Category Archives: General

Every brand from skincare to automobiles to diapers today runs an integrated campaign. Ad spots, billboards, pop-up stores, sponsorships, digital, CSR initiatives and point of sales promotions are just some ways brands try to reach their consumers. Consumers have a limited attention span and brands across categories contest for it. This makes it critical to measure the effectiveness of campaigns and optimize them continuously.

MavenMagnet has developed innovative research capabilities to do just that. But we do it a little differently. In order to do campaign assessment, we analyze thousands of consumer conversations around a brand to discover the marketing initiatives that have had an impact on the brand perception – old, new, planned as well as unplanned. We then analyze the conversations around these initiatives to granularly identify various campaign elements and quantify the impact they have on the brand’s imagery. We have developed KPIs with exhaustive industry benchmarks to measure campaign effectiveness in a manner that has a direct impact on driving consideration and purchase. We provide actionable recommendations to help brands optimize campaign elements and deliver maximum return on investment. Continuous measurement of marketing effectiveness also helps brands develop a rich database of “what works” and “what doesn’t” that often acts as a ready reckoner for the development of future communication strategy.

At MavenMagnet, we have developed techniques to contextually analyze consumer conversations to get you the complete picture while providing focused insights to make strategic decisions on how to develop your messaging and impact brand preference of the consumers. We use advanced technological and analytical techniques to provide you data-driven input in campaign planning and optimization while adhering to the most stringent industry and government privacy standards.

Scale: the thing we use for measurement. We are surrounded by scales. We measure everything from the distance to a destination to how much something (or someone) weighs to how long it’s going to take. Every measurement has a standard scale associated with it. For example, we measure distance in miles, weight in pounds and time in hours. It is second nature to us. It makes life easier and more meaningful. The same applies to everything else that is measurable including in the world of marketing. That’s where Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, come in play.

In marketing world KPI is a standard scale to measure the success of things like marketing campaigns, a website’s performance and a brand’s position in a competitive landscape. The million dollar word here is STANDARD. If you are developing the best algorithms in the world to come up with the best KPIs, the most important thing to do is to make sure the KPIs you define are acceptable as the standard.

So let’s get to the important part. What are the ingredients to make KPIs standard? It’s a sequence of things. First and foremost is accuracy. You need enough benchmark and trends to show accuracy of your KPIs. When you have historical data to prove accuracy, you are in the market with something that you can be justified with evidence. You can make a case that there is a need for these KPIs because that’s the best measure of success. You have the confidence to let the early adopters–the progressive clients–kick tires and  try it out. When accurate results emerge, the most important ingredient in the standards business comes in picture. Trust. Trust around KPIs leads to adoption, first by the early adopters and then by everyone else. And there you have it–a new measurement standard making the lives of people in the industry so much easier and quantifiable.

MavenMagnet conducted a study in partnership with The Economic Times to evaluate the public performance of Indian government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The study was published on May 14, 2016. Here’s the link to the study.

There are lot of things that helps the business grow. One of those things, specially for a B2B business, is global expansion. Global expansion has become a necessity in lot of ways for service companies. All Fortune 100 companies are multinationals with operations across the globe. A cereal company sells cereal in US also sells cereal in Europe also sells cereal in India and China. So if they are looking for information like how they are doing competitively in the market or how their campaigns are doing, they will need measurement tools in every market. Therefore developing global capabilities is a slam dunk and in lot of ways a no-brainer.

Then why are many service companies regional? There are many benefits of being regional. You can develop niche expertise in a market and run the tables there. It’s easier to manage and contain, and if you are in a big market, there is way too much ground to cover in there than thinking of expanding wings across borders. But sometimes its prudent to have capabilities in multiple geographies to serve your consumers.

So you plan to go global. Let’s look into challenges that comes in your way. One of the key ones is resource management. The most fundamental resource is people. Getting the right people to work in the right market is the most essential thing. You should go to the markets that will provide you the best bang for the buck, but a key decision making factor, given most other things being equal, is also where you have the most dependable people to service the market.

We would all love to have presence in all 200 countries where Pepsi sells cola, but it is just not practical and in many ways not essential. Take a step at a time so that your operational capabilities are able to support your expansion. Operational capabilities expanding with your expansion is critical. Everything from language support to time zone support need to keep up the pace. There is no time of the day when you can allow downtime if sun is up in some part of the world where you are operating.

Go global if you it makes business sense. Go global at the right time in your growth curve. Go global if you have the muscle to sustain it.

The PM’s brand shines on, as an ET Magazine-MavenMagnet study of online conversations over the past year indicates, although it’s respected more than it’s trusted — and the expectations are only piling up.

Check out the complete study report here.

MavenMagnet study in association with The Economic Times. 

They were born in India, and achieved fame, glory and success in other parts of the world. Which is why we decided to call them the Global Indian Women (GIW) — their influence measured by big data research firm MavenMagnet, which began with a long list of 60 women, all born in India and making waves outside it.

