How Do You Build a Passion Brand?
Every day people have millions of conversations about brands around the world. Many of these are advocacy mentions that help brands significantly amplify their marketing.
Research suggests that up to 80% of reach from marketing campaigns now comes from network amplification through advocacy. This means brands that can’t generate substantial advocacy will simply pay more to market less efficiently than those who make advocacy a brand priority.
Despite this huge potential value, “brands are failing at driving satisfied customers to share in social media,” said Irfan Kamal, global head of Data+Analytics and Products at Social@Ogilvy. “Our study suggests that the vast majority of satisfied customers are not publicly advocating for brands on social platforms. Brands have not provided the technology, incentives or content that both inspire and enable customers to speak out positively. To help close the gap, brands must help facilitate advocacy volume, reward passion and amplify reach.”
Advocacy mentions represented about 15% of all brand mentions, with the remainder being either neutral or negative mentions. However, when we dove deeper into the US hotel category, we found less than 1 advocacy mention per 100 stays. With some of the studied hotels reporting guest satisfaction scores of 80% or more, there is clearly a large social advocacy gap: the vast majority of people satisfied with their experience aren’t advocating online.
Social@Ogilvy analyzed 7 million brand social mentions across 4 countries (Brazil, China, UK, US) and 22 brands (with data from partners CIC, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and Visible Technologies) to analyze the key drivers of advocacy. We found that:
● Few brands are driving true passion. For most brands, the majority of mentions were casual. In the US, only 2 brands out of 22 had over 50% of mentions falling in the most enthusiastic advocacy category (love, excitement, must-do/buy). Yet, these 2 brands had even more enthusiastic advocacy than blockbuster movies like The Avengers and The Hunger Games.
● To drive passionate advocacy, brands have to know and focus on their fans’ true advocacy (not satisfaction) inspirations. Using tools that help identify “clusters” of discussion, we notice that Holiday Inn’s breakfast tends to drive more advocacy than its peers’; in comparison, Kimpton’s bars are more often cited than those of other brands. This data can be useful as the inspiration point for creative/campaign messaging – more deeply, these insights can be used to inform changes in messaging and even products.
● Move beyond the blunt metric of “sentiment” to tracking advocacy levels. Brands that really want to strengthen advocacy will implement a quantitative advocacy tracking index. Ogilvy’s Advocacy Index feature a scoring system that identify key drivers by brand and evaluate differentiators between brands over time.
