Because of the nature of our work, talking in specifics about what we find on behalf of our clients is, shall we say, not behavior fitting an organization interested in keeping said clients. HOWEVER, as each project that we undertake is enlightening on numerous fronts, we are making an effort through posts we are tagging “lessons learned” to share that which is sharable.

Every time we embark on a client project, we’ve a sense of excitement over the discoveries we know are about to be made.  This is the same whether our directive is to collect consumer insights to shape a marketing or PR campaign, to help an organization better understand its consumers for the purpose of guiding sales initiatives, to shed light on possible shifts in opinion toward their products/ services, or to reveal possible service gaps in the marketplace (think smarter product development).

This feeling of excitement was certainly present when we dug into a rather expansive project that we just wrapped up for a global consumer apparel company.

When thinking about relevant insights from the project that we could share here, we thought it worthwhile to bring up immersion, communities as silos and how these impact brand perception. This project in particular illuminated the importance of understanding the communities in which one’s brand, products and services live. We often hear industry experts talking of online reputation monitoring and building as if one’s consumers/customers/clients can be classified as a single homogenous group online. Wrong.

For this particular client, we identified numerous active, highly opinionated communities. Why does this matter? Although they were oftentimes purchasing and using precisely the same products, they had vastly differing perception of the brand, and equally varying views when it came to particular features — as well as to quality. While all of these communities exist purely online, they exist in silos. Crossover was all but nonexistent. So to talk about brand perception for this organization was to talk in compartments.

When online brand monitoring is conducted, and numbers are analyzed, conclusions often are drawn without looking beneath the surface of the figures to see what they mean. But a certain degree of immersion is necessary to grasp their relevance.

-Angela