At a business planning meeting, a colleague tells you entering a new product

category is your brand’s manifest destiny. The rest of the team salivates over

potential gains in mindshare and in market share. But in the back of your

mind, you waver, asking yourself: “Will consumers accept us?”

We all want to maximize our brand’s surface area in the contexts that add

value to our customers. Beyond managing this multimedia real estate, a

major challenge for brand managers, in particular, is prospecting into new,

uncharted territories.

Every day, we face uncertainty with new opportunities to extend our brand

experiences. How do you know if the market will accept your new product—

especially in a category in which you are unknown? Will it reinforce your

intended brand associations? Will consumers even retain your brand

associations? The answers aren’t clear; even worse, we often base our

predictions on very small research samples, and gut feeling.

With billions of comments posted daily, social media is the largest source of

unsolicited consumer opinion—ever. Your customers talk about how they

feel and what they want right this minute. It is the world’s largest focus

group, and the participants aren’t paid to be there. Hidden within this mass

of data is an incredibly untapped source of intelligence for brand managers.

The following four steps lay out the process for using social media data to

evaluate your existing brand portfolio and new product concepts. I use

NyQuil to ZzzQuil and Dr. Pepper soda to Dr. Pepper Marinade, two examples

from Adweek’s review of recent consumer brand extensions, to illustrate.

How extendible is your brand?

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What are the current themes of conversation surrounding your brand?

I recommend you begin by performing unstructured text analysis on all

social media conversations about your brand over the past year (if you’ve

recently rebranded, be sure to look pre and post-campaign, as brand

engagement has likely shifted on social media). What is the size and texture

of this conversation? How do consumers talk about you, and in what context?

Pay particular attention to segmenting product use discussions.

To this end, measuring basic consumer sentiment (Positive, Negative, and

Neutral) is insufficient; instead, you need to retrieve a topical breakdown from

your Consumer Insights team. Depending on the social analytics platform

you have in house, you can accomplish this with one robust analysis of online

consumer opinion. Just make sure you have access to historical content.

After successfully establishing a set of useful benchmarks on your brand,

which many of your competitors likely do not even have, you are ready for

Step 2.

Step 1: Establish a Brand Baseline

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This step involves thinking more critically about the affinities and product

use cases that are derived from your brand baseline analysis. Based on this

mix of customer interactions, can you see a logical fit for your brand in

another category or medium? In other words, what is the “extendibility”

potential of your brand, as voiced by consumers right now?

NyQuil Last year, over 1.8 million posts talked about using NyQuil on social media.

Interestingly, the largest portion of this conversation discusses taking NyQuil

specifically as a sleep aid, rather than for its marketed purpose as a cold

remedy. Here, the majority of consumers reveal an existing mental

association between NyQuil and sleep inducement, as they identify strongly

with the product’s sleep-aid benefit. Therefore, it appears that it would not be

too much of a “stretch” for consumers if P&G considered extending this brand

experience.

Step 2: Assess Consumer Use Cases

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Dr. Pepper With Dr. Pepper, consumers vividly describe where and when they buy Dr.

Pepper, and what makes that experience so enjoyable for them. Last year, in

over 1.5 million discussions about Dr. Pepper, 3% comment on pairing Dr.

Pepper soda with barbeque food, including varieties of BBQ chips. While this

is not the single largest conversation driver, barbeque stands out as a unique

pairing that draws considerable praise among consumers, warranting

additional investigation.

Both of these examples serve to illustrate the types of cues consumers can

give you on social media regarding potential new real estate for your brands.

Armed with these insights, you might also want to consider testing your new

hypotheses using traditional market research techniques, including surveys

and focus groups.

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Fast-forward several months: You have decided to bring your new concept to

market. In this third step in the process, you want to analyze online

discussion of your brand extension. How have consumers reacted to this

product to date? Is there high purchase intent? Do consumers recommend it

to their friends online, or are they confused and skeptical of the product’s

utility?

Step 3: Evaluate the Brand Extension

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New Brand Extension: ZzzQuil With the parent brand’s major appeal as a

favored sleep aid, there is, ostensibly, huge

potential in the extendibility of the NyQuil

brand into this new product category.

Looking at the data following ZzzQuil’s

launch, the largest driver of conversation

(38%) represents excited early adopters

using the product for its intended, sleep-aid

purpose.

In addition, social media discussion signals that consumers retain the

intended brand associations: 32% express purchase intent and another 18%

recommend the product to others online. There is no expressed confusion

about usage and the relationship to the parent brand, NyQuil. As far as the

market is concerned, NyQuil to ZzzQuil exemplifies both a very logical and

successful brand extension that reinforces the positive images associated

with the parent brand.

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New Brand Extension: Dr. Pepper Marinade Dr. Pepper, on the other hand, is a more interesting case that draws more

polarizing consumer commentary. While 14% of consumers express

significant interest in trying the product, another 16% hotly criticize the

concept and its taste. Furthermore, nearly 30% express skepticism and

continue to ask questions about the new product.

Keep in mind: Every time you analyze social media data, you should track

each category of conversation over time to assess the varying degrees of

market education and acceptance across geographies.

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Adweek pegged Dr. Pepper Marinade as one of the “worst” brand extension

concepts this year. It is true that BBQ-related discussion of Dr. Pepper soda

represents a significantly smaller proportion of product use cases. However,

through social media analysis, we find the product appears to strongly

appeal to the niche market of consumers who favor that food and beverage

pairing. And they aren’t shy to tell us how great it is!

Brand managers simply cannot afford to skip this next step: How has the

brand extension impacted your parent brand image? Parent brand dilution is

the major strategic risk accompanying any brand extension (recall the classic

“New Coke” debacle).

Good news: Remember that brand baseline we set up for Step 1? Now we can

revisit the same social media analysis to evaluate, quantitatively and

qualitatively, how the new product has affected brand-level discussion.

Step 4: Conduct A Full Post-Launch Audit

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That’s it. You just successfully operationalized the unsolicited opinions of

millions of consumers in several stages of brand decision-making. How easy

was that?

As your brand evolves, it becomes even more important to uncover and track

the nuances in consumer discussion— discussion that is earned and

unfiltered. From one prospector to another, social media may hold the

destiny of your next successful brand extension.

Evaluating Brand Extensions

Crimson Hexagon, founded in 2007, is the leading provider of analysis software that delivers

business intelligence from social media data for global corporations. Powered by patented

technology developed at Harvard University’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science, the Crimson

Hexagon ForSight™ platform delivers the industry’s most comprehensive Big Data analysis

capabilities for a variety of large-scale data sources. Clients include leading global organizations

such as: Microsoft, Paramount Pictures, Starbucks, Simon & Schuster, Twitter, and many more. For

more information go to: http://www.crimsonhexagon.com.

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Jehan Hamedi is an expert in the intersection between social media and business intelligence. As

Global Market Development Manager at Crimson Hexagon, Hamedi is responsible for developing all

vertical value propositions, go-to-market and growth strategies, as well as the messaging and

content marketing programs for all domestic and international markets. It is his goal to discover

novel use cases of social media analysis technology and to help companies learn how to harmonize

disparate consumer data in order to solve complex business problems. As an industry thought

leader, Hamedi regularly shares his expertise on social media and social intelligence at industry

conferences and in academia.

Jehan Hamedi Global Market Development Manager