Turning Brand Awareness Insight Out

For decades, brands have relied on intuition and arbitrary, inconsistent techniques to determine brand perception. Now, due to the dominance of audience-generated content, brand perception changes spontaneously, is at the discretion of the user and what he/she disseminates and digests, and, thankfully, is far more measureable. As a result, today’s savvier brands have learned to carefully listen to their audience and gain mindshare and market share through a Social Advocacy Platform.

Developing a Social Advocacy Platform and using it to measure brand perception is not as difficult as brands may think. By regularly studying ongoing discussions in blogs and other social media channels, a brand can produce a realistic and current snapshot of its perception, as it is evolving. The opportunities and challenges so often revealed by this exercise can then be compared to internal assumptions and traditional research data. Often times, the resulting discussion patterns, product attributes, and brand messages the audience adopts- in support of or in attack upon- a particular brand are revelatory. The Social Advocacy Platform this knowledge provides the basis for can now be applied to all audiences.

Just about every audience segment is represented online, and in considerable numbers. For example, for years brands thought ‘affluents’ were not communicating online, but recent studies have shown that approximately 70% of those over the age of 40 in this consumer segment have at least one social media profile. Not only are all audiences representing themselves in this forum, but their presence is linked considerably to purchasing habits. A study released by Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate Research Technologies surveyed over 1,500 people to reveal that people are more likely to purchase and recommend products/services from brands they follow in social media:

• People are 67% more likely to purchase products from brands they follow on Twitter
• People are 51% more likely to purchase products from brands they follow on Facebook
• 60% of people are more likely to recommend a brand once they become a fan of it on Facebook
• 79% of people are more likely to recommend a brand once they become a follower of it on Twitter

Shrewd and progressive brands can leverage such activity by listening to, engaging with and measuring the outcomes of online discussion as it unfolds. Information discovered through the Internet will help them better understand the mindset and psychographics of the target audience, direct the adjustment of strategies and tactics, and contribute to addressing challenges. Brands that do not see the value in observing the living, breathing brand perception dynamic will always be behind and detached from the market reality, which may ultimately bruise the bottom line.

Information culled and refined from this process is only useful if a brand understands how to adjust their programs to impact communication with the audience, thus influencing the behavior change. To do so effectively calls for adaptation within the development of marketing and communications programs. In the past, program development consisted of three phases: Research, Strategy and Implementation, and Analysis. The anatomy of the exercise does not require change, rather, an adjustment is necessary in type of data gathered and observed in Steps 1 and 3, and in the way the resulting data is applied following analysis. Optimally, the data will influence everything from the website usability to online and offline communications to marketing direction and materials.

Success in a very competitive environment requires the maximization of every advantage, and ignoring an opportunity to evaluate a first-hand account of your brand’s perception through a Social Advocacy Platform can be marketing suicide. The audience is already telling you about your brand. The question then becomes: Can you hear them? And, more importantly, are you listening?