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David Rabjohns, founder and CEO of social intelligence company MotiveQuest, has more than 20 years of experience in strategic consumer insight research.
MotiveQuest uses “Online Anthropology” software to help companies create new products, improve their marketing and measure their success. Key clients include: Citibank, Nike, Microsoft, Kraft, Novartis and Audi.
Prior to starting MotiveQuest in 2003, David was the youngest ever account planning EVP at Leo Burnett. David has also worked in marketing and strategy positions at IBM (UK), PepsiCo (Aus), Saatchi & Saatchi (UK) and McConnaughy (US).

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Beyond the Dashboard: Online Advocacy and Offline Sales

Written on
Dec 8, 2011 
Author
David Rabjohns  |
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Beyond the Dashboard: Online Advocacy and Offline Sales

ADOTAS – It’s the dirtiest secret in marketing today: As marketers, we know social networks and engagement have revolutionized the way individuals evaluate and engage with brands – and ultimately choose what to buy. And as marketers, we’re terrified.

Social media — from blogs and forums to networks like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube — have inserted a very powerful force into the buying process: peer-to-peer dialogue on a network scale. While shoppers always have been able to talk with a few friends and family members to seek out a product recommendation, today they can talk with experts on a specific product or service anywhere in the world. They can find reviews of their prospective purchase in just seconds online and rapidly compare features and prices for competing brands.

So where does the terror enter the mix? How do you measure and quantify these discussions?  Where are the most important conversations taking place within the social grid, and how can marketers keep on top – let alone activate – the same?  The sheer pace of digital innovation has made it difficult for marketers to feel proactive and confident about how to measure progress and what really matters to their brand portfolio.

Furthering the fear factor is one matter of the discussion that may not be on the new marketing radar. My company MotiveQuest’s analysis finds that as many as 90 percent of online conversations are not about brands at all — they are about categories and the motivations that drive people within those categories. Dashboards and other numerical ways of measuring favor in social media may help in calculating a brand’s reach, but marketers must dig deeper to learn what consumers actually are thinking and what really will persuade consumers to buy. Marketers then need to try to connect their brands to those specific motivations. Dashboards won’t provide the intelligence that marketers need to capitalize on motivations in the marketplace — only listening where the conversations are really happening and analyzing the motivations behind the words — will do that.

Stop Asking and Start Listening

The best and only valid way to measure what is driving the market is to stop asking questions and start listening to conversations. In this new social environment, we can actually observe the buying behavior of consumers, rather than merely asking them about their behavior. We can measure if, how and why people are talking about a product. Instead of asking them if they like it, we can measure the positive or negative words and context they are using. Perhaps of greatest importance, we can observe individuals as they make recommendations to friends, acquaintances or even strangers in a group or forum.

It turns out, not surprisingly, that the sorts of things people talk about around the kitchen table are the same sorts of things they talk about online. Of course, social media conversations are just a sample of all conversations, but online forums enable us to overhear those networked conversations, which were already happening but which we had no way of listening in on before.

A Stunning Discovery

We have previously noted the motivations that drive conversations in social networks are the real treasure to be mined by marketers, because the more we explore online conversations and reveal the motivations that are common to all of us, the more effectively we can position our brand, and ourselves, to be unique. But the consequences of examining motivations extend beyond brand positioning — they can be a precise and predictable indicator of future sales.

To understand the correlation between social media and sales, we must first determine which aspects of online conversations we should measure. Five years ago, MotiveQuest began working with statisticians at Northwestern University to examine all the components of these conversations and attempt to find the most impactful elements.

Our simple goal was to determine which elements in online conversations have the biggest influence on sales and market share. We looked at correlations and metrics related to such factors as the number of times a brand is mentioned, likeability of the product or service, and the power of influencers. We uncovered what ultimately became a stunning discovery: The highest correlation — and a direct, measurable correlation – between social-media conversations and offline sales occurred when people online went out of their way to pick a brand and recommend it to a friend.  Statements like, “I would recommend the iPhone” — rather than, “You might like the iPhone, Samsung or Nokia brands” — led to precise correlations with offline sales.

