In today’s day and age there is more data and more ways to connect with your consumer than ever before. To make full use of this surge in consumer data and to gather valuable data-based insights to help drive strategic decision making requires a specialist intelligence resource. Real-time business intelligence software specific to brands can go a long way to make the most of this data burst. Here are my top ten as to why;

1. Traditional methods of brand tracking are flawed

   Traditionally, executives have depended on a combination of quantitative data from surveys which track things such as brand image and customer satisfaction and qualitative insights from focus groups and interviews. However, these methods have a fundamental flaw: reliance on customer memory. Consumer memory rapidly decays and can be filled with biase. Social intelligence research tools reduce this problem, capturing customer experiences and reactions immediately, before memory fades. They also present a better cost and time saving option for your brand compared to traditional tracking methods.

2. There is greater and better real time customer insight

   One of the toughest marketing challenges is identifying and understanding what drives customers’ attitudes and behaviour. According to an IBM study 82% of CMOs say their organisations are underprepared to capitalise on the data explosion. Moreover, there is a lack of confidence about their ability to translate the data eruption into an insight surge. If unfiltered, big data has limited use. Brand intelligence software can help return power to the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). Using the latest methodologies to analyse human feelings across multiple sources, software can track the emotion behind the conversation and lead to actionable insight. Utilising big data to not only provide data outputs, but also strategic guidance to help answer the big marketing questions. By understanding the customer more fully, companies are better placed to predict consumer behaviour and their response to marketing changes, thus improving retention and loyalty.

3. Semantic and sentiment analysis has improved dramatically

Over the last 18 months the ability for algorithms to effectively analyse human language and meaning has improved significantly. Prior primitive social listening software could not fulfil the role of data intelligence. New methodologies transcend the simple ‘rules-based’ or ‘bag of words’ approaches used by social listeners and have reached near human level precision at speed and on large scale. The most exciting of these is the combination of semantic and sentiment analysis which provides real-world knowledge and common sense to understanding language. These advances are helping to provide much greater insights whilst avoiding the pitfalls of traditional sentiment approaches such as positive, negative and neutral.

1. Crisis and campaign management

   Brand intelligence software can detect high volumes of negative commentary on your brand and can alert the manager accordingly to take appropriate actions. This allows you to react faster to customers and issues which can equal better customer satisfaction and more customer loyalty. Additionally the software can be utilised to track the success of a campaign. It can be used to explore how the end consumer is interpreting the concepts and messages in the campaign.

2. Reasonably be applied to customer in large numbers

   Brand intelligence software can aggregate data across numerous channels containing published content and user generated content. These channels are unique environments due to a number of factors, such as social dynamics. Firms may be able to infer overall brand performance from a broad sample of comments accumulated from multiple channels and millions of data points.

3. Competitive analysis

   Brand Intelligence software allows you to identify competitor performance. See how people feel, not only about your brand in real-time, but also the feelings towards competition also. This comparison of expressed customer concepts can be used to inform ways to differentiate against competitors, understand what channels are performing best and identify ways to disrupt this.

4. Discover how ‘brand concepts’ are being received by end consumer

   Software like Adoreboard’s will we do this by defining your brand’s impact as a single metric linked to a set of real-time emotions that in turn will help you improve marketing performance based on accurate actionable insights that will inform your future creative campaigns.

5. More effective than social listening tools

   Brand intelligence goes far beyond social listening. Rather than taking things at face value, it is valuable to understand the behaviour driving it. Basic ‘automated’ sentiment analysis is good for specific use cases, not so good if you are trying to surface the golden nuggets to give you a competitive edge.

6. Ethnographic research is labour intensive and expensive

   Another popular traditional brand tracking method is ethnographic research that shadows individual consumers and watches their behaviour in a natural environment. Although this technique is useful to document a range of customer experiences, it is both labour-intensive and expensive. Moreover biases might occur as the physical presence of the researcher may affect the consumers’ reaction.

7. Non-Intrusive method of consumer research

   Unlike other methods of consumer research, real-time brand tracking does not intrude into customer’s lives and their reactions. The brand stays objective by processing what the audience is saying and can take an action from this.

It is therefore clear that business intelligence applied to brands can provide both new approaches and insights to making better business decisions.

About Nuala Murphy

With 10+ years experience in Sales & Marketing across a variety of sectors including technology, Nuala has joined Adoreboard as their Chief Marketing Officer, focused on taking the company to market. A Chartered Marketer and elected voluntary board member for the CIM Ireland Board, Nuala’s specialities include Strategic Marketing, Leadership, Market Research & Analysis, Market Entry & Development, International Strategy Development as well as Brand Architecture & Management. Nuala has a BSc Hons in Applied Language and Linguistics, from University of Manchester (Institute of Science and Technology), a Professional Post Graduate Diploma in Marketing from the Chartered Institute of Marketing, speaks French fluently and enjoys International travel.