Social Leaderboard_Indian luxury car brands_31 August 2012

SOCIAL LEADERBOARD
LUXURY CAR BRANDS: 18th Aug – 31st Aug 2012

1:
INDEX:

 SOCIAL LEADERBOARD:
week-on-week performance of top 3 luxury car brands…

 SUMMARY
Sins of short term social gains…

 OBSERVATIONS

 RECONNECT GRADE:
o BMW

o AUDI

o MERCEDES-BENZ

 WHY COMMUNITIES?

 METHODOLOGY:
the research process…

 ABOUT SHACK

©Shack Companis. All Rights Reserved. Social Leaderboard: Luxury Car Brands

2:
SOCIAL LEADERBOARD

18th August – 31st August 2012

13,00,000

12,00,000
12.4%
5.1%
10.8% 21.9%
11,00,000
Community Size (members)

10,00,000 BMW (W7)
BMW (W8)
9,00,000
Audi (W7)

8,00,000 Audi (W8)
Merc (W7)
7,00,000 Merc (W8)
8.2%
6,00,000 7.0%

5,00,000
- 5.0% 10.0% 15.0% 20.0% 25.0%
Activity Grade

Share of members (%) Activity Grade (%)
Current 1w ago Current 1w ago

39.2% 39.5% 12.4% 21.9%

39.9% 39.5% 5.1% 10.8%

20.9% 21.1% 7.0% 8.2%


3:
SUMMARY
Sins Of Short Term Social Gains

Brands using digital as a communication medium are gradually

increasing their marketing investment in this medium. Audi, for

instance, will spend close to 30% of its marketing spend on the digital

medium in this financial year. However, any such incremental

expenditure has to be justified through tangible results for the brand.

Setting up KPIs and then mapping it to the marketing objectives of the

brand and the impact of the traditional communication media (print,

TV etc.) is a tough challenge faced by marketers and brand managers.

The challenge is made more difficult by the increasing number of

engagement avenues (Facebook, Twitter, Blog, Forums, Websites,

Groups etc.) for users and customised measures for each such

platform (fans, followers, discussions, pageviews, bounce rate etc.).

Therefore, it becomes hard to account for all these avenues and

reduce them into a data set that is indicative of the combined

effectiveness of all these platforms.

Flawed measurement begets flawed outcomes

Likes, followers, fans and page views are insufficient measures when they

are not broken down. Therefore, it is easy for brand managers to be

misguided by the media managers with the promise of a shiny new


4:
technology and the potential million users accessing that technology.

In this excitement, two key questions are ignored

1. What does the brand stand for?

2. Who does the brand serve?

Digital allows for customized relationships with the audience and a

considerably more comprehensive feedback loop. In chasing the new shiny

thing, marketers forget those two aspects.

As a result, we observe a big gap between the actual outcome and the

desired one.

Volume of users and engagement is an extremely weak ROI indicator. What

really matters is the quality of the audience and the engagement. We

are going to explore this statement in more detail with the help of two case

studies.


5:
Real Life Case I

For our first case, let us look at the estimated paid media
spends of a well-known car brand and their return on
investment for the campaign.

We do a quick calculation and observe that there is c. 84% correlation

between the visits and the level of investment. The regression

coefficient (r2) at 0.71 also substantiates the high dependence of the

total visits on the media spend.

This means that a very little % of the approx. 170 lakhs of investment

results in organic growth as word-of-mouth referrals - a worrying sign

for any brand.

Site visits highly dependant on media spend L
o
1600 80.0 y
a
66.7
l
Investment (lakhs)

1200 60.0
Page Views ('000)

t
38.3 y
800 40.0

18.5 L
400 23.0 20.0
11.9 a
5.0 d
8.6
0 0.0 d
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul e
r
PV (K) Invst (lakhs)

Significant %age of visits come from users at the bottom of the

customer loyalty chain


6:
This is what we mean by having a BROKEN web presence. If your

consumers genuinely cared about your brand, they would share their stories

on social platforms that, in turn, will generate organic traffic between

various brand-owned platforms

There are two main reasons for this

1. There is no emphasis by brands in attracting the right target audience

on the platform. As can be seen in most KPI reports, there is no

mention of the audience profile. Just faceless likes and pageviews.

2. Brands are self-obsessed and, therefore, never talk about what the

users actually care about.

Companies attempting to "position" themselves need to take a

position. Optimally, it should relate to something their market actually

cares about.


7:
Real Life Case II - BMW

Are a million fans any good when not even 1/1000th of
that number identify with what the brand stands for?

