PJA Blog: The Complex Brand

Although Cymfony may claim a higher-level algorithm developed for the government (whatever that is), Nielsen’s new BuzzMetrics is generating more, well, buzz. Bring together MBAs, 2.0 specialists and algorithm developers, and you get BuzzMetrics (and a big story in this Sunday’s Times). Like Cymfony, a PJA partner, BuzzMetrics claims to be able to sweep through the exploding mushroom crowd of chat rooms, blogs and boards and produce a tonality map of competitors, products, concepts and brand attributes. As the three top dogs claimed in the Times article on the topic, they are relegating focus groups to their proper status, something “going the way of the buggy whip.” (Perhaps that phrase ought to meet the same fate.) The article also notes that in addition to Cymfony, BuzzMetrics competes with BrandIntel, Biz360, MotiveQuest, and Umbria.

Over the past year, companies like Dell and Toyota have discovered the respective downside and upside of online buzz, and compaies such as Jupiter predict online monitoring of brands will double in 2007. Apparently, 90 percent of consumers trust word-of-mouth suggestions and make purchases (such as stocks?) based on such input, the “radar” of how consumers now fly. Toyota’s Lexus division, in fact, pulled a gay-neutral ad on the basis of right-wing nut job input via traditional channels before discovering that viewers actually liked it. Imagine.

Some of the uses of buzz measurements:

• Track technology trends
• Anticipate lifestyle trends
• Track interest in new products
• Gauge responses to social media-styled content placed online
• Track the effect of advertising

The most interesting development, though of questionable use on a per-company basis, is Floodgate, a Google Earth of blogging, which creates a constellation of thoughts and desires, clustered by themes, that allows the user to click on a star of output and see the full post.

Interesting, I suppose, but if every member of the chattering masses takes charge of marketing, who will be left to advertise to? And for the record, I still tend to get a hell of a lot out of focus groups, providing they’re done well.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 17th, 2006 at 10:15 pm and is filed under Branding, Measurement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.