Valuable Brand Insights vs. Vanity Metrics
As the end of Q4 is approaching, it’s time to plan for the next year as well as learn from past successes (and failures). Brand reports, awareness measures, and audits might be drifting around your organization but oftentimes they end up having little influence on or value for the overarching strategy.?
In this newsletter we’ll cover 5 interesting ways you can look at your brand that you probably aren’t working with, moving from vanity metrics to potential brand insights:
1. Brand footprint in Category
How your brand is mentioned and in what relation has a huge impact, and helps you understand current and future communication challenges and opportunities.
Below is an example of how media covers medical weight loss, segmented into clusters of topical similarity. In this example, we highlighted where the brand 诺和诺德 is mentioned. Here, communication mostly revolves around medical risks, side-effects and new studies. The unflattering topics include suicide, stomach paralysis, heart health and competing products. Sentiment wise, this is primarily neutral or negative (right coloration).?
This could help Novo Nordisk identify growing narratives that they need to address next year, which concerns are most prominent, or faulty information being shared. Subsequently, they could create a communication plan that takes these narratives into account and analyzing the data further could reveal key drivers, engagers, positives within the negatives, media and many other relevant insights for their marketing and communication strategy.
2. Emerging Narratives
It isn’t always easy to see through the various visualizations that software provides, and figuring out what is coming next can be a real challenge. While no-one can truly predict the future, it sometimes pays off to look at outliers.
Below you see a word-cloud sourced from social posts about fashion in 2023. While it certainly seems bigger is better and more central to the narrative, looking at an outlying hashtag such as #fashionforward can reveal growing attention. The term has had growing popularity and went from barely being mentioned to more than a thousand posts a week - maybe we’re looking at a more risky fashion look going into 24’.?
Having a solid monitoring and tracking set up can help you identify trends, and allow you to both prepare long-term or act on-the-fly to peaks of attention.
3. Long term Growth and Baseline Awareness
We’ve previously talked about what long-term brand awareness and growth looks like in this video looking at Volvo Trucks . Being aware of growth or decline is great, but understanding the underlying reasons is when you can start to effectuate change.
Depending on where you sit the reasons may be more or less obvious. For example, the person handling site traffic may argue that due to optimized SEO and advertising spend, you saw an increase in Q4 - which is entirely reasonable. However, she didn’t pay attention to a large-scale PR effort being implemented at that same timeframe, having a massive impact on awareness and subsequently traffic.?
The truth is that both likely had an impact, and tracking your brand presence long-term will help you understand how these synergize. You can start to pin-point efforts and changes over time and understand whether it is a communication change, optimization effort or something third that had a lasting impact.
4. Review Analysis
The internet is abundant with willingly given information from clients and customers that you’re probably not using. Whether you’re looking to understand how people feel about a new product or how it is to work for you, there are thousands of sites with reviews giving you intelligence about you for free.
The trick lies in aggregating this information large-scale - and not just by looking at the collected star rating. Analyzing reviews at scale will eventually weed out the “this is crap because I’m mad” type and start showcasing a pattern, which can inform anything from product development to communication failures. In the below example is a snippet of the results from 30 user reviews of Garmin s fantastic Fenix 7 series.
There are many ways to break down user-reviews but if you don’t have access to software that can help you visualize it try out ChatGPT - we have a video about it here.
5. Demographic Changes
You might think your demographic doesn’t fluctuate, but we assure you that it does. Certain initiatives will elicit more or less responses from distinct communities and this can really inform you well when trying to address new opportunities or changing up your communication. Changes in which demographic follows and engages with your content is a signal you shouldn’t underestimate and keeping a close eye on this reveals what resonates well with certain audiences.?
Here it becomes important to look at engagement and growth in segments, that allows you to compare either relating to a timeframe or activities. Just check out the difference between audiences engaging with an example Polestar campaign, compared to their general audience below.
We hope at least one of these were an eye-opener that helps you enrich your brand reporting and 2024 plans.
At The Mine Group we are always ready to support you with R&I or consultancy that helps you build a stronger strategy and learn from past mistakes and wins.
Remember that a report shouldn't be a check-box - it should help you achieve your goals.