User generated content (UGC) is every marketer’s dream, as a creative customer base can be invaluable in spreading a brand’s message and surveys have shown that 93% of consumers find UGC helpful when making a buying decision.
For brands, that’s a strong case for leveraging the power of UGC.
But how should they go about finding this content? Combing through thousands upon thousands of posts manually is not an option. And even with the help of a social listening solution, many tools quickly reach their limits when users don’t mention the brand in text.
Enter Talkwalker image recognition.
With the powerful technology behind our visual listening engine, brands have a simple-query solution that ensures they will no longer miss out on visual content.
To give you an idea of the kind of stories that brands are missing every day (and how they can profit from them), we’ve looked at how KitKat’s logo has been shared online. Here’s what we discovered.
The Story Behind the Green Kitkats
When we first started our research for this blog, we stumbled upon a lot of green in KitKat’s image stream.
Curious, we took a closer look and discovered that there’s a special green tea flavour that’s only sold in Japan.
People on Instagram really seemed to love it, and the snack became popular on Twitter as well. Looking at the text in posts, in many cases the KitKats were quirky souvenirs friends and family had sent from Japan. None of these users actually mentioned KitKat in their posts, however.
While that’s already nice to know for KitKat, we dug a little deeper. Cross-referencing image data with location or demographic information helps brands find the insights they need to take their product strategy to the next level. In this case, we found out that most of the posts about this didn’t actually come from Japan and that more men were posting about it than women.
The top posts featuring green KitKats came from outside of Japan, mainly from the U.S., the UK and France.
4 ways KitKat can use these insights to adapt product/marketing strategies
- Place the product in strategic travel locations with special marketing materials to tap the tourism market: airports, hotels
- Explore partnership opportunities with airlines and cruise liners to include the flavour in their snack offers
- Develop products using local flavors (and colors) to entice tourists in other regions
- Take the leap and bring the product to other markets outside Japan
But this information is not just helpful to brands themselves. KitKat’s competitors will find that with this data at their fingertips, they can swoop in and steal KitKat’s thunder… Purple Twix, anyone?
The Talkwalker image recognition database includes 30,000 brands already, which means that in-depth research intothings your competitors don’t even know about their own brands is easily possible.
Discover more image recognition use cases
Take your monitoring to the next level
The web has become visual and users are sharing more images than ever before. Trends like visual storytelling, the popularity of infographics and the meteoric rise of platforms such as Snapchat or Instagram all underline the fact thatvisuals are here, and they’re here to stay.
For brands themselves it’s vital to know how users interact with their logos as there are many ways in which to profit from analysing this data. Talkwalker image recognition takes social listening to the next step and adds a whole new dimension to what brands can learn from online conversations.