We began to linguistically pull together all the ways people talk about recommendations, and from these cues we developed an Online Promoter Score, an index of the strength of the online community’s recommendation of a brand.

The Best Metric of a Brand’s Health

The most important, unalterable finding that we drew from listening to and scoring the ways people recommend products is that these recommendations — actual advocacy of a brand in online conversations — continue to correlate with offline sales in virtually every category. The type of product doesn’t matter; in these conversations, only the level of advocacy influences sales. The best metric of a brand’s health in online conversation, we were able to declare, is advocacy — the number of individuals actively promoting the brand.

Note that advocacy measures the number of individuals making recommendations, not the number of conversations. And further, understand that advocacy, not sentiment, offers the highest correlation with changes in market sales or shares.

Finally, metrics must be based on insights — and insights are not gathered through an automated process; rather, they are developed by applying hard work, thought and analysis.

In our research for a national financial services company, we measured the number advocated a particular brand to other people. Among those who discussed more than one brand, we assigned a score to their most favored brand.

Our analysis showed, with statistical significance, that people’s willingness to advocate for the brand online is a leading indicator of the brand’s new-customer acquisition. Even in relatively low-interest, low-engagement categories like personal finance, then, what people say online allows us to predict shifts in consumer behavior offline.

A Canary in the Coalmine for Market Shifts

All this is not to say that the correlation between online advocacy and offline sales means that online advocacy necessarily causes increased sales. What it does mean is that advocacy is an indicator of the offline and other unmeasured conversations that are going on around a product. The Online Promoter Score is the canary in the coalmine for brands, telling us something is going on in the real world, as well as in online conversations, that is boosting sales or forcing them to plummet.

The power of listening for recommendations produced astonishing results for Sprint, the phone carrier. Sprint was losing a steady stream of customers to rivals AT&T, Verizon and TMobile, but it didn’t know why. MotiveQuest launched a project for Sprint designed to find the reason and the solution. We built custom linguistic models to understand the essence of the conversation about the company online, categorizing those who posted their opinions in social media as current or former Sprint customers. We then aggregated carrier advocacy conversations — messages in which one brand was being actively recommended over another — to learn what drove recommendations and retention.

We discovered that customers had three primary reasons for staying loyal to a carrier:

1. Customer service

2. Models

3. Coverage

Sprint trailed competitors in all three areas. The company determined that its best opportunity resided in upgrading its customer service; we discovered that it was the biggest driver of carrier advocacy, ahead of models and coverage. Sprint implemented a number of initiatives to revamp customer service, including the retooling of its programs and rewriting scripts for call centers based on the consumer expectations revealed in our research.

Subsequently, a Consumer Reports satisfaction survey of carriers ranked Sprint second, and five months later, the American Customer Satisfaction Index ranked Sprint first in customer service. Most importantly, after listening to the advocacy conversations, Sprint’s reinvigorated customer service efforts pulled in 644,000 net subscribers in a single quarter, an astonishing turnaround from its loss of 565,000 during the same period the previous year. Six months later, it added 1.1 million net new customers in a quarter.

The Secret of Boosting Online Advocacy

What, then, is the secret to boosting online advocacy for your brand? Above all, consider ways to create products and services that are remarkable; inherently, that’s the best way to ensure people remark on them to each other. Social networks turbo-charge this process, accelerating good products to the forefront and quickly killing off products that are disappointments.

For your product to become remarkable, you should attach it to a core passion or movement in the marketplace in a three-step process: 

• First, identify what your best customers are most passionate about. 

• Then, figure out how you can be useful around that passion — how you become part of the movement. 

• Finally, create buzz-worthy products and services that help serve the passion. For instance, Apple created MacWorld, a conference that is little short of a religion for its advocates. MacWorld is a movement.

Connect your brand to a passion, something people care about at their core, and you create the foundation for advocacy that can lead to higher sales offline and improved market share.





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