Understanding Your Audience with Conversation Research

There’s a spirits brand we’re familiar with at the Conversation Research Institute, not because they’re a client, but they’re a favorite for us when we break for a drink at the end of the week. Their marketing is not unlike other sprits brands in their category. It’s focused on tradition, heritage and quality. It’s aimed at men and of a particular status in life.

Honestly, you could take one of about two dozen brands in this category and put them in the same advertisements or even social media posts and, generally, the communications would work.

But we did some snooping around the conversation about the brand and found something interesting. The professions of the people who talk about the brand don’t exactly align with who the brand thinks they’re talking to.

(See the chart here or above)

Over the course of two months time, almost one fourth of the authors talking about the brand online listed themselves as artists. While certainly more research needs to be done to determine what type, what gender, how serious and the like, if you are targeting your messaging at male executives, does this data not give you pause?

Yes, 15 percent of the authors talking about the brand fall into the executive label. But the labels of “artist” “teacher” and even “journalist” add up to almost half of the online conversations about your brand, don’t you think segmenting and targeting them could result in more, bigger or better?

Conversation research isn’t just about finding sentiment and tone. It’s about uncovering insights about your brand that help you make critical marketing and business decisions. This particular brand of spirit is missing out on a huge content marketing or even targeting paid spend potential if they aren’t paying attention to the data that conversation research can unearth.

More can be had for your brand. Let us know if we can help.

NOTE: This first appeared at The Conversation.