These women earned their spurs across countries — from the United Arab Emirates to, inevitably, the US — but one thing’s for sure: you can’t take India and their Indianness out of them. After all, many of them are what and where they are because of their cultural roots, and their ability to adapt them to a new milieu.

Consider, for instance, the story of Falu Shah, who has introduced the West to a mint-new genre of ‘Hindi-Indie’ music. Part of the credit for the success of Falu — or Falguni as she was known in her childhood days in Mumbai – would have to go to her mother Kishori Reshamdalal who ensured that her daughter was trained in Hindustani classical music.

Then, the success saga of Zulekha Daud, founder of an eponymous UAE-based hospital chain, is incomplete without a significant mention of the struggles of her mother Bilkis Vali in getting Zulekha trained as a doctor in Nagpur, fighting orthodoxy on the one hand and her own lack of formal education on the other. In fact, Zulekha recalls how her mother successfully sat for her own class 10 exams while Zulekha studied medicine.

The MavenMagnet long list also had names like Leena Nair, till recently head of human resources at Hindustan Unilever before being called up to the Unilever Headquarters in London. The likes of Nair have been left out purely because much of their achievements were back home — at least so far. The study focused primarily on two areas: business; and the arts. That helped to short list 20 names for an in-depth research to bring out the granular details of their sphere of influence.

How we did it

MavenMagnet, a research company, uses big data to uncover consumer and market insights across a broad cross-section of demographic and psychographic segments. The key advantage of its research methodology is that it does not involve moderation of discussions or questions. Instead it uses the conversations that the consumers are having on various online platforms with their friends and family to gather insights. Maven-Magnet analysed 4,172 conversations among 1,642 individuals around the 20 women to evaluate their footprint in their domain of expertise and beyond.

A key functionality of the approach in this study is its impact normalisation technique. This was essential because of two reasons. Firstly, the social sphere of influence for individuals working in different fields is considerably different. For instance, authors writing in a particular genre have a great influence on their readership, but generally their sphere of influence is considerably smaller as compared to actors working on projects with mass appeal. In order to cover women in different fields, Maven Magnet normalised the influence analysis based on the field of focus. Secondly, some business leaders (Indra Nooyi and Padmasree Warrior) and show-business personalities (Mira Nair and Freida Pinto) are outliers who have a considerably high overall impact due to their stature and work. This approach ensured that these outliers didn’t set the benchmarks.

MavenMagnet’s Conversational Research doesn’t involve any discussion guides or questionnaires that can steer the outcome in a certain direction. This considerably increases the scope of discovery. One surprising insight in this study was that the imagery spectrum (sphere of influence) of artists is narrower as compared to business leaders. While the perception of artists was generally driven by factors such as domain expertise and sensory appeal that were directly linked to their profession, peripheral attributes such as social appeal and trust were relatively more dominant in case of business leaders.

This is a study done by MavenMagnet and was originally published as the cover story in the Economic Times on December 14, 2014.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi versus superstar Rajnikanth — how is that for a match-up? Perish the delicious thought, for now we just have netizens comparing the two.

It was inevitable though, with the aura of invincibility around the two and the Modi government completing 200 days in office on the eve of the release of the Rajni starrer, Lingaa.

To mark 200 days of the Modi Sarkar, ET Magazine got big data research firm MavenMagnet to crawl the internet to gauge the mood on the day.

MavenMagnet’s patented methodology for the survey gleans opinions out of public conversations without asking questions. Rajanikanth has company though; Modi is also being compared to Singham.

Never mind the scenes in Parliament, Modi still seems to be enjoying a honeymoon with the virtual world, with a net 22% positive vibe around him.

A large segment, or 61%, remains neutral or mildly positive. On the 200th day, that is Thursday, December 11, Modi also scored brownie points by congratulating President Pranab Mukherjee and tweeting in Russian to welcome president Putin.
Foreign relations, infusion of national pride, governance and his Kashmir pitch dominated the online discussions around him and his role as prime minister.

The discussions that focused on him personally hovered around his vision and his ability to engage with the masses.

The negative vibes were generated by the usual suspects. Positives and negatives split the vibes baskets down the middle in topics like ‘communal harmony’ and ‘secularism’.However, these topics themselves have not gathered enough traction yet to dominate the discussion around Modi and the most prominent words around him are “vision” and “shares” or “meets” followed by “developed”. Even words like “RSS” or “Hindu” are not prominent.

The man-in-charge imagery clearly is winning the day as this comment from an anonymous commentator shows: “Powerful Modi can only solve all India problems and put the opposition and even his own ministers in place.” Over to the next 200 days.

Research Undertaken in Support of Strategy Summit for Fighting Ebola

A high level of concern and an equally high level of ignorance about medical facts, real or perceived, continue to fuel conversations about Ebola in social media and the press, even as the disease drops out of the headlines.

