Read this case study to see how American research firm The Social Studies Group used Brandwatch to identify a new, socially active market segment for an ethnic-branded food product.

1. Case Study/
Consumer Goods Major Brand
The Social Studies Group
Uses Social Analytics to
Understand Social
Consumers

2. Case Study/ The Social Studies Group
About/
The Social Studies Group
The Social Studies Group
Delivering valuable consumer
research through social insights
Company:
The Social Studies Group
Headquarters:
Washington, DC
Audience:
Consumer Brands
Industry:
Social Media Research
Website:
• Identified a new, socially active market
segment for ethnic-branded food
products
www.socialstudiesgroup.com/
Services:
• Uncovered the differences between
the brand’s online and offline
audiences
• Mapped the brand’s competitive
positioning and content in the social
media realm
Social Media Research,
Marketing & Branding Strategy
Brandwatch Services: Social Media Monitoring
and Analytics
Yielding a
true picture
of organic social
discussions
The Goal/
The Challenge/
Understand a Brand’s Competitive
Position in the Social Space
Key Results/
Parsing Big Data to Gain
Valuable Insights
Referring to themselves as “Nerds with Panache,” The
Social Studies Group (SSG) is a social media research
firm with a seasoned team that brings over five decades
of marketing and branding strategy to each engagement.
This enables the firm to gather the right intelligence and
deliver meaningful results for companies seeking more
knowledge in the area of consumer research.
Three major challenges arose as SSG attempted to gain
social insights on behalf of their client. First, there is a
massive volume of data and conversations related to
ethnic foods, because there is a long history of social
conversations popping up around name-brand products.
One of SSG’s clients – a global consumer goods company
and household name – wanted to understand how its
pre-packaged ethnic food products stacked up against the
competition in the eyes of social consumers. Brand managers
had three specific goals in mind for SSG as the firm began its
social media data collection and analysis:
1. To quantify the brand’s share of social conversations
versus its six largest competitors
2. To profile the market segments most involved in social
discussions about the products in question: pre-packaged
ethnic foods (i.e., mixes, spices, etc.)
3. To understand the social positioning of each of the brand’s
ethnic products, individually
SSG was also tasked with performing its analysis based on
real, organic consumer discussions. There is a vast amount of
brand-directed content about grocery items on social media
(e.g., coupons and giveaways), and brand managers did not
want this included in the analysis.
Second, the volume of brand-directed content rivals that of
organic discussions, which means that SSG would need to
systematically ignore nearly half the data for some brands in
order to isolate consumer-driven content. Third, people often
discuss products without mentioning their names, presenting
SSG with the risk of under-counting or completely missing
important conversations.
“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 of SSG. “Consumers usually don’t spell things
out the way we would like, so we have to develop creative
queries to reach those ‘ah-hah’ moments.”
Since the client’s brand managers were unsure if their emerging
knowledge of their online consumers was complete or
representative, SSG decided that the initial search should pull
data from as many social sources as possible. This would need
to include the biggest social media sites with a B2C focus, as
well as blogs, forums and other sites that delved into such
topics as recipes, fun food, social eating, etc. However, the
budget and turnaround time for this exploratory search
presented an additional challenge when considering an all-out
data gathering effort.

3. Case Study/ The Social Studies Group
Combining
Advanced Queries
with Random Sampling
The Solution/
The Results/
Budget-friendly
Data Collection
New Audience and New Market
Opportunities Uncovered
SSG had been using Brandwatch on behalf of other clients
and enjoyed particular success when performing broad
data collection combined with complex social analytics.
In this case, with the budget and time constrained to a
smaller search scope, SSG leveraged the automated rules
and random sampling capabilities within the Brandwatch
platform to shrink the data set as much as possible before
applying analytics to it.
When launching the search for relevant data across all social
sites, SSG used Brandwatch’s automated search rules to filter
out all brand-directed content – see Figure 1. At the same
time, the team hand-tagged themes they had created based
on their knowledge of the market. For example, they found
that ethnic foods are often mentioned with such themes as
Fig. 1
“group dining”, “quick and easy”, and “family night.”
SSG then got a clear picture of their data in a cost-efficient
manner by taking a random sampling of the Big Data results.
“It’s nice that Brandwatch bakes random sampling
functionality right into the platform,” said Scherer. “It enabled
us to run our advanced queries against a data set that was
statistically significant, yet less costly to manage and analyze.”
With a reasonable sample data set across all products under
investigation, the team applied Brandwatch filters to break out
results by gender and age. When identifiable, SSG even
tagged data for “Mom” and “Dad.” The team then
micro-segmented the results for each competing brand,
including breakdowns by individual product, usage variables
and additional demographics.
Actual search query used by SSG in their ethnic foods research
[FULL BRAND AND COMPETITVE SEARCH] NOT ((promo* NEAR/10 (sale OR
buy)) OR (raw:(save OR Save OR SAVE OR off OR Off OR OFF) NEAR/4
raw:("$" OR "%")) OR title:(coupon* OR voucher* OR discount* OR
weekly OR ad OR deal* OR matchup* OR albertsons OR kroger OR walmart
OR meijer OR freebie* OR ((promo* OR now) AND buy) OR sale OR save OR
click OR "credit card" OR creditcard OR purchase OR (free AND (ship
OR shipping)) OR (order AND (now OR online)) OR ((get OR save) AND
(off OR "up to"))) OR "buy buy buy"~20 OR "purchase purchase
purchase"~20 OR "order order order"~20 OR "credit credit credit"~20)
As the team filtered data, statistically significant results
began to show, yielding a true picture of the organic social
discussions taking place around specific competing products
and the people who care about them. This would inform the
marketing content and opportunity recommendations that
the SSG team would present to the brand managers at its
client company.
Historically, the company has focused its marketing
efforts on moms in their late twenties and thirties.
However, the social analytics revealed a substantial
online audience segment that has not been apparent in
the offline audience, with a sizable online conversation
dominated by unmarried people 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. “We’re talking about a very different set of content,
messages and strategies when targeting a 22-year-old
college guy versus a 38-year-old working mom.”
How was SSG’s client performing against competitors in the
social media space? That is client confidential, according to
SSG. But one thing is certain: The client has the evidence in
hand to pursue a new market opportunity that is heavily
engaged and displaying a penchant for their products,
thanks to the efforts of SSG and Brandwatch Analytics.

4. “You can imagine
the value that this
research has had
on the company’s
social media
marketing efforts”
About/
About The Social
Studies Group
The Social Studies Group
(www.socialstudiesgroup.com) is a
market research firm that
specializes in using social media
conversations and visual content to
help companies better understand
their customers, competitors,
markets and industries.
Custom service offerings include
netnography (virtual ethnography),
identifying and analyzing niche
communities and influencers;
comparative linguistic analyses of
social media used for organizational
and brand messaging; creating
“universes” that can be monitored and
analyzed over time; and in-depth social
media monitoring for knowledge
accumulation and analyses.
Wendy Scherer,
Managing Partner,
The Social Studies Group
About Brandwatch
Brandwatch is a leading provider of
social media monitoring and
analytics solutions. More than 600
global brands and agencies use
Brandwatch, relying on a broad
range of social coverage and highly
reliable, spam-free data to monitor
online conversations.
As a result, organizations can glean
insights around their brand interests,
conduct market research, predict
market trends, and more actively
engage influencers, customers and
prospects.
A global company, Brandwatch is
headquartered in Brighton, UK and
has offices in the United States and
Germany.
For more information, please visit
www.brandwatch.com
For more information, please visit
www.socialstudiesgroup.com/
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