How Brands Are Taking Audience Understanding to New Heights

For every brand worldwide, improving their level of audience understanding is now a core focus, and for good reason. As recently as a few years ago, all you needed to know about your audience was what TV shows they were watching and what press titles they were reading and you could advertise accordingly. In today’s digital landscape, this just isn’t good enough. You no longer talk to a target group defined solely by their age and gender, you talk to people about their interests, their passions, the things that they center around beyond simple demographics.

Last week, we announced the launch of our Brand data set – introducing a unique approach to audience-centric marketing set to transform the way brands understand their consumers. Unlike more traditional brand tracking, this takes a slightly different perspective. While offering insights into a consumer’s engagement with a brand, it goes far deeper to help you understand the perceptions and digital behaviors of current, lapsed and potential customers, allowing you to match that against the other 8,500 data points in our Core data set.

But what does this new kind of data mean for advertisers, and how can it make a significant difference to their level of audience understanding?

Creating Brand-Centric Audiences

Relying on behavioral data and analytics is nothing new for the world of marketing, but there is a widespread lack of understanding when it comes to what kind of data advertisers should rely on to get their information.

Most turn to either active (survey) or passive (analytics), when in actual fact, to truly understand what your consumers are doing and how they feel, you need to combine the best of both worlds; take the strengths of active and combine it with the strengths of passive.

Everything we do is about going deeper into the consumer’s motivations and their digital lifestyles. This is why we combine both active and passive data to get a much clearer and more reliable picture of who these consumers really are. This, coupled with the breadth and frequency of the survey, and the fact that it’s truly harmonized across all of our 36 countries, means you can legitimately compare people across locations.

The purpose of GWI Brand is to enrich our Core data set with brand engagement and perception metrics, allowing our clients to profile the digital behaviors and attitudes of current versus previous versus non-customers across hundreds of global brands.

In short, it’s about creating brand-centric audiences.

Using the right blend of active and passive data, brands can now look at their customer groups to understand what their top social networks are, what they talk about online and who they follow, what their purchase journey looks like, how they feel about the various devices they use to get online, and what role particular brands are playing in their lives, and more.

Featuring hundreds of leading brands across technology, sports, fashion, entertainment, CPG/ FMCG, travel, automotive, alcohol and health, global names include Chevrolet, American Airlines, Samsung and Starbucks. The data set also covers fans of film titles like Star Wars and Pirates of The Caribbean, games franchises such as Call of Duty and Candy Crush, along with sports teams like New England Patriots and Manchester United.

Identifying Opportunities with Deeper Insights

Revealing both in-depth and high-level insights for brands, this marks an important transition from brand trackers towards more complex, data-driven solutions. For example, clients can now distinguish between daily drinkers of Coke and Coke Zero, using 8,500 data points to uncover new consumer insights. Of these two audiences, GWI Brand reveals that Coke Zero daily drinkers are:

• 15% more likely to be on Instagram.
• 33% more likely to watch videos on Snapchat.
• 15% more likely to be interested in Reality TV.
• 25% more likely to play games while they second screen.
• 10% more likely to upload videos on Facebook, but 15% less likely to read news stories.

These consumer-driven insights, coupled with behavioral analytics, provide a 360 degree view of target audiences, which marks an exciting advancement for global brands.

For the very first time, advertisers can use a holistic data solution to truly quantify the behaviors and perceptions of their audiences, a task now more central than ever to marketing that works.

Like what you’ve read? Find out why GWI is trusted by the world’s leading marketers with a glimpse into the GWI Research and Methodology.

*GWI Brand is now available to all GlobalWebIndex ‘Enterprise’ plan subscribers.