key value proposition.

Tracksuit then surveys consumers in your market — as well as those of five competitors — to measure agreement with each statement on a scale from 0–100%. This helps the brands understand how well their messaging is landing and whether they own their value props.

Cassandra is a big fan of this functionality, saying that it enables the team to make smarter decisions around the creative direction and messaging of Lyka's campaigns.

"One of the more surprising features that we've gotten a lot of value from is the Statements. We've been able to make really interesting creative leaps that we've then validated through further interviews," she says.

Tracksuit's statement-related data, along with other insights, allow the company to produce better creative briefs for things like out-of-home ads and digital marketing initiatives.

"The data from Tracksuit has informed some of the creative choices used in our campaigns. Thanks to the brand statements, we have a solid starting point to be like, 'Oh, this is interesting. Is there something here?'"

Cassandra continues, "And then by looking at other data points, we've been able to stitch together a story and go, 'Okay, this is actually grounds for us to do a campaign around.'"

All in all, Tracksuit has helped Lyka go beyond instinct, bringing clarity and confidence to the team's marketing strategy.

Visualizing brand momentum in a competitive market 🏁

The team also uses Tracksuit's Timeline view, which sheds light on how brand metrics are evolving month-to-month and how Lyka stacks up against competitors.

According to Marketing Manager Hanah Cullen, the ability to visualize brand growth has been a standout feature for the team.

"What's just been awesome to see is the timeline, particularly in comparison to our competitors. We can see the growth we've had in the last three years compared to the rest of the industry."

Just how much growth are we talking about? According to Hanah and Cassandra, Lyka has seen up to 3x brand awareness growth over the past three years, driven by a combination of strong brand building and effective performance marketing efforts.

What's next for Lyka's brand?

As Lyka continues to scale, the team remains focused on challenging the status quo in pet food and deepening their connection with Australian dog owners.

“We are on a mission to change the way Australians feed their dogs, showing them the benefits of swapping highly processed food to fresh meals,” says Cassandra. “To achieve this, we're focused on building both awareness and consideration, helping people understand not just what we offer, but why it matters for their dogs’ health.”

With that in mind, Lyka's next chapter will involve continued investment in above-the-line advertising and broader brand-building efforts. And as those initiatives expand, Tracksuit will remain a crucial partner in measuring their impact.

"The role that Tracksuit plays is in helping us make sure we're on track for building future demand."

She adds, "As a scale-up, we might not have all the tools available to us as some of the bigger companies, so having Tracksuit allows us to stay on top of our core brand measures.”