What We Talk About When We Talk About Brands

One day last June, a 29-year-old graduate student in South Dakota had more than 21 conversations as she scurried through her day. She discussed Donald Trump’s wealth with her boyfriend and suggested to her best friend that she should audition for “The Apprentice.” Old Navy clothes, she complained, were cut rather large. And during a phone conversation, she told her mother she would really like her to buy more Crystal Light rather than Coke. During the course of this daily chatter, the woman discussed 17 brands.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Brands – New York Times (via Pierce Mattie PR)

The power of word of mouth recommendations shouldn’t be underestimated, and the Keller Fay Group now does hundreds of interviews a day, and gets respondents to complete diaries of their brand conversations.

While there’s an element of Big Brother about the results — In May, a 45-year-old woman in Pennsylvania started talking with a co-worker about Kraft and ended up discussing “the pros and cons of genetically modified foods and the lack of accountability of these companies to educate the consumers of our country.” — there’s no doubt that this sort of data would be incredibly valuable to brand owners.

Of course, as with all reputational issues, there’s the danger that things might not go quite so well. First Direct, which advertises itself as the ‘UK’s most recommended bank’, and which has long relied primarily on word of mouth marketing, recently introduced fees for dormant or lower income (and therefore less profitable) customers.

Will there be a backlash against First Direct? The evidence so far is inconclusive, and while there’s a fair amount of griping and numerous strategies for avoiding the charges altogether, it’ll be interesting to see whether the people who were recommending the bank in the first place will continue to do so.

More interestingly, how are First Direct tracking the public reaction?