Insights 2.0

Evian does not communicate much, yet with its baby swimmers campaign, few brands can claim having made such a lasting impression. Ten years after this campaign, Evian has launched a new one, still with babies, but this time, out of the pool and in roller skates.

BETC 4D EuroRSCG organized a plan that included television, online media, design, and events, but only the online media aspect originally hoped for a worldwide audience thanks to viral marketing. 4D called on linkfluence to oversee in real time these videos’ broadcast and audiences on blogs, social networks, and forums worldwide.

Linkfluence’s monitoring plan focused first on Evian Babies’ official YouTube account audience measurement data. Toward the end of the campaign, Evian had launched 12 different videos on its channel. To track each video’s evolution and performance over time, we had to record the audience by country and by video each day. The Evian campaign quickly became the biggest video commercial buzz in the web’s history.

Thanks to its technologies, linkfluence was able to watch and report on the videos going viral and the discussions taking place around them. Linkfluence was able to assess precisely the campaign’s ROI by showing that each paid viewing on YouTube led to over 14 free viewings. Analyzing and mapping the buzz’ spread highlighted the importance of communities of families, women, and technophiles in the campaign’s success.

Nutella, Kinder, or Ferrero are among the most talked-about brands on the social web.

Starting in 2008, Ferrero France wanted to set up a barometric system to understand the profiles of those Internet users active around its brands. It wanted to measure these brands’ spontaneous recognition on the social web, to identify the related themes (such as cooking and health), and to gauge the tone of opinions expressed. Also, Ferrero wished to detect quickly its consumers’ reasons for dissatisfaction and to reply to them.

Linkfluence set up a plan with detailed analytic phases and continuous monitoring of conversations. Twice a year, linkfluence undertakes a brand essence^2.0 study to survey quantitatively and qualitatively the changes in views about Nutella, Kinder, and Ferrero. This study identifies existing opportunities for brand positioning and communication and offers ideas useful to their product innovation policy.

Ferrero also benefits from a dashboard to access contributions on the social web (posts, articles), ranked in order of their influence. This dashboard measures constantly Ferrero brands’ penetration rate in the dozens of communities that comprise linkfluence’s livepanel, their association with predetermined themes, and their share of voice among competitors.

This system won SEMO-Marketing Magazine’s silver trophy in 2009, in the category of brand and communications marketing studies.

In a context of social upheavals combined with a morose economic climate, consumption behaviors can become more difficult to read, interpret, or forecast. Brands can find it difficult to find their way in such a shifting environment.

Take L’Oréal’s luxury products division (Lancôme, YSL Beauté, Giorgio Armani, Biotherm, Cacharel, etc.) for example. In 2009, it had to face an American perfume market that was undergoing profound change. L’Oréal asked linkfluence to analyze the spontaneous opinions trendsetters expressed on the North American social web to have an interpretive framework of market trends.

In under two weeks, linkfluence was able to identify the main reasons consumers were shifting away from the luxury perfume industry. It also measured the weight of this phenomenon among all conversations about perfumes. Linkfluence extracted the 5,000 or so contributions over a 4-month period from its livepanel (sampling of sites selected for their influence, where market trends crystallize). After analyzing the profile of the different communities discussing the subject, linkfluence identified and extracted a few hundred remarks that expressed some degree of dissatisfaction with perfumes. It quantitatively coded and qualitatively analyzed this data following a precise protocol to highlight the deep-set and temporary reasons for this drift.