Social Insights Guide for CPG Executives2

Every marketing team needs a powerful competitive edge.

Campaign Reach and Real-time Positioning

Social insights can be that edge, helping align strategy with unsolicited consumer response. Big brands and their executive teams must react to and build concise, powerful campaigns to entice and subscribe audiences to their products and brands. To be the leader and outrank the competition, it all comes down to the data. There is an increasing demand to understand and relate to customers using the vasts amounts of consumer data now available, particularly the data that comes directly from consumer fingertips. As big data takes a larger role in campaign effectiveness strategies, we decided to focus on the role of the CMO in making key decisions empowered by social media analytical data.

When the data is compiled, and the campaign has run its course, what can you look at to understand and change what needs to be adjusted within your brand? Your team sets up a post-mortem analysis of the campaign, built extensively with charts, graphs, statistics and key trends, there’s really just one question every marketing leader wants to know: how has our brand’s perception changed in the marketplace? In this brief, we’ll discuss the priorities that matter to executives: how to leverage social insights for campaign decision-making, building brand identity and even how to predict audience response and building targeted market strategy after a merger.

In the aftermath of the campaign, it’s important to gather those details of data and string them together into a strategy to springboard your next attack. Surface-level insights are not enough anymore: executives want to know more than engagement or vanity metrics. Those metrics don’t tell them the real story. They want to know how audiences were responding to their campaign and what exactly they were saying. Social data allows users to see the fuller picture of consumer discourse. As an example, we analyzed one of the top CPG brands in the world, Kraft, and one of their most successful campaigns from 2014 -- Honey Maid’s Wholesome campaigns.

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Social Insights Guide for CPG ExecutivesCampaign Effectiveness and Audience Analysis

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These insights help paint a picture of the deeper understanding that marketers can get from social media data. By using a customizable categorical breakdown, marketers are able to to train posts around certain conversation into categories that reflect the proportions of discussion to measure shifts and changes in growth and decay over time. If your brand is concerned about a spokesperson, or unique advertisement, having the capability to monitor facets of conversation as they evolve can be enormously important to appropriating reactions to brand crises. And once the categories are trained, the data stands for itself.

In the Honey Maid Wholesome campaign, we were able to see shifts in the amount of “Purchase Intent” driven conversation over social: We categorized these posts by users who stated they planned to buy the product, that they wanted to own the product while this

What was clear from the first moments the ad placements hit multi-channel content sources, it was powerful and connected to all audiences. From the campaign launch, (March 10th 2014) to date, there has been a 75% positive reception of the advertising strategies. The biggest drivers of discussion were audiences loving Honey Maid’s positive response to hate mail and negative feedback they received (24%) and the ad campaign making people nostalgic for their families and the role the product has played in their lives (26%).

The advertisement was a resounding success with their fans, not simply because of the power of the content, but as we can see above, it was the brand’s decision to respond gracefully to hateful feedback that helped win support of the Honey Maid audience and solidified these social users’ brand loyalty..

advertising strategy is running. By calculating the shifts in the discussion, marketers can make real-time decisions about changing brand perceptions associated with certain campaigns.

Using the data can do more than inform campaign strategy. It can also be used to inform some of the most difficult and precarious decision-making across the entire brand. The most valuable piece of data found in social analytics surrounding a brand can be summarized as its image: how the brand is perceived, discussed, stories shared about top brand leaders, as well as what key products are discussed and promoted. Public conversations around these factors are all crucial to understanding and building new concepts that will improve the results of sales and marketing strategies for the brands.

Social Insights Guide for CPG Executives4

You did in six weeks and for $50,000 what would normally take us 12 to 14 months and $500,000.“

— 7Summits using Crimson Hexagon for a large packaged goods company (Forbes Top 50 for America’s largest private companies)

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Pivoting Strategy to Build Brand Identity Through a CampaignOne key factor of brand identity that stands above the rest is public perception. Social media can act as a barometer, sourcing thousands or hundreds of thousands of human thoughts regarding a particular brand -- these insights can be more powerful than any focus group. Understanding what shifts and behavioral differences your team is looking to see in audience responses is crucial before the campaign launch. When research is built with customizable data insights, marketers can see the focused insights shift in conjunction with the campaign growth or decay. When a campaign is in progress, and there’s money on the line, it’s crucial to be able to pivot campaign strategy to meet the needs of the market and listen to the audiences that have the most powerful connections to your top brands.

