Every day, marketers are putting out content via digital ads, social media, TV commercials and billboards. While focus groups and social media monitoring tools make it easy for organisations to collect data and consumer responses, knowing how to make it actionable is both crucial and challenging. There are a few pitfalls related to brand language that marketers need to keep in mind when measuring the success of campaigns: sentiment, dilution and differentiation.

Sentiment

Sentiment can be one of the most dangerous concepts to rely upon in marketing. The term has been hijacked in recent years and come to mean a simple assessment of consumer discussion. It is termed as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘happy’ or ‘sad’, ‘positive’ or ‘negative’; when in reality language and conversation is far more nuanced than this. Sentiment analysis doesn’t take into account sarcasm, tone or any number of different meanings a word can take. For example, even a simple word like ‘break’ can be interpreted more than 80 different ways, and sentiment technology isn’t always able to determine which interpretation a person means. And that’s before factoring in dimensions like sarcasm!

Additionally, given the sheer volume of data associated with global brands online, it’s quite easy to find the positive mentions if you’re looking for them. A brand looking for positive mentions online will be just as successful as a person attending an event is looking for chairs. Of course they’ll find plenty of chairs making their search a success, but they won’t find anything that they weren’t looking for!

Dilution

While the majority of brands have a dedicated brand language guide that is carefully crafted by the marketing team, the execution of language from above-the-line to below-the-line can happen from any number of people, whether in-house or with an agency, in any number of countries. The more global a brand is, the easier it is for this “language drift” to happen.

The end result that appears in front of the consumer is a distortion of the initial language the brand intended to disseminate. Brands need to be more mindful about understanding at what stage this dilution happens and taking steps to avoid it.

Differentiation

When measuring the success of a campaign, brands often compare their results from similar projects, but they fail to see how they’ve resonated in comparison to their competitors. Within the same industries, brands tend to have similar logo colors, mission statements and websites. For example, banks in the UK focus on being local, green and having low interest rates, highlighting a real opportunity for banks to step out and differentiate from their competitors.

Another example is found in the websites of luxury designers such as Gucci and Prada. If the website copy is analysed by counting the words used and visualising this in a traditional “word cloud”, then words such as “Milan,” “leather” and “fashion” appear. However, when the brands’ website copy is compared to one another, the only differences are the words “Gucci” and “Prada.”

By avoiding sentiment and dilution, and highlighting key points of differentiation, brands can begin to measure their campaigns in a data-driven way more than ever before. They can use that insight to develop campaigns that will resonate with consumers better in the future.

 

By Ben Hookway, CEO of Relative Insight. 

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