1.8 billion reasons why image analysis will go mainstream in 2016 #3

CEO Job Muscroft continues his blog series exploring ways in which visual social media research is being adopted in the world of market research. In this final post, Job discusses a case study which helps develop creativity for a global smart phone brand.

With smartphone sales having reached 1.4 billion worldwide in 2015, there is an arms race between manufacturers (both hardware and software) to launch new features in order to get ahead of the competition. In 2016, with smartphones being so ubiquitous in the eye of consumers and most handsets looking similar and doing similar things, how do brands in this market actively differentiate themselves and stay relevant?

A smartphone company wanted to identify the key creative platforms they should leverage for the launch of a new advertising campaign aimed at millennials.

What we did

• Using Pulsar, we created a smartphone tracking strategy which looked at leading brands, and more importantly, the relationship people had with their phone
• Alongside this, we conducted wider topic tracking, identifying common smartphone discussions amongst millennials in Europe and associated visual content
• From this tracking, we identified a group of consumers we could work with across 5 European markets. We invited them into an online community for us to work with, so we could get a deeper understanding of their phone usage
• We identified millennials’ brand perception of their smartphone for our client’s brand to produce 10 creative principles of how to improve relevance with this audience
• A communications checklist with 5 key ‘go/no-go’ principles for creative briefings was delivered, and adopted by the client and their agency
• 5 short term activation ideas were generated from the materials analysed during the project. This tied into the final creative brief and included content topics, associated imagery, tone of voice and channels

Why this worked

Conducting image analysis allowed us to clearly pinpoint emerging consumer trends in this market at scale, so that we could form hypothesis to test in our research community. Associated imagery from social media content gives brands a direct way of understanding the emotional and rational associations with brands.

For example, in this study it became clear that the most successful brands in this market don’t focus content on the device and its features, but instead show the lifestyle they can help you lead – and the associated benefits that come with it.

This leads to a number of interesting creative platforms about how, as a brand, you can position yourself in different lifestyle areas relevant to millennials, as well as discovering the Instagram and YouTube influencers that could become potential brand partners.

The most important aspect of this project’s success was the speed of insights and how actionable they were. This project was turned around in 8 weeks, and fed directly into the creative brief for the campaign that launched in Q1 of 2016. The campaign so far has seen the brand increase its market share by 6% – a big accomplishment in such a competitive market.

Are you working in product development or consumer insights and do you have an exciting brief? If so, we’d love to hear from you. Just send an email to [email protected].