PR Pitfalls and Brand Booby Traps

CorpSumers Care about Brand Social Stance

A Battle Plan for Allying with the CorpSumer

As we learned from examining the data behind the CorpSumer phenomenon, consumers are not just becoming more concerned about social good, they are also making purchasing decisions based on brand positioning around these moral and ethical values. Thus, the brand social stance is vital to consider among consumer audiences who will pay close attention to this messaging.

In today’s fraught political environment, a new headline appears daily which forces individuals and brands to confront their stances on topics from employee diversity to environmental impact. As reporter David Gelles writes in his recent article “The Moral Voice of Corporate America,” CEOs can no longer avoid politics. He quotes Nancy Koehn, a historian at Harvard Business School, who says [tweet_dis excerpt=”Today, to keep silent is to jeopardize the reputation of the company. -Nancy Gelles, HBS Historian”]“Today, to keep silent is to jeopardize the reputation of the company.”[/tweet_dis]

If we know that companies are being encouraged by changing social pressures and expectations to take a political and social stand, how do they know the degree to which their customer base cares about their brand’s actions for social good, and which positions should they take?

Resonate data provides a guidebook to this potential minefield by allowing brands to see not just the demographic composition or behavior of their audience, a commonality across all vendors, but also the consumer’s deeply-held values, beliefs, and other psychographic information.

By examining the brand’s own values and matching them to audience values in an authentic way, [tweet_dis]brands can tap into the CorpSumer’s powerful influence as a brand promoter, rather than a brand criticizer[/tweet_dis]. This is a vital segment to message correctly due to their outsize impact on brand perception, as heavy social media users who spend more than forty hours a week online and publicly share their opinions of products and companies.

Resonate’s Steps for Audience Research:

  1. Place our tags on your website, advertisements, and other areas of digital presence to identify who is really engaging with your content and buying your products.
  2. Analyze this audience in the Resonate platform to get detailed insights into demographics, purchasing behavior, media consumption, personal values, consumer engagement topics, important social issues, and much more.
  3. Strategize new messages and creative designed to appeal to your own exact audience’s beliefs
  4. Activate digital advertisements against precise audiences to maximize value of ad spend and pinpoint messaging to key customers

Contact Resonate at success@resonate.com or 855-855-4320 to start a conversation about how to ensure brand safety in today’s PR minefield, and make sure your brand social stance both matches up with your own brand values and targets your customer base’s personal values.

We will be at the ANA Masters of Marketing conference October 4-6 in Orlando, FL, where keynote speaker Marc Pritchards, CMO of P&G, will also speak about the increased brand responsibility to address broader social issues as a force for good and a force for growth.

Categorized as: Blog Page, Brand

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