Using Discourse Analysis to Fuel Brand Strategies By Ray Poynter Presented at Merlien Institute's International Conference on Qualitative Consumer Research & Insights, 7 & 8 April 2011, Malta

1. Using Discourse Analysis to Fuel
Brand Strategies
Ray Poynter
The Future Place

2. Agenda
1. Brand and service discourses
2. Introduction to Discourse Analysis
3. Conversation Analysis
4. Discursive Psychology
5. Foucauldian Discourse Analysis
6. Pragmatic approaches
7. Lines of enquiry

3. Brand & Service Discourses
Actors
Organisation ↔ Customers
Customers ↔ Customers
Organisation ↔ Organisation
Outsiders ↔ Organisation, Customers, Outsiders

4. Brand & Service Discourses
Locations
Social media
Face-to-face
Telephone
Letters & emails
Survey responses
Media
Official reports

5. Introduction to Discourse Analysis
Family of approaches
Common themes
– Constitutive
– Contextual
– Dialogical / contested
– Discourse as an end not as a proxy

6. Three Illustrations
Turn taking
Footing
Language games

7. Traditions of Discourse Analysis
o Conversation analysis
o Discursive psychology
o Foucauldian
o Bakhtinian
o SocioLinguistics (inc. corpus research)
o ‘Critical’ – (inc CDP and CDA)
o Pragmatic extensions
Social media monitoring

8. Conversation Analysis
Harvey Sacks
Close examination of what people do when they
speak
4 examples
– Mental health calls
– Construction of delicate subject
– Why just saying No is not so easy
– A non-Western example

9. Mental Health Calls
Operator: Go ahead please
A: This is Mr Smith (B: Hello) of the Emergency
Psychiatric Center can I help you.
B: Hello?
A: Hello
B: I can’t hear you.
A: I see. Can you hear me now?
B: Barely. Where are you in the womb?
Havey Sacks, Lecture 1, 1995

10. Construction of Delicate Subject
1 C Let’s finish this HIV thing . . . Hhhhh So do you
2 understand about the antibodies.=
3 P =Yes I [do:.
4 C [Ri:ght. .hh So: .h how lo:ng is it since you
5 think (.) you might have been at ri:sk (.) of being
6 infected with HIV.
7 P Well uh- (0.4) uhuh to tell you the truth it’s only
8 I- like er Friday I had a phone call from a .h ex-
9 girlfriend- my boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend .hh to say
10 that uh:m (0.5) she’d been to the VD clinic (0.2)
11 and she thought that I should go:, {Continues}
Extract of counselling in interview (C=Counsellor, P=participant), from Siverman’s “Construction of ‘Delicate’ Objects in Counselling”, 1997

11. Why Just Saying No is not so Easy
Just Say No? The Use of Conversation Analysis in Developing a Feminist Perspective on Sexual Refusal, Celia Kitzinger, 1999

12. “
”
Korean Air flight 801

13. Discursive Psychology
What if neuroscientists are looking in the wrong
place?
Traditional Psychology
Discursive Psychology

14. What is thinking?
"the experience of thinking may be just the experience of saying” Wittgenstein, 1958, here ‘saying’ could be external or internal.

15. Attitudes
Traditional definition
– “an enduring organizational , motivational,
emotional, perceptual, and cognitive process with
respect to some aspect of an individual’s world”
But
– Anchoring?
– Framing?
– Contradictions?
Kretch & Crutchfield, 1948

16. Common sense & Contradictions
Many hands make light work
Knowledge is power
Look before you leap
Clothes make the man

17. Portmanteaux of ‘Attitudes’

18. Memory
Is memory is collective and negotiated?
Is it largely made of words?

19. Foucault & Foucauldian DA
Shifts the focus away from the individual to the
society
Post-structuralist and constructionist
What is said is governed by what society has
created and is creating
Meaning is created socially, not within the head or
even within individual conversations
– Epistemes/regimes of truth
– No simple top-down model of power
– Genealogies

20. Downloaded from http://assets.starbucks.com/assets/960b83c436e34f5ea4a1e5c7e6d5191e.jpg March 22 2011

21. Pragmatic DA
Several Names
– Social Media Monitoring
– Blog Mining
– Buzz monitoring
– Listening research
Usually little theory
– Model
– Epistemology
Is it a sort of ‘critical’ DA?

22. Social Media Research
Influence and the flow of memes
Turn taking within online discussions
Sentiment analysis → actions
CA for communities, what are the
analogies for pauses, repairs, repetitions?

23. Key Lines of Enquiry
• Tactical Issues
– Training off-shore call centres using CA
– Improving social media monitoring
– Customer interaction training, e.g. use of change of
footing
• Strategic Issues
– Rethinking customer satisfaction
– Brand positioning, friend, advisor, expert, …
– Advertising, creating speech acts, sayable ideas,
genealogies, …

24. Rethinking Cust Sat
Old school
– How can we turn people from unhappy customers
into happy customers?
Discourse Analysis model
– What has to happen to get people to stop using
phrases we associate with dissatisfaction and to
start using words and phrases that are ‘beneficial’?
1. What are the words/phrases we want them to use?
2. Are they sayable in our context?
3. Can we change what is sayable?
4. What other words/phrases might be good for us?

26. Screen grab from http://www.busabeats.com/ March 22 2011

27. Let’s talk

28. Presented at the International conference on
Qualitative Consumer Research & Insights
7 & 8 April 2011, Malta
For more information
Please visit: http://www.merlien.org