When BMW India recently reached a million Facebook fans,

Dr. Andreas Schaaf, President, BMW Group India, said,

“With the launch of BMW India page on Facebook, we have

focused on harnessing the power of social media to create

passionate brand engagement with the fans of BMW. Today, our Facebook

page interacts with an ever growing fan base and spreads Joy in the virtual

world. With Sachin Tendulkar as the One Millionth fan of BMW India on

Facebook, we are proud to have achieved yet another milestone in our social

media journey.”

We looked at the 2 key points mentioned in the above statement i.e.

 Passionate brand engagement among BMW fans

 Sachin Tendulkar as a brand evangelist and brand ambassador

We ran an analysis on the SHACKMATRIX™ to find out that actual numbers

do not validate the above points.

On an average, the average engagement frequency per fan was 1.3x

which means that each unique user only engaged with the brand

approximately once.


8:
We analysed the activity score for three key attributes common to Sachin

and BMW to see whether the celebrity endorsement affected the perception

of the users.

 Legacy -> Only 2 in every 500 fans associate brand BMW with this

attribute

 Power -> Only 4 in every 500 fans associate brand BMW with this

attribute

 Masterpiece -> Only 4 in every 500 fans associate brand BMW with

this attribute

Weak reconnect with key brand attributes
6
Engaged fans (per 500 fans)

4

4 engaged in 4 engaged in
2
every 500 fans every 500 fans
2 engaged in
every 500 fans
0
Legacy Power Masterpiece

Brand Attribute

Clearly the numbers tell a much different story than what has been claimed.

The primary reason for this difference between the perceived results and

actual results is that the industry still has an excessive reliance on gross

numbers that does not differentiate in value between customer A and


9:
customer B. If you can’t make that differentiation then it is only

natural that you can’t reap returns on your investment.

The current audience on
BMW’s Facebook page
can classified as rented
audience as opposed to
earned

Conclusion: Digital should be part of the core

and not an afterthought

A me-too strategy

Currently the tendency of most brands is to look at the digital space as

hygiene related afterthought – a me-too strategy. The problem with most

corporations is that in the absence of contests & events, they lack any plan

to keep their audience engaged. As a result, to their intended online

audiences, companies sound hollow, flat, and literally robotic. By speaking in

this language, they build walls to keep brand owners, loyalists and

enthusiasts at bay. Companies that don't realize their markets are now

networked person-to-person, getting smarter as a result and deeply joined

in conversation are missing their best opportunity.


10:
Tie it in with macro brand objectives

If digital has to make sense for brands as an important marketing medium,

then marketers need to incorporate it into their scheme of things when they

are charting out the overall marketing plan and connect its performance

with the macro brand goals of improving preference, brand association,

loyalty and perception.

A good example

Nowness.com is a great example of a brand using the digital medium to

engage with its relevant audience by finding the common ground between

the brand message and what the brand’s audience cares about. It is an

editorial web platform owned by LVMH that showcases an exclusive daily

premiere of the most inspiring stories influencing contemporary arts and

global lifestyle.


11:
OBSERVATIONS
 We see an opportunity for BMW to create a platform and leverage its

association with design, art & music that, on an average, appealed to 5

in every 100 community members. The reconnect with the attributes of

power and comfort associated with the new-3 series declined

considerably to 0.8% and 0.2% respectively. With the absence of any

contests and events, the activity score fell by almost 50% to end at

12.4%.

 Audi organised the Quattro drive event which saw Audi India brand

director Michael Perschke and members of the Super car club go on an

off-roading trip from Srinagar to Leh. The objective of the trip was to

showcase the power, agility and endurance of Audi's Quattro drive

technology in its Q-series range of cars. For the first week, 6 in every

100 brand followers connected with the off-roading theme while the

figure fell to 3 in every 100 in the second part of the week. However,

only 1 in every 100 engaged with content about Quattro technology.

 The Star Drive promotion was the highlight of the fortnight for

Mercedes-Benz with an online contest that promised the winner a drive

experience with Farhan Akhtar. The ShackMatrix showed that 4 in every

100 brand community members were fans of Farhan Akhtar but this

affinity did not translate into positive W-o-M for the brand. Overall,

Mercedes still finds itself trailing BMW and Audi even with the Sports

Tourer launch and the Ultimate touring trails initiative that was

designed to cater to a younger target group.


