The “Brand” of a company carries a significant worth.

Brand Equity is what defines this worth and is defined as

A value premium that a company generates from a product with a recognizable name, when compared to a generic equivalent

This value for all kinds of brands is significant and as an example, in 2015, the Apple brand was valued at $247 Billion by WPP.

In an online world, “Brand Monitoring” is essential and companies that do NOT invest in any form of Brand Monitoring are bound to face serious negative consequences as a result.

How to do Brand Monitoring right

There are various ways companies can start Brand Monitoring if they aren’t doing it already and to significantly enhance the value they derive from it if they have already started to do something.

Off the shelf solutions

These solutions are generic that collect a limited amount of data and resell that to everyone for a fee. You get the same data (that cannot be customized) that your competitor gets. The value that you derive from such solutions is minimal and primarily satiates your desire to have a solution in place but won’t provide you any competitive advantage.

Off the shelf products primarily deal with text based data and with the proliferation of cameras in every smartphone, the newer content being generated is usually in video or image based.

Most companies start with off the shelf solutions and soon realize that there is an extremely limited amount of value that can be derived from such cookie cutter and inflexible solutions.

Custom solutions

A solution built just for you, with your needs and requirements in mind – completely configurable to your changing needs – that is what we promise.

All this is usually associated with a high cost and lengthy timelines, but Parse’s goal is to build this solution for you for a very affordable cost and within weeks. While the costs may be higher than the “off the shelf solutions”, the relative value you derive for your dollars will be significantly and proportionally higher. The time-to-market is much faster than self-built solutions because we have a library of pre-built components that we can easily assemble to build a custom solution instead of starting totally from scratch.

Parse has assisted large companies with the definition, refining and building of these custom solutions and we can help you too.

Artificial Intelligence to the rescue

We can ingest a massive amount of online content – text, video, images etc and process it using the latest Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques and derive meaningful insights and identify issues impacting a Brand using these techniques. You need these AI, Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computer Vision based technologies to process the content that is produced at an incredible rate online. Humans cannot possibly keep up with these volumes so if your current processes, solutions or providers rely on humans, it is time for a change.

Our custom solutions aid human curators in processing massive volumes of data and focus on a smaller and addressable amount of data.

Where to find data for Brand Monitoring

There are the obvious sources of “Brand Monitoring” which people immediately associate with negative brand mentions and the biggest sources are “Social Media”.

However, there are a lot of sources online that have a subtle and maybe not so visible impact on a Brand on a daily basis. Some of these sources are:

• eCommerce sites such as Amazon or eBay (lower price, higher ratings and position of competing products)
• Online forums (What is said about your brand)
• Review sites such as Yelp or TripAdvisor or many other niche sites (What brand do people recommend)
• Self review areas in sites such as Amazon where consumers can review products using Video or Image based content
• Social Media such as Twitter, Facebook etc (Are they talking about you and to you?)
• Niche websites dedicated to a group (Specialized niche sites have an outsized impact on consumer decision making)
• Data Aggregation sites such as Expedia and other travel sites (Reviews and suggestions for improvement)
• Online influencers and their followers (What do they say about your Brand or about your competitors brands)
• News – Global and Local news sites and newspapers publish pieces that usually portray negative issues about a Brand to attract eyeballs
• Television – Investigative stories about a Brand and its quality or harm to consumers are usually pretty popular segments on local television

Negative effects of not focusing on Brand Monitoring

Some of these negative consequences of not investing in any form of Brand Monitoring are listed below:

• Dilution of the Brand Equity
• Harm to the Brand and the Company name
• Significant loss of sales due to negativity associated with a Brand
• Loss of market share due to subtle but effective pricing by competing brands that DO monitor their brands
• Loss of market share due to the positioning of the brand – physically or virtually with respect to competing brands
• Long term decline in Brand Equity and perception leading to stagnant growth and the eventual demise of a company

We focus on “Online Brand Monitoring” and use our amazing technologies to help companies monitor their Brand online.

Web scraping techniques have been and continue to be effectively deployed to monitor and collect information online and present the data in a relatively instant manner to enable micro or macro level decision making by company executives.

If you are a company executive and haven’t thought about using such services, you are falling behind your competitors already. They have been using these techniques for a while or have recently approached companies such as Parse to help build their online Brand Monitoring solution.

Call us and pick our brains for free – there is nothing you have to lose. Become a hero at your company by proposing this investment to the head of marketing, sales, strategy, brand or walk right into the CEO’s office and walk out with a promotion !