Category: Most innovative use of measurement in a digital campaign

Client/Entering Company: Kantar Media

Campaign title: Using a constructive guideline to optimize company digital performance for Goodyear Tire Company

Company Name: Goodyear

Summary

After Goodyear suffered massive negative discussions online, Kantar Media set up a structured matrix of measurement along with actionable recommendations to help the brand track and improve its online performance.

The collaboration between Goodyear and Kantar Media was transparent and fast to minimize losing time and to enable the brand to react instantly to the constantly shifting Chinese social media landscape, ultimately changing online user perception regarding the Goodyear brand and its products.

Objective/Brief

In 2015, complaints around flaking and chipping of Goodyear tires started to surface online. Massive negative media coverage and online discussions resulted in a bad reputation for Goodyear in the Chinese online automotive community. Goodyear was eager to change people’s perceptions towards their products and conducted a series of online campaigns to turn the tables.

Under these circumstances, Kantar Media’s Digital Impact Score came into use to track Goodyear’s performance on digital platforms. The Digital Impact Score (DIS) is an on-going tracking KPI to help client personnel learn about the overall situation of their brand’s digital marketing performance across Social, Search and Website. The DIS also tracks the digital performance of Goodyear’s competitors (Michelin, Continental and Bridgestone) to learn from their successes and downfalls.

Strategy

Kantar Media and Goodyear conducted a number of formal and informal discussions regarding the design of the DIS. Eventually, we identified several proper quantitative indicators to serve as the client’s main objectives.

On social platforms:

  1. To identify the popularity of the Goodyear brand by monitoring brand buzz volume.
  2. To evaluate the performance of the Goodyear campaign and the degree of participation of netizens by calculating the number of interactions between brand and online users.
  3. To appraise Goodyear’s word of mouth standing online by analyzing Internet use sentiments regarding the brand per se and its product. On search engines:
  4. To identify brand awareness in general by tracking organic search results. On the Goodyear website:
  5. To optimize the website interface and offer a more convenient viewing experience for users by monitoring bounce rate and average time spent on website.

We agreed that the reports should not only track indicators, but recommend specific actions. These recommendations should be transparent to executive agencies and their feasibility was validated with agencies as a team to ensure fast and informed collaboration. We scheduled monthly meetings and regular calls from the outset to ensure that the success of the implemented actions was monitored on an ongoing basis.

Execution/Implementation

1. Project Setup
The strategy that Kantar Media team and client worked together gave clear guidance on how to set up the project.

On social platforms:

  1. We set up data collection system which monitored almost all platforms where Internet users actively discuss cars and car accessories. The solid database meant we could collect more accurate brand buzz volume and gave us the impetus to conduct more comprehensive research.
  2. In order to give a reliable suggestion, we used both qualitative and quantitative methods to evaluate the performance of brands’ campaigns. We developed quantitative matrix to identify the performance of each influencers brands has collaborated with and key indicators to measure the outcome of the campaign. We also collected and analysed the campaign participant’s verbatim record to identify room for improvement.
  3. We updated the lexicon and used manual sampling to ensure we obtained more accurate and reliable data to evaluate Goodyear’s share of word of mouth online. And, since Goodyear place greater emphasis on making people like the brand, rather than having overall awareness of it, we gave this section greater weight.

On search engines:

  1. Organic search results were tracked through the Baidu Index, China’s largest search engine. It is a tool similar to Google Trend, and can illustrate the degree of popularity of a word as well as identify search patterns on Baidu over a period of time.

On the Goodyear Website:

  1. Instead of focusing on increasing visits to its official website, to track PV and UV, Goodyear concentrated on improving user experiences. So, bounce rate and average time spent were chosen as key indicators to evaluate user preferences.
    The Kantar Media team ensured the transparency of the measurement process, making the methodology available to Goodyear as well as its executive agencies.

2. Reports
Reports were delivered in the form of monthly overviews and quarterly in-depth reports. These reports included routine tracking of the score, campaign highlights for Goodyear and its competitors as well as alarm setting for potential crises, such as the F&C crisis in 2015.

Monthly face-to-face meetings were conducted with Goodyear and its executive agencies to evaluate performance, present future plans and set up goals for the next stage.

Reports were offered and routinely updated to provide Goodyear with insights and suggestions to help them conduct more effective social campaigns, track competitors’ strategy and activity. Last but not least, the clear structure of the DIS helped Goodyear identify its weaknesses and opportunities. The independent structure enabled Goodyear to find the reason behind each improvement in performance and to identify who, or which agencies, had contributed the most.

Effectiveness of Assignment

3. Insight and Advice
Over the past year, Kantar Media offered countless valuable suggestions to help Goodyear raise its awareness, perfect its word of mouth among internet users and implement performable actions to further improve its digital performance:

Case 1: Incentive free tire trial campaign
Initially, we analysed the behaviour of internet users who frequently share their experience of tire using on forums. We advised Goodyear to initiate a campaign with free trial opportunities and to encourage users to share their feedback. The subjective initiative of internet users was surprisingly strong and their reviews were much more popular than those of professional reviewers. This campaign successfully helped Goodyear improve the word of mouth of its products: Efficient Grip Performance.

Case 2: Goodyear Online Marathon Campaign
For a tire brand, it is never an easy job to integrate brand image into people’s daily lives. Inspired by competitor activity (e.g. Michelin’s collaboration with Babolat and Continental’s collaboration with Adidas), we suggested running as a good opportunity to leverage running, given its overall popularity among Chinese.
After adopting our suggestion, Goodyear collaborated with Running APP and sponsored the Beijing Online Marathon. This campaign achieved huge success as over 40k applicants signed up.

Case 3: Competitor study to deal with online boycotts and complaints
In 2016, Bridgestone suffered from its crack issue. Regarding this quality issue, forum users posted a large number of complaints, informed the National quality test center and contacted the media to defend their legal rights. Bridgestone’s crack issue largely damaged its word of mouth performance among its consumers. In response, Bridgestone conducted a series of actions to control the spread of negative emotion online and helped its word of mouth rebound.

In the end, our study helped Goodyear identify and track potential opportunities, threats as well as solutions. We offered Goodyear constructive recommendations to help it improve its performance on digital platforms.

Highlights

Our structured measurement method ensured client executive actions performed accurately. Different weighted indicators precisely illustrate the client’s focus, instead of fancy numbers. Changing people’s perception about the brand was our primary objective throughout the measurement campaign.

It is now vital for brands to react and respond accurately on social platforms. Thus frequent communication and transparent strategy and methodology ensured a fast and informed collaboration between Kantar Media, Goodyear and its executive agencies.

Competitor research was equally important: the actions of Goodyear’s competitors that we tracked on social platform offered not only models to learn from but also pointed out mistakes to avoid at all costs.

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