12:
RECONNECT GRADE
18th August – 24thAugust 2012

7.0%
6.1%
6.0%
Reconnect Grade
5.0%
4.0% 3.5% 3.4%
3.0%
2.0%
1.0% 0.4% 0.4%
0.04% -
-

8.0% 7.4%
6.3%
Reconnect Grade

6.0%
4.5%
4.0% 3.6%

1.7% 1.52%
2.0%
0.19%
-

5.0%

4.0%
Reconnect Grade

3.0% 2.6%
2.2%
2.0%
1.1%
1.0% 0.8% 0.7% 0.7%
0.4%
-


13:
RECONNECT GRADE
25th August – 31stAugust 2012

7.0%

Reconnect Grade 6.0% 5.5%

5.0%
4.0%
3.0%
2.0%
0.8% 0.8% 0.6%
1.0%
0.2% 0.02% -
-

8.0%
Reconnect Grade

6.0%
4.2%
4.0% 3.2%

2.0% 1.1%
0.7%
0.2% 0.21% 0.02%
-

5.0%
4.3% 4.3% 4.3%
4.0%
Reconnect Grade

3.0%
2.0%
2.0% 1.6%

1.0% 0.4% 0.3%
-


14:
About the Social Leaderboard
The Leaderboard updates the results derived from our internal tools and

methodologies on a bi-monthly basis, based on which we will bring out our

conclusions. Shack uses a proprietary grading mechanism

ShackMatrix™ to derive the Authority, Activity and Reconnect Grades,

which are key determinants of a brand’s social presence. Read more

about the Matrix and Grades.

Why Communities?
Create, Connect, Curate — The Shack Manifesto for Building

Communities

With the social online world becoming an important cog in a customer’s

relationship with a brand, there is a need for a common language that can

give meaning to the seemingly unstructured social data scattered across

platforms that represents a brand’s interaction with its core community.

As has happened with the introduction of any new communication medium,

practitioners are making the mistake of using the measuring stick (such as

views and reach) of traditional advertising media to gauge success in the

social web. For over a half a century, we have been thinking about


15:
marketing in terms of campaigns with a very clear beginning, middle and an

end. But the online digital world is currently in the process of being rebuilt

around people and what we know as the social web, in a few years, would

simply be the web.

Therefore, long term success for brands depends on leveraging these

human relationships to create a strong sense of community around

products, concepts and values that are dearest to the brands.

How we measure effectiveness in Online Communities?

The ShackMatrix™ is a proprietary framework that enables assessment of a

brand’s digital footprint in a holistic way. It is a common language designed to

understand the value of a brand’s online efforts expressed through 5 grades that

combine the understanding of traditional branding with the dynamics of a social

online world.

 Presence Grade: Measures how well is the brand represented on digital

platforms.

 Authority Grade: Measures how authoritative is a brand’s owned-

channels for information on the brand and its products.

 TG Grade: Measures the percentage of the desired target group mix

active on the brand’s owned platforms.

 Activity Grade: Measures the level of activity on existing channels.

 Re-Connect Grade: Measures the extent to which community members

connect and identify the brand with the attributes desired by it.


16:
Data Methodology
We take online performance as a holistic concept. While size of the brand’s

community and level of activity are important factors, the profile of the TG,

the authority of the brand’s platforms and its recall are also equally

important ingredients.

In calculating the ShackMatrix™, we assign weights to the different metrics

on individual platforms in order to combine them into a single comparable

grade that is relevant to the digital objectives of the brand.

The weights are decided based on the relative effectiveness of the platform

to a brand’s community as well as the brand’s own digital goals.

Data Validity and Integrity

We source the data from the brand’s official digital properties. Our scope is

restricted by the data made available through the APIs of the social

platforms we cover.

The coverage of data in this report is restricted to Facebook and Twitter.

More detailed and granular metric studies are done for clients on a project

basis.


17:
About Shack
Shack is a digital marketing company which brings together brands and their

customers in carefully crafted, wholesome communities, providing exceptional

experiences for all.

We leverage communities for brands:

In order to create and maintain buzz around your brand you need your target

audience to form lasting relationships with your brand.

We build platforms for the communities:

Being a one-stop solution for all your community building and web-based marketing

needs, we craft comprehensive campaigns, based on careful strategy, encompassing

an entire digital eco-system.

We develop content for the platforms:

Along with creating engagement tools both online and off-line we also encourage and

facilitate generation of remarkably effective and compelling content, in a methodical

manner by our own team, and in a random manner, by your community members.

We measure the impact on the brand:

You need to monitor the impact that the campaign has on your brand. This impact is

not something hypothetical, it is hard, tangible, three-dimensional data that not only

tells you where you presently stand, but also tells you where you need to go and

what path you need to follow with the help of Shack’s proprietary Digital Ecosystem

Management tool. Website || Blog || Twitter


Social Leaderboard_Indian luxury car brands_31 August 2012

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