Strategic planning for the real world - part three

In part three of a series, Nicholine Hayward, planner, brand storyteller and digital evangelist, explains how strategic planning can benefit your business.

Friday, 26 June 2009

In the last module, we looked at how online research can give us new insights into markets, categories and consumers. Now, for module three, we’ll look at brands and what we can learn about their equities and assets, advocates and detractors, what they’re saying about themselves and what they’re not.

The brand

Profiling and segmenting a brand’s equities

A good place to start finding the issues associated with a brand, and what consumers want from it, is the Google keyword tool. Looking at the data for Cadbury’s for example there are several interesting observations to be made.

Firstly, the biggest thing that people want from Cadbury’s at the moment is Cadbury World, followed by the advert, and in third place, the chocolate. This tells me straightaway that Cadbury is an entertainment, not confectionary brand. There is also strong demand for Cadbury Schweppes, which is surely a search made by the trade, the press, analysts and investors – who comprise a small but important audience for Cadbury.

Finding – and listening to - customers

You can also do an exact search on a buying behaviour to find the people who use your product. For example, click here to see what you get when you search for ‘I drive a Skoda’.

As you can see, it’s a rich source of demographical and attitudinal information. When you scroll through a few pages, you’ll see patterns and commonalities start to emerge. From studying the people who say they drive a Skoda we can see that they tend to be:

• Rational

• Practical

• Careful

• Comfortable

From looking at the conversations they are having on forums and the kind of reviews they are writing, we can see that Skoda drivers feel as though they have got a great deal: a lot of car for not a lot of money. Sensible types, they carefully weighed up the features and benefits and came to the decision that Skoda made perfect sense. They’re not given to boasting, but they are quietly delighted at the bargain they’ve made.

We can also see the effect of Skoda’s renaissance at work. Skoda owners are determined to ‘own the joke’, as was the original intention, and are secure enough in their purchase to often get in first, with jokes of their own.

For an example of unconditional love in a user base, let’s look at the iphone, in a webspace where apple users are perfectly at home: Flickr. Here are the results for the search “I love my iphone”. Looking through the results, people who love their iphone do so with an evangelical passion.

Identifying brand rejectors

You can do the same in reverse, by looking at the people who say they don’t buy the product. For example, here’s a search for “I don’t buy Microsoft”.

What comes across very clearly when you read through the list, is that as many people don’t like the company, its ethics, positioning and purpose, as much as they don’t like the products. Microsoft is seen as distant, cold and controlling and its products are tarred with the same values in consumers’ minds.

Measuring sentiment for a brand

A quick and easy way to measure consumer’s affection, or dislike, for a brand, is to look at the level of searches on Google Insights. Here is a comparison of search demand for ‘love Microsoft’ and ‘hate Microsoft’. It might seem odd that people are making these searches, but I’ve found that it seems to be popular with people seeking out like-minded consumers and communities online.

As we can see, 2004 and 2005 were the years when both love and hatred for Microsoft were at their peak. It’s also interesting to note that there is a newly emerging surge of love in the last few weeks, but overall, we’re not seeing the spikes of emotion as in previous years, inspired, presumably by new Microsoft products and services.

Buying criteria and shopping behaviour

For insights into what kind of people are visiting a brand web site, and what their motivation and intent might be, have a look at Google Trends for Websites. For example, let’s go back to the data for Moonpig, the online card company.

If we look at the search terms they used and the other sites they visited, we can see that Moonpig is popular with younger women who shop on the high street, like to organise their lives online and are on a gift and card buying mission.

What a brand doesn’t say about itself

Lastly, it can be just as useful, in understanding the category, the brand and the market dynamics n order to identify the problem, to look at what a brand isn’t saying about itself, as what it is. For example, looking at the results for a search on Google for ‘fake Viagra risks’, the first thing to note is that there are 14,300 search results for the phrase, but can you see Pfizer anywhere? Me neither.

Most of these results are from news, education and healthcare sites, but Pfizer has got nothing to say on the risks of fake Viagra – clearly an important issue to consumers and health professionals alike. One of Viagra’s problems isn’t just that the market is flooded with fake products, but that Pfizer isn’t speaking up against the issue, to protect consumers – and its brand equity and market share into the bargain.

So what’s the problem we need to solve?

Depending on what we’ve found so far, we should have a new understanding of the challenges we need to overcome with the communications strategy. We should now have greater insights into the problems we’re facing and the events and issues behind them, such as:

• A depressed, declining or unstable market

• Low brand awareness or consumer demand

• Negative publicity or perceptions

• Competitive threats

Having gained some insight into what the problem is, we can now start thinking about the solution, which we’ll do next time, in module four.

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