Using our Honey Maid example, we can see that while negative response grew slightly over the two years (4% up to 7%), there was tremendous growth in the people who loved Honey Maid’s response to negative criticism (up from 13% to 38%). This specific data illustrates the effectiveness of Honey Maid’s continued efforts in campaign performance. The appeal of this campaign has only grown stronger over time, meaning the brand continues to resonate with key audiences successful with this campaign. The campaign has now tied directly to impacting the brand perception overall. It also shows audience respect for a brand that responded eloquently in the face of criticism.

The general conversation for the Honey Maid brand shifted drastically within the effective and meaningful #thisiswholesome campaign (right), as the commercials remained a the topic of choice within general brand discussion for a number of months.

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Using social insights to move your brand audience forward

The #thisiswholesome campaign had a strikingly positive effect on Honey Maid brand discussion. Not only has positive sentiment increased overwhelmingly, but the type of conversation has changed. Audiences are no longer simply discussing products, they are bonding positively with the campaign and its messaging. This illustrates that Honey Maid is creating loyal fans who will in turn advocate for the brand and

There’s more to social data than simply what conversation involves your brand. Some of the most interesting data lies in the conversations that surround your brand. The overlapping portions of conversation that are tangentially related to brands because they are important to your most compelling brand factor: your audience.

its mission. This, in the long term, is bond stronger than product preferences.

LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) audiences also shows a crucial shift -- those interested in the wholesome campaign are 3X more interested in LGBT. Or put another way, the pre-campaign brand audience has ⅓ less interest in LGBT.

The brand’s continued efforts such as releasing a response to hate mail with the “Love” advertisement, hosting a variety of engagement opportunities with twitter parties, and using the campaign in conjunction with a product launch can be seen to translate tangibly into positive ROI and increases in intent to purchase after these endeavors. With continuous monitoring and nuanced measurement of responses on social media, brands can make their campaigns phenomenally successful and track the impact of real-time campaign decisions and responses over social media.

The polarization of audience affinities helps illustrate the new audiences and powerful new brand advocates built through the success of the Honey Maid campaign.

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Pre-campaign brand audience

51x more interested in One Direction

61x more interested in The X Factor

8x more interested in MTV

5x more interested in soccer

5x more interested in SnapChat

2x more interested in entertainment news

5x more interested in writing, news and media, and beauty

82x more interested in parenting

65x more interested in being a mom

43x more interested in being a dad

50x more interested in advertising

53x more interested in activism

Campaign brand audience

How social data can inform a brand merger

While Honey Maid brand discussion before the campaign engaged millennials with interests in SnapChat, MTV, and One Direction, the campaign succeeded in reaching and engaging an audience of parents and those in the LGBT community. This could provide a fruitful space for Honey Maid to continue its endeavors in winning over new segments of customers who occupy alternative key demographics than those who they originally planned to reach out to. The secondary audiences that complement the original intended fans: these details can better inform additional targeted marketing and provide top marketers new and exciting territories to bring in consumer traffic.

When looking to make a major change within your brand, it’s important to see the full picture of what key audiences feel and understand about your two businesses, and more importantly, what the brand’s future combined audience can look like together.

Kraft, the owner of Honey Maid, announced a merger with Heinz Brands. This merger would make the combined brand the 5th largest CPG company in the world. But where can the two companies find their one audience? How can they move forward with these two distinct companies and find common ground to market and reach their target audiences.

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Here we can see that Kraft brands and Heinz brands both resonate with a millennial audience with key interests in colleges and universities, high school, Snapchat, Disney, Glee, and MTV. This illuminates the audience with which Kraft and Heinz can have the most success and where they target their future strategy.

By using the information powered through social data, brands can inform strategy and build confidently the decisions that change brand market strategy everywhere. Evaluating that priority can be difficult; most data tells you whether or not (quantitatively)

a product or commercial was successful, but how has that campaign comparatively affected the outward appearance or brand recognition for your business? For that level of insight, you need to move beyond positive, negative and neutral groupings of responses to see the “why” about how people respond to campaigns: what did they like, why did it “feel” like that brand to them? This is where the data provided through social insights becomes so compelling and can guide your team towards the right financial advertising investments, moving paid strategies, content planning, all the way to brand decision-making in the right direction.

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