In support of Strategies for Fighting Ebola: A Columbia University Summit to Help End the Epidemic, held this week at the Columbia Club in New York City, MavenMagnet, a multinational big data-based research company, conducted a study to understand the current U.S. public perceptions of Ebola.

The Summit is sponsored by: Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University School of Nursing, Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia Business School Alumni Club of New York, The Columbia Alumni Association, and The Columbia University Club of New York.

The nationally balanced, projectable sample of 2,090, was drawn from an analysis of conversations about Ebola from a wide range of digital sources including Facebook, Twitter, blogs, forums, community chat rooms, press, and other platforms between October 20, 2014 and November 20, 2014.

“With the vast majority of the conversations (41%) centered on discussions of the Medical Understanding behind the virus (i.e. the causes, prevention, effects, treatments, etc.), only 4% of the conversations were positive indicating a continuing high level of concern about the disease and a continuing lack of knowledge about medical facts,” said MavenMagnet CEO Aditya Ghuwalewala.

The key words which had the greatest impact in the conversations were: scared, plot and airborne. The reference to Ebola being part of a plot was, of course, highly charged, as was the reference to airborne which remains both a very hot and misunderstood topic.

Skepticism and Fear were the second most discussed topics and the focus of 18% of the conversations with Controversy a close third at 14%. Disturbingly, Racial Stigma also was part of 11% of the conversations.

On the positive side, 14% of the conversations referenced the importance of Global Solidarity in fighting Ebola. Awareness of celebrity initiatives such as those by Bob Geldof and BandAid, drove the solidarity references, with mentions in 58% of the conversations on Global Solidarity. Clearly, celebrity events are noticed and have the potential to have an even greater positive effect.

Surprisingly, both references to President Obama and hospitals were few and had very low impact.

This classic question comes up every time a company comes at a crossroad where options are either to build an expertise or buy it from the experts. The short answer is: build it if it is your core competency, buy in all other cases.

If your core competency is to sell detergent, build the product and sales & marketing machinery, buy the services to support it. You don’t have to build a data center to store information, you can buy it. You don’t have to build data analytics machinery to understand this information, you can buy it. Let the system engineers and data scientist respectively at expert shops do that while you focus on selling your detergent.

Buying has a lot of advantages. It keeps your overheads under control. You are relying on someone whose entire job is to sell that particular thing. What you would otherwise build as your back office is their front office. They stay on top of things. In areas like technology where machine learning, new technology deployment and product evolution happens at a rapid pace, the service provider will distribute the cost among several buyers making it so much more cost-effective for you along with making to get the latest and greatest stuff without worrying about the details under the hood. When you are buying, in most cases you are options, i.e. there’s competition among the sellers, which always work in your best interest.

So long story short, you got to buy it if it is not what you do. Focus on what you do and do it the best it can be done. Buy the rest.

Boomers and Millennials may not agree on a lot of things but there appears to be common ground in considerable areas when it comes to purchase decision.  In a broad-scale study of the two cohort groups conducted by MavenMagnet, a big data research company, both groups agree that value for money (vs. cost alone) is the most important factor in the purchase decision.

One area where the groups are significantly different – that color how they approach life and make decisions – is that Boomers are “INSIDE-OUT” skewed, whereas Millennials are predominantly “OUTSIDE-IN.”  Boomers are more driven by shared values than Millennials who are more concerned about social appeal. Aside from common turf on value, and quality, Boomers give importance to benefits such as personal relevance and individuality most highly, reflecting inner-directed values. Conversely, Millennials rate social conformance at a rate more than twice as high as their older cohorts.

“Fitting-in” or social conformance is important for Millennials – be it in college, society or when they move into the workplace. Many of their choices are driven by what is considered “right by others.” Boomers are a lot more comfortable with who they are…they don’t look for social approval.  Individuality is important to them and their purchase decisions may or may not conform to social trends.

Sensory appeal is important for both generations, but the sensory drivers are very different. Comfort is way down on the important criteria for Millennials (in favor of aesthetics), reflecting the clear variance in life stage of the two groups. Boomers would rather pick something average looking than compromise their comfort; Millennials will accept slight discomfort in their clothes, furniture or even bed sheets, if they look good. Again, this supports the inner-directed vs. outer-directed differences between the two generations.

The green groups can take little encouragement from this study since sustainability is at the bottom of the purchase decision list for both generations.

What are some of the lessons learned? This study could have saved JC Penney from taking the wrong turn in their ill-fated no-coupon marketing strategy.  Both groups place high importance on discount coupons and price-off promotions. Interesting tidbits? Boomers reference USA in emotive word associations. Millennials do not. And guess what big box stores – Walmart is for Boomers, what Target is for Millennials.

About the Study

MavenMagnet used its Conversation Research^TM methodology to analyze Boomer and Millennial purchase attitudes using big social data. Proprietary technology and methodology was used to analyze and gain insights from thousands of consumer conversations over 12 months (June 2013 to May 2014). Please contact us at research@mavenmagnet.com for an overview study report.