Brands
Tapping into the questions that people ask in search is a key tool to working out what people are really thinking about.
When we look at questions around brands and branding, there are some common threads.
There are several different approaches to measuring brand perception, health and awareness using the Ground Control tech stack. (Keep reading on to see how we close the loop and then also quantify the business impact of this branding activity).
Each approach has its merits, but bring them all together for a really robust solution.
Social Listening
Brandwatch Consumer Research is a recognised world leader in social listening that enables you to track how many people are talking about your brand online, and analyse the conversation. Listening to these unsolicited opinions allows you to hear what people are saying in a more natural context than surveys.
You can measure the volume of mentions of a brand, measure the sentiment of those mentions (using sophisticated machine learning to go beyond just positive and negative) and benchmark changes over time.
Brandwatch has 10 years of data and over 1.4 trillion posts to tap into. You should also be benchmarking your brand mentions versus competitors.
You can also measure reach, accounting for the number of followers (someone talking about your brand with a million followers is more consequential than someone with only a hundred followers). There are multiple different articles on the Brandwatch website which break it down further:
How to measure brand awareness
Brand Health and How to Measure it
Surveys & Panels
Global Web Index is a survey-based audience insights tool that tracks nearly 4000 brands via its 47-country strong global panel. If your brand is not already being tracked, it’s quick and easy to add into the platform without having to wait a whole year. Not only can you track the standard metrics of awareness across a large population base, you can use the GWI platform to understand how your target audience discovers new brands, what drives brand advocacy online, and the brand qualities that your customers are looking for.
Check out some great material from GWI on:
Surveys & Panels
Global Web Index is a survey-based audience insights tool that tracks nearly 4000 brands via its 47-country strong global panel. If your brand is not already being tracked, it’s quick and easy to add into the platform without having to wait a whole year. Not only can you track the standard metrics of awareness across a large population base, you can use the GWI platform to understand how your target audience discovers new brands, what drives brand advocacy online, and the brand qualities that your customers are looking for.
Check out some great material from GWI on:
Search Share of Voice
Les Binet has been making waves with his fast, cheap and predictive Share of Search metric, which can measure both short and long term ad effects. In summary, it’s using a brand’s share of organic search queries for their specific brand, divided by the total searches for all brands in that category.
Our search listening platform, Pi Datametrics, was an early pioneer of tracking search share of voice in the platform, where you can also look at a brand’s share of generic or category searches in addition to the brand search terms. There are also stockbrokers who leverage Pi Datametrics and search share of voice metrics to decide on how to price equities and predict which brands are likely to get a greater market share based on their share of search.
Here’s a great summary by Pi Datametrics on:
Within the organisations that are already tracking brand awareness, perception health and reputation, some stakeholders will eventually ask:
This is where the HamiltonAI platform from Blackwood Seven steps up to use AI-powered unified measurement techniques (think of it as media mix modelling (MMM) on steroids) to quantify the value of a brand and its contribution to sales. This is called Total Marketing Modelling.
In a downturn, branding initiatives are often cut down in favour of sales promotions, but how costly is this tactic – and how much do various brand drivers each contribute along the customer journey?
And what does this mean in terms of where and when you should plan and allocate your media investments?
The power of having a brand presence is called out in a study by Google and the Behavioral Architects called “Decoding Decisions: Making sense the messy middle”, which updates the model of consumer decision making to reflect the realities of making decisions in the internet era.
Using Blackwood Seven, we build a brand model to identify the various drivers of brand strength and quantify the impact from each driver (whether it’s positive or negative). This brand model will deliver strategic insights into what factors and activities drive a brand, but also the operational actions to optimise the media investment to have the best impact on your brand.
As we do with media, we identify the brand hierarchy chain to see which elements are directly or indirectly affect by other variables.
Within the organisations that are already tracking brand awareness, perception health and reputation, some stakeholders will eventually ask:
This is where the HamiltonAI platform from Blackwood Seven steps up to use AI-powered unified measurement techniques (think of it as media mix modelling (MMM) on steroids) to quantify the value of a brand and its contribution to sales. This is called Total Marketing Modelling.
In a downturn, branding initiatives are often cut down in favour of sales promotions, but how costly is this tactic – and how much do various brand drivers each contribute along the customer journey?
And what does this mean in terms of where and when you should plan and allocate your media investments?
The power of having a brand presence is called out in a study by Google and the Behavioral Architects called “Decoding Decisions: Making sense the messy middle”, which updates the model of consumer decision making to reflect the realities of making decisions in the internet era.
Using Blackwood Seven, we build a brand model to identify the various drivers of brand strength and quantify the impact from each driver (whether it’s positive or negative). This brand model will deliver strategic insights into what factors and activities drive a brand, but also the operational actions to optimise the media investment to have the best impact on your brand.
As we do with media, we identify the brand hierarchy chain to see which elements are directly or indirectly affect by other variables.
The brand value parameters include:
Buzz: If you’ve heard anything about the brand in the last two weeks, through advertising, news or word of mouth, was it positive or negative?
Impression: Do you have a general positive or negative feeling about the brand?
Quality: Is its good quality or poor quality
Value: Does it give good value or poor value for what you pay?
Recommend: Would you recommend the brand to a friend or colleague or tell the friend or colleague to avoid the brand?
Reputation: Would you be proud or embarrassed to work for this brand?
Awareness: (Aided Awareness) Have you ever heard of this brand?
Ad Awareness: Which of the following have you seen an advertisement for in the past 2 weeks?
WOM Exposure: Which of the following have talked about with friends and family in the Past two weeks (whether in-person, online or through social media)?
Purchase Intent: From which of these would you be most likely to purchase?
Consideration: When you are in the market next to purchase X, from which of the following would you consider purchasing?
