At a business planning meeting, a colleague tells you entering a new product
category is your brand’s manifest destiny. The rest of the team salivates over
potential gains in mindshare and in market share. But in the back of your
mind, you waver, asking yourself: “Will consumers accept us?”
We all want to maximize our brand’s surface area in the contexts that add
value to our customers. Beyond managing this multimedia real estate, a
major challenge for brand managers, in particular, is prospecting into new,
uncharted territories.
Every day, we face uncertainty with new opportunities to extend our brand
experiences. How do you know if the market will accept your new product—
especially in a category in which you are unknown? Will it reinforce your
intended brand associations? Will consumers even retain your brand
associations? The answers aren’t clear; even worse, we often base our
predictions on very small research samples, and gut feeling.
With billions of comments posted daily, social media is the largest source of
unsolicited consumer opinion—ever. Your customers talk about how they
feel and what they want right this minute. It is the world’s largest focus
group, and the participants aren’t paid to be there. Hidden within this mass
of data is an incredibly untapped source of intelligence for brand managers.
The following four steps lay out the process for using social media data to
evaluate your existing brand portfolio and new product concepts. I use
NyQuil to ZzzQuil and Dr. Pepper soda to Dr. Pepper Marinade, two examples
from Adweek’s review of recent consumer brand extensions, to illustrate.
How extendible is your brand?
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Step 1: Establish a Brand Baseline
What are the current themes of conversation surrounding your brand?
I recommend you begin by performing unstructured text analysis on all
social media conversations about your brand over the past year (if you’ve
recently rebranded, be sure to look pre and post-campaign, as brand
engagement has likely shifted on social media). What is the size and texture
of this conversation? How do consumers talk about you, and in what context?
Pay particular attention to segmenting product use discussions.
To this end, measuring basic consumer sentiment (Positive, Negative, and
Neutral) is insufficient; instead, you need to retrieve a topical breakdown from
your Consumer Insights team. Depending on the social analytics platform
you have in house, you can accomplish this with one robust analysis of online
consumer opinion. Just make sure you have access to historical content.
After successfully establishing a set of useful benchmarks on your brand,
which many of your competitors likely do not even have, you are ready for
Step 2.
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Step 2: Assess Consumer Use Cases
This step involves thinking more critically about the affinities and product
use cases that are derived from your brand baseline analysis. Based on this
mix of customer interactions, can you see a logical fit for your brand in
another category or medium? In other words, what is the “extendibility”
potential of your brand, as voiced by consumers right now?
NyQuil
Last year, over 1.8 million posts talked about using NyQuil on social media.
Interestingly, the largest portion of this conversation discusses taking NyQuil
specifically as a sleep aid, rather than for its marketed purpose as a cold
remedy. Here, the majority of consumers reveal an existing mental
association between NyQuil and sleep inducement, as they identify strongly
with the product’s sleep-aid benefit. Therefore, it appears that it would not be
too much of a “stretch” for consumers if P&G considered extending this brand
experience.
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Dr. Pepper
With Dr. Pepper, consumers vividly describe where and when they buy Dr.
Pepper, and what makes that experience so enjoyable for them. Last year, in
over 1.5 million discussions about Dr. Pepper, 3% comment on pairing Dr.
Pepper soda with barbeque food, including varieties of BBQ chips. While this
is not the single largest conversation driver, barbeque stands out as a unique
pairing that draws considerable praise among consumers, warranting
additional investigation.
Both of these examples serve to illustrate the types of cues consumers can
give you on social media regarding potential new real estate for your brands.
Armed with these insights, you might also want to consider testing your new
hypotheses using traditional market research techniques, including surveys
and focus groups.
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Step 3: Evaluate the Brand Extension
Fast-forward several months: You have decided to bring your new concept to
market. In this third step in the process, you want to analyze online
discussion of your brand extension. How have consumers reacted to this
product to date? Is there high purchase intent? Do consumers recommend it
to their friends online, or are they confused and skeptical of the product’s
utility?
New Brand Extension: ZzzQuil
With the parent brand’s major appeal as a
favored sleep aid, there is, ostensibly, huge
potential in the extendibility of the NyQuil
brand into this new product category.
Looking at the data following ZzzQuil’s
launch, the largest driver of conversation
(38%) represents excited early adopters
using the product for its intended, sleep-aid
purpose.
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In addition, social media discussion signals that consumers retain the
intended brand associations: 32% express purchase intent and another 18%
recommend the product to others online. There is no expressed confusion
about usage and the relationship to the parent brand, NyQuil. As far as the
market is concerned, NyQuil to ZzzQuil exemplifies both a very logical and
successful brand extension that reinforces the positive images associated
with the parent brand.
New Brand Extension: Dr. Pepper Marinade
Dr. Pepper, on the other hand, is a more interesting case that draws more
polarizing consumer commentary. While 14% of consumers express
significant interest in trying the product, another 16% hotly criticize the
concept and its taste. Furthermore, nearly 30% express skepticism and
continue to ask questions about the new product.
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Adweek pegged Dr. Pepper Marinade as one of the “worst” brand extension
concepts this year. It is true that BBQ-related discussion of Dr. Pepper soda
represents a significantly smaller proportion of product use cases. However,
through social media analysis, we find the product appears to strongly
appeal to the niche market of consumers who favor that food and beverage
pairing. And they aren’t shy to tell us how great it is!
Keep in mind: Every time you analyze social media data, you should track
each category of conversation over time to assess the varying degrees of
market education and acceptance across geographies.
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Step 4: Conduct A Full Post-Launch Audit
Brand managers simply cannot afford to skip this next step: How has the
brand extension impacted your parent brand image? Parent brand dilution is
the major strategic risk accompanying any brand extension (recall the classic
“New Coke” debacle).
Good news: Remember that brand baseline we set up for Step 1? Now we can
revisit the same social media analysis to evaluate, quantitatively and
qualitatively, how the new product has affected brand-level discussion.
Evaluating Brand Extensions
That’s it. You just successfully operationalized the unsolicited opinions of
millions of consumers in several stages of brand decision-making. How easy
was that?
As your brand evolves, it becomes even more important to uncover and track
the nuances in consumer discussion— discussion that is earned and
unfiltered. From one prospector to another, social media may hold the
destiny of your next successful brand extension.
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Crimson Hexagon, founded in 2007, is the leading provider of analysis software that delivers
business intelligence from social media data for global corporations. Powered by patented
technology developed at Harvard University’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science, the Crimson
Hexagon ForSight™ platform delivers the industry’s most comprehensive Big Data analysis
capabilities for a variety of large-scale data sources. Clients include leading global organizations
such as: Microsoft, Paramount Pictures, Starbucks, Simon & Schuster, Twitter, and many more. For
more information go to: http://www.crimsonhexagon.com.
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