With just one year to go until the Games commence, we thought it was good time to take a look at some of the debate surrounding the Olympics. We have been tracking the global English debate on the Olympics since January 2011.
Some of the key stories driving the debate included talk of claims from Iran that the 2012 Olympic logo is racist, which appeared in February and interest in June as customers began to find out whether they had been allocated tickets to the Games.
We expect the debate to increase in July as people seize the ‘one year to go’ opportunity (much as we did!) to discuss this great event.
For this post, we will be concentrating on the Worldwide Partners; VISA, GE, Acer, Atos Origin, Coca Cola, Dow, McDonald’s, Omega, Panasonic, Procter & Gamble and Samsung. We show the spilt of the debate among these brands in the chart below. Of these competitors, VISA generated the highest volume of coverage in relation to the Olympics between the 1st January and the 30th June 2011, marginally ahead of Samsung.
Figure 1: Share-of-Buzz for Olympics Worldwide Partners in the global English debate on the Olympics
However, when mentions are weighted for influence the order changes considerably, as we show in the next chart. Although VISA still remains the most prominent partner, Coca Cola and GE move to take a close 2nd and 3rd place while Samsung is overtaken and falls to 4th place. This shows that although Samsung had a higher volume of mentions than GE and Coca Cola, it wasn't discussed among influential stakeholders as much as its competitors.
Figure 2: Share-of-Influence for Olympics Worldwide Partners in the global English debate on the Olympics
When we break this data down by month, as shown in Figure 3, it is clear that the overall conclusions are not as simple as ‘VISA is dominating the influential debate’. We can see that interest in VISA peaked in March and has been decreasing between April and June as attention has shifted towards GE and Coca Cola.
Figure 3: Monthly Share-of-Influence trend for Olympics Worldwide Partners in the global English Olympics debate
Coca Cola drew interest during May amid discussion of the torch relay, of which it is a presenting partner.
In June, GE came to the forefront of debate among worldwide partners driven by the International Olympic Committee’s desire to make GE a top-tier sponsor.
Currently we could say that VISA has been ‘winning’ the Olympic Advertising Games, but VISA may well be usurped by GE shortly, based on the momentum GE has gained since April. With one year to go until the Olympics, it is still early days and it will be interesting to see which brands manage to make the most out of their relationship with the Games.
Having a great brand is something most businesses aspire to. A business or product with a better brand can command a higher price for comparable products. Organisations spend a lot of resources trying to shape their overall brand, products and services. The stakes are very high because of the sheer size of the investments necessary to develop the right brand.
To improve their ability to manage their brand initiatives and thereby secure a greater ROI on these initiatives, most organisations conduct surveys to understand how customers feel about their brands. These surveys are often conducted every six-12 months. However, in today’s fast moving world this is clearly too infrequent to support an increasing number of tactical decisions.
Being able to quickly understand the effects of an organisation’s marketing communications (and those of their competitors) is essential. By having a constant feedback loop from the market place marketers can constantly understand which initiatives they might want to amplify and which they might want to adjust or scale back.
At Onalytica we are putting enterprise listening and analytics solutions in place for an increasing number of organisations. Several of these solutions include the ability to constantly measure the brand profile of the organisations as well as understand what is driving the brand in the right direction.
One of the models we use to analyse brands describes the brand in relation to a number of different personality traits. These traits are defined as “pillars”.
These pillars form part of “The Davies Model”, which can be found in the great book on corporate reputation; “Corporate Reputation and Competitiveness” by Professor G. Davies et al. (Rudledge, 2003).
The pillars of the standard Davies model are shown below:
Naturally, the pillars and the traits can vary according to the brand and our solution allows full flexibility on how many pillars can be used and the descriptive words that go into each pillar.
I had a look at some brands and how they are discussed in the context of mobile phones, below, is what the brand profiles look like.
First up is Blackberry. For this example, the original pillars taken from the Davies model, shown above, have been used. Notice how the brand changed slightly from Q1 to Q2 of 2011: Chic, Enterprise and Informality were down – Machismo was up:
Then I took Motorola. Motorola’s brand also changed during the first half of 2011:
Enterprise and Chic were also down, but Machismo and Competence in particular were up.
The general model of using pillars and traits can be configured to compare brands according to the dimensions that are deemed important to those brands.
The next graph shows how three mobile phones compare on a number of features such as camera, design and security:
Notice the substantial differences between the three phones that largely target the same consumer segment. Also notice how the Motorola Pro scores so much higher than its competitors on “security”. The Motorola Pro has extra strong encryption and a number of new security features that mean the phone can be controlled and wiped clean, should the need arise. These are features that Blackberry used to be more associated with, but the current positive differentiators for Blackberry Bold 9900 seem to be apps/applications and design.
Battery life and camera are key differentiators for the Nokia E6. Talk time for this particular model is said to be 14.8 hours, with 31 days standby. The phone has an 8-megapixel camera with full-focus and support for HD video recording.
It is clear to see how maintaining an up-to-date understanding of a brand’s profile can help in the management of that profile. Combining this with our solution’s ability to interactively run root-cause-analysis on changes, marketers can quickly see what is driving their brands in the direction they want and thus which of their marcomms initiatives they might consider increasing.
With the aim of improving cancer outcomes, the Government has commissioned M&C Saatchi to raise awareness of the signs and symptoms of bowel cancer as well as encouraging the public to go for screening. A seven-week pilot campaign was launched at the end of January this year in two southern regions of the UK, which focused on awareness of bowel cancer with the key message: Be Clear on Cancer.
We have been tracking the debate on Cancer in the UK since September 2010 and wanted to measure the initial effectiveness of this first campaign. If the campaign has been successful we would expect to see an increase in debate in relation to the overall cancer debate.
Overall cancer debate has been more elevated this year compared to the last four months of 2010; showing overall effectiveness of the campaign. The weekly trend of debate during the pilot campaign showed a steady and sharp increase in discussion between the second and fifth weeks followed by a steep decline in debate the following week, the final week of the campaign. Increased levels of discussion during the middle of the campaign were not sustained towards the end or just after the end of the campaign itself.
Taking a monthly view of the data, February marked the highest month of bowel cancer debate since tracking began and although discussion dipped in March, April marked a new high – indicating the longer term effects of the campaign.
Amplifying the Message
We can already see that the campaign has had a positive effect on the level of bowel cancer discussion, however, in order to amplify this effect what can M&C Saatchi do?
One of the first steps could be to identify what is currently driving the debate on cancer and more specifically on bowel cancer. By tapping into the current debate drivers in the discussion, your message can form part of the most current topic of interest, which will boost visibility and therefore awareness. Current topics driving the bowel cancer debate are targeted therapy, cancer research and faulty gene. An initial strategy using a combination focused on using the hot topics of the moment and discussing them, along with the key marketing messages, on identified influencer sites can only help form part of a recipe for success.
If you would like more information on how Onalytica can help you find out what is driving the debate in your industry, or who the key influencers are for your brand, product or service please feel free to contact me: sophie.hill@onalytica.com.