How Social Listening Speaks to Brands and Improves Consumer Targeting

Canned tuna has been a pantry staple for generations. So when StarKist introduced it in a pouch after nearly 100 years in a can, sales stagnated. The company lowered the price and reduced the pouch size, which helped, but didn’t fix its image problem. To solve the dilemma, StarKist turned to social listening. It’s an increasingly popular marketing tool that uses artificial intelligence to scrape publicly available social media chatter and information—Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, news outlets and Reddit, for instance—for keywords directly and indirectly related to a brand. The goal is to learn firsthand about trends, habits and sentiment related to a business or category. Those thousands of conversations are analyzed and the results drive business decisions on messaging, product development and package design in an effort to grow sales. The results are often significant. What’s the Difference Between Performance and Brand Marketing? Diving into the subconscious In StarKist’s case, the team wanted to learn what consumers were saying about tuna fish, healthy lifestyles, omega-3, Weight Watchers and Keto. The findings led to new messaging on pouches, a marketing strategy change and product creation. Armed with those directional insights, the pouch category grew by 75% and household penetration nearly doubled. “We’re tapping into the subconscious of the consumer,” Andy Mecs, Starkist’s vp of marketing and innovation, told Adweek. “In a traditional focus group, we would have some takeaways, but they're not comprehensive or conclusive.” Part of social listening’s allure is the ability to learn what consumers are thinking in real-time. That was a benefit for the national cleaning company, The Maids, when it partnered with the digital search and performance marketing agency, Pacific. Pacific’s team programmed the software to flag conversations in the U.S. featuring the terms cleaning service, maid, housekeeper and the names of five competitors. Through machine learning, the software organizes positive or negative sentiment around a topic. Two themes emerged: The Maids’ customers want eco-friendly cleaning products; and consumers expect national brands to reflect local tastes and sensibilities by framing that knowledge around photos of local neighborhoods. In response to those social signals, Pacific’s marketing team rebranded The Maids’ site according to those two prerequisites. Advertising and marketing content were likewise rewritten to highlight sustainability values alongside geotargeted images of staffs at nearby franchises. The changes resulted in a 90% increase in traffic to the website and a 125% increase in bookings, according to Pacific. “We uncovered a bunch of insights that we never would have found with traditional search marketing research,” Jamey Bainer, Pacific’s head of strategy for clients, told Adweek. “Because we have social listening, we have the voices of all these people telling us this is the most important thing I need to see before I'm going to book a house cleaning service.” The tuna industry casts a tighter net StarKist partnered with Netbase Quid, a social media analytics company, to define the parameters of its social listening search. In addition to a wide variety of social platforms, which each have unique demographics, they scoured news outlets, forums, blogs, in a variety of languages. “This is not five people talking [generally] about something,” Paige Leidig, Netbase Quid’s CMO, told Adweek. “In order for real conclusions, we look at hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of different conversations and analyze them with a system that can identify the differences and relevance of those conversations.” When StarKist initially introduced pouches, it was in part because younger generations didn’t own or know how to use can openers. Also, as a cohort, Gen-Z consumers don’t consider canned food healthy. How did StarKist know all this? It was the learnings from social listening that enabled the company to connect the dots about why its pouches weren’t selling. StarKist’s renewed marketing health They learned tuna, specifically StarKist, has an extremely high frequency of mentions in relation to Weight Watchers. The team drilled down on that theme. Ultimately, StarKist determined that tuna is associated with weight loss, a healthy lifestyle and often featured in low calorie recipes. That discovery led company leaders to completely change how StarKist brands itself. They changed the packaging to include how much protein is in a pouch, number of calories and confirmed it’s wild cod tuna on the label. The brand was also able to correct misinformation. Consumers wrongly thought StarKist sold chicken (thanks, Jessica Simpson!) so that “gave us permission” to sell it, Mecs stated. “We've evolved from being a canned tuna company to becoming a healthy lifestyle brand,” Mecs said. “Along the way a lot of things change.” The social listening research also accelerated the launch of new flavors since they knew exactly what consumers wanted. The deeper information also explained why certain flavors weren’t doing well. For example, from social listening, StarKist knew consumers were interested in spicy flavors. So they positioned a new line of tuna as “Mexican-style.” That generic approach didn’t sell well. But when they repositioned the product as “Jalapeno-flavored,” sales tripled. Ocean Spray broadens cranberry juice’s appeal Ocean Spray cranberry juice was also facing an image problem. When the marketing team partnered with NetBase Quid, sales were slumping. The morning juice industry as a whole was facing decline, thanks to the push to lower sugar intake. Through social listening, Ocean Spray and Netbase Quid analyzed 150,000 conversations around cranberry juice. They found three recurring themes: People were self-conscious about others thinking they have a UTI or bladder infection; they often drank it to rehydrate after workouts. Secondly, these consumers tended to drink Ocean Spray in a wine glass instead of a cocktail at social engagements to mask the fact they weren’t drinking alcohol. Ocean Spray leaned into these learnings and went to work on revamping its product marketing. It created a line of branded mocktails that were infused water called Cranberry +health, which is marketed to people with UTIs since it has the highest concentration of cranberry juice compounds of all of the brands’ products. "The new line has exceeded expectations," Leidig said. Ocean Spray has since expanded its reach to people interested in living a healthy lifestyle and in particular, women. “What’s so interesting about the data we get with social listening is you go in with certain hypotheses, but because of the accessibility of the data we derive insights and can then identify unmet needs,” Leidig expressed.