FMCG companies were some of the early adopters to social. The likes of Oreo and Innocent have taken to social platforms like ducks to water.

We also recently released a case study from one of our clients, Kellogg’s, that demonstrated the interesting ways they are using social to run and track competitions.

That’s all well and good for the big boys – the fun companies – but what if you’re a niche product in the FMCG market? How do they get value from social?

The Social Studies Group, a market research firm who specialize in using social media conversations to help companies better understand their customers, competitors, markets and industries were working with a niche client just like that.

A Global goods company and a well-known household name in the US wanted to know how its ethnic food products compared with the competition in the social space.

The Social Studies Group (SSG) had been using Brandwatch on behalf of other clients and enjoyed particular success when performing broad data collection combined with complex social analytics.

SSG knew they could leverage Brandwatch’s powerful analytics platform to help their client.

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The Goal

Brand Managers at the FMCG company had three specific goals in mind:

1. To quantify the brand’s social share of voice compared with its top competitors
2. To profile the market segments most involved in social discussion about the product
3. To understand the social positioning of each of their brands

FMCG products and more specifically food and drink are unsurprisingly a very popular topic of discussion online.

The SSG had their work cut out working with massive volumes of data and conversation. Their client also only wanted analysis of organic consumer discussions, not conversation driven by ethnic food brands themselves.

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The Solution

The SSG utilized the Brandwatch analytics platform‘s powerful query creation and multiple Boolean operators to unearth the results.

“When looking at brands with many extensions, it’s important to be able to flexibly query social data in all sorts of ways,” said Wendy Scherer, Managing Partner at SSG.

A good query however is just the beginning. The SSG needed to filter out all brand-driven content. They used Brandwatch’s automated search rules to ensure the data they were analysing was organic.

The SSG then hand-tagged themes they had created based on their knowledge of the market. Themes such as “group dining” and “family night” were often mentioned alongside conversation about ethnic foods.

The team didn’t stop there, The SSG refined the data even more by taking a random sample of the data set and applying Brandwatch’s vast array of filters to break out results by age and gender.

They then micro-segmented the results for each of the ethnic food competitor brands, breaking the data down by individual product, usage and demographics.

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The Results

Using Brandwatch Analytics The SSG managed to identify a new online audience that had not been considered in the past when the ethnic food brand had planned targeted marketing.

There was a considerable volume of conversations amongst unmarried consumers in their twenties.

“You can imagine the value that this research has had on the company’s social media marketing efforts,” said Scherer of SSG.

SSG’s client now has a brand new consumer market to explore. They can target advertising and messaging to a very specific demographic, a demographic they already know are engaged and very vocal online, thanks to the efforts of SSG and Brandwatch Analytics.

Download the full case study here

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