Sometimes, one of the tasks of a marketing person at a company, is to propose partnerships between their brand and another. This offers the opportunity of joint advertising campaigns (like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s), cause-based alliances (like Target and UNICEF), or even bundling products together — like the streaming deals that include joint Hulu and Spotify subscriptions.
But finding those partners isn't always easy. And determining whether your customers would be thrilled with an alliance or offended by it should be top of mind.
What if there were a measure of brand partnership potential? A score that would tell you which other organizations would make for great alliances.
That's what Pankhuri Malhotra set out to invent. She and her coauthor have published a paper in The Journal of Marketing called Leveraging Cofollowership Patterns on Social Media to Identify Brand Alliance Opportunities.
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Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital on the traditional territories of the Snuneymuxw First Nation on Vancouver Island, Canada.
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[00:00:00] Hello there, it is Todd. I am still on vacation, but I am coming back in just two days on Thursday
[00:00:05] with a regular newscast-type episode. In the meantime though, please enjoy this deep dive
[00:00:11] interview episode.
[00:00:13] Sometimes one of the tasks of a marketing person at a brand is to propose partnerships
[00:00:18] between their brand and another brand. This offers the opportunity of joint advertising of a certain set of brands. And then we realized that, hey, there's a pattern here. So if we look into the co-followership patterns between certain groups of brand, some groups of brand have very strong co-interest patterns than the others. So we saw that and we were like, OK, there's definitely an opportunity here. And then we started collecting data.
[00:01:40] And what we found was we found these clusters of brands
[00:01:44] in these networks.
[00:01:45] So we were finding clusters of brands like Tesla connected
[00:01:48] to technology brand. And I think that range was very, very interesting to us because in some way it was telling us that, hey, there's a potential brand alliance opportunity that the managers may not be aware of. I see, so the practical application of this is a way to identify potential partnerships between brands based on them having similar Twitter followings.
[00:03:02] Do I have that right?
[00:03:03] Yes, yes, exactly, exactly.
[00:03:06] So that's the objective. Right. And your research, of course, you had access to big piles of data from Twitter that you put into a I presume a large database and it spat out these alliances or potential alliances.
[00:04:20] How does though an average digital marketer who is managing a small brand, for instance, can supply to managers. But right now, it's just code and the entire methodology. So it's sort of like if you've got a developer, these are all of the steps you would need to take to produce your own version of this. Yes. We're not there yet. We're not there yet. What is brand transcendence? I saw that mentioned in your paper. Oh, yeah. So in this article, we also come up
[00:05:40] with this new construct called brand transcendence, which
[00:05:43] is essentially defined in the context of brands
[00:05:46] belonging to plus 1. So if your values are closer to plus 1, that means that you're highly transcending into a new category. So for example, in our paper, I think we talk about the transcendence of car brands, and of course, we see brands like Mercedes,
[00:07:01] which have very strong transcendence
[00:07:04] into categories like technology? Oh, well, that's a very, very good question.
[00:08:24] So like we did not lot into the sports category,
[00:09:42] they were transcending a lot into the technology category. And we were like, okay, why is this tool which summarizes and clusters information automatically was a game changer. Find simplicity in your most complex projects with Miro. Your first three Miro boards are free when you sign up today at miro.com slash podcast. That's three free boards at M-I-R-O dot com slash podcast.
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[00:12:21] You've got one of two approaches.
[00:12:22] You either hire a developer or have a developer on staff,
[00:12:25] get access to Twitter's API, and then I mean, that's a good question. I feel like most of the companies, I think even smaller companies, they tend to have like marketing analysts or like data analysts that can like replicate this approach for the focal brand if they want to. But as of now, we don't have like a dashboard that brands can go and get a transcendence score.
[00:13:40] We don't have that right now.
[00:13:42] Yeah.
[00:13:42] So yeah, but that's something to consider.
[00:13:44] But if someone did have a developer, they could use that tool to get that.
[00:14:43] Could I ask you to reveal sort of how that formula works? Like, is it not, does it need to be that complicated?
[00:14:47] Could it not just be, you know, if there are 5% of the followers between both or, you know,
[00:14:54] that are common between two accounts, that's good.
[00:14:56] If it's 1%, it's bad.
[00:14:57] If it's 20%, that's amazing.
[00:14:59] Like, can it be that simple a formula or a calculation?
[00:15:02] Uh-huh, it could be.
[00:15:04] And actually, that's the first step what we do is for each of these brands, we compare their transcendence with the category average. Is your transcendence above what your category has in general or not? Or is it below? So that's why we have this negative and positive. So are you doing better than what the rest of the category is doing? Or are you doing lower than that?
[00:16:22] What surprised you the most about this research?
[00:16:24] I mean, some of the connections that we saw, I know you didn't study this, but do you have a hunch as to why? I do think it's like the brand concept that plays a part here. Like Tesla has always been a tech brand.
[00:17:40] They've promoted themselves like that compared to BMW, which is more of been a
[00:17:44] luxury brand. I think it has something to do with the way these brands have
[00:18:45] like for 2017 and 2020. So there is like a huge change that happens. Like for some brands, the transcendence goes up. For the other brands, the transcendence goes down. So for managers to
[00:18:50] know that, hey, connections are being formed between a new category, it can help them to
[00:18:56] identify potential co-branding opportunities. At the same time, if they get to know that critical
[00:19:01] associations to some categories, they are waning or they and you know, it would be there for people to use. I would love to. I mean, I would love to do that. I mean, that's the ultimate goal that, you know, we can come up with like this automated dashboard, which is dynamic, right? So like marketers can see, okay, this happened in January, my transcendence was so high with
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