The new brand health metric: Your SIM Score

This post was extracted from an article that appeared in the 2010 Outlook Report, which was recently released by Razorfish. It has been modified in part to make it more relevent for the Headlightblog.com audience.

On January 21st, all hell broke loose for Toyota. Its sticking accelerator pedal recall was the most challenging crisis the company had ever faced. In fact, a few industry insiders even wondered whether the mighty Toyota brand could survive, as six million cars were recalled worldwide. The crisis is going to change Toyota forever and it may take years to recover lost market share.

Around the same time, something rather dramatic happened to another company, but this time by its own choosing. For the first time in 23 years, PepsiCo decided not to advertise its flagship Pepsi brand on the Super Bowl. With Coca-Cola sponsoring the Winter Olympics, Pepsi launched a year-round “movement,” Refresh Everything, to
donate money to charities based on consumer voting. For the traditional marketer, this was indeed a bold and risky move.

What do Toyota and Pepsi have in common? They both are in business situations that demand new ways of measuring their brand health — measurements they haven’t had before. And that’s where the SIM Score — monitoring how a brand ranks in Social Influence Marketing — comes in.

Why the SIM Score matters beyond the social web
In July 2009 Razorfish introduced the SIM (Social Influence Marketing) Score and, at the time, felt that it was an accurate measure of how people perceive your brand in the social web in one moment of time. But since then, through our experiences in deploying the SIM Score and the even more explosive growth of social media (now it transcends all media and all platforms including mobile and gaming devices), we have come to believe that the SIM Score can and should be used as a broader measure of a brand’s health, not just as a measure of the strength of a brand in the social Web.

At the root of this thinking is the belief that we now live in a world where brands are shaped in real-time — more by how consumers talk about them versus anything the brands may do to market themselves or that we as an agency may help them do. This does not mean brand-building is dead. You shouldn’t fire your marketing department or your marketing agency. In fact, please don’t.

Nor does it mean brand equity has no meaning. But whether your brand is worth $83 billion (as Apple is, according to the fifth annual BrandZ Top 100 ranking by Millward Brown Optimor) or $10 billion cannot be revealed through annual, laborious and expensive brand tracking studies. You need to be tracking your SIM Score every day, every week and every month of every year. Brand health, measured using a SIM Score, is dynamic, because it constantly captures the consumer conversations of your brand relative to its competitors and determines whether they are helping or hurting your brand. The SIM Score tells you whether your brand is healthy, based on actions that you, your competitors or your customers are making every day.

With 50 billion tweets being published every 24 hours and millions and millions of consumer conversations taking place across social platforms and company websites via desktop computers, laptops and mobile devices, your brand health is a reflection of how consumers are talking about you in real-time everywhere.

But it also means that the SIM Score must be further optimized to address this new responsibility. Thus, watch for announcements as we work with additional analytic partners to refine the SIM Score methodology. We will be focusing on four areas:

1. better automated sentiment analysis
2. manual analysis of conversations via sampling
3. a sharper mechanism for applying influence weight-age
4. a tighter formula to give additional weight-age to positive mentions

However, in the meantime, let us show you how the SIM Score is already being used as a broader brand health metric by taking you back to the Toyota and Pepsi examples.

Toyota: SIM score numbers result in shocking short-term findings
When the Toyota recall crisis first broke, we uncovered something extremely surprising. In the first two weeks, the Toyota SIM Score, as illustrated at right, instead of dropping dramatically, actually increased. In some bizarre way, the crisis at first actually helped Toyota. (See related post.)

This happened for two reasons. First, as Edmunds.com later pointed out, the crisis made many prospective buyers believe they could get a bargain on a Toyota. They felt the cars would be fixed and there’d be a special discount on them because of the bad publicity. Second, at first it wasn’t clear how big a deal the crisis was and Toyota brand advocates came to the automaker’s defense. As a result, not just negative — but also neutral and positive — conversations about Toyota increased as the advocates spoke about their experiences with the cars and their safety — all helping to prop up the Toyota brand. In fact, Toyota saw a sharp increase in the number of fans on its Facebook page during this period too.

Without the SIM Score, one would never have uncovered these findings — findings that, as we’ll explain later in this article, warranted a unique response strategy. Did Toyota know this was happening? Did it respond to these findings? It is hard to tell from the outside. But one thing is certain; if we were in Toyota’s shoes at the time, we’d have discounted the cars just as the crisis broke (without waiting to see sales drop first) and would have actively started explaining the situation to the brand advocates of Toyota across the social web and especially on the brand’s Facebook page. Those brand advocates needed the right information quickly as they were becoming Toyota’s new sales force.

Unfortunately, the SIM Score uptick was short-term for Toyota. After those first two weeks, its score started dropping precipitously, partly because the advocates felt betrayed by the brand too — not to mention the fact that the full extent of the crisis slowly came to light.

Arguably, Toyota’s fate will be decided by whether it can stop its SIM Score from dropping the way it has been lately. In other words, Toyota needs to improve its brand health by finding ways to get consumers talking positively about the brand again and building trust with those brand advocates first and foremost. Discounting cars and running advertising campaigns touting their safety message will not be enough. They will need to focus on learning how they can build trust and figure out what it takes to inspire their advocates once again. In a sense, it is like a marriage that’s spiraling downward and needs counseling. We’ll be watching the SIM Score to see whether they are able to save the marriage with their advocates or not.

To read the rest of this article, go to the Razorfish 2010 Outlook Report. To read more articles by Shiv Singh, go to his blog, Going Social Now.

Related links:

• Razorfish 2010 Outlook Report
• The Toyota Way: A tragedy in three acts; Headlightblog.com, 3.17.10
• Toyota Files Voluntary Safety Recall Select Toyota Division Vehicles for Sticking Accelerator Pedal; Toyota USA Newsroom, 1.21.10
• Pepsi’s Refresh Everything project
• Razorfish Proposes Social Influence Score; ClickZ, 7.14.09
• BrandZ Top 100 ranking; Millward Brown Optimor, 4.28.10
• How Tweet It Is!; Library of Congress blog, 4.14.2010
• Could the Toyota recall crisis be helping the brand?; Headlightblog.com, 2.23.10
• Toyota USA fan page; Facebook

Image credit:
Toyota news release image appears courtesy of Toyota USA Newsroom