What message about your product is going to work best to move a prospect along the path to purchase? For everyone working on marketing campaigns, that’s always a tough but essential question to answer. Whatever you’re trying to accomplish—create awareness, change perception, prompt consideration—you want to base your campaign on the message that’s going to connect with consumers. Social analytics can help you find it. By providing insight into consumers’ opinions, emotions and behaviors, social analytics can help you craft messages that show consumers you understand them. From there, it’s a shorter step to convincing them that you also understand their needs, and that your product meets them. This paper takes the men’s shaving and grooming category as an example, and shows how companies in that vertical could use a social analytics solution to analyze the online conversation, find insights, and craft messages that drive successful campaigns.

1. Sharpen Campaign
Messaging With
Social Insights

2. Sharpen Campaign Messaging With Social Insights 2
Finding Campaign Messages That Work
What message about your product is going to work best to move a prospect along the path
to purchase? For everyone working on marketing campaigns, that’s always a tough but essential
question to answer. Whatever you’re trying to accomplish—create awareness, change perception,
prompt consideration—you want to base your campaign on the message that’s going to connect
with consumers.
Social analytics can help you find it. By providing insight into consumers’ opinions, emotions and
behaviors, social analytics can help you craft messages that show consumers you understand them.
From there, it’s a shorter step to convincing them that you also understand their needs, and that your
product meets them.
This paper takes the men’s shaving and grooming category as an example, and shows how companies
in that vertical could use a social analytics solution to analyze the online conversation, find insights,
and craft messages that drive successful campaigns. Although this may not be your vertical, you can
extrapolate from our example and envision how you could apply the same process to your business
and sharpen your campaign messaging.
A Process for Crafting Powerful Messages
Companies in the men’s shaving and grooming category, including Gillette and Schick, need to find
campaign messages that help them retain existing customers and acquire new ones. They can use
the following process built on social analytics to do that:
• Step 1: Identify key assumptions about consumer attitudes
• Step 2: Formulate questions that test those assumptions
• Step 3: Analyze the online conversation to get answers
• Step 4: Glean insights from those answers
• Step 5: Use the insights to shape campaign messaging
Let’s see how a company in this market might go about using
that process to sharpen their campaign messaging.

3. Sharpen Campaign Messaging With Social Insights 3
State of the Category: Men’s Shaving and Grooming
First, a quick overview of the state of the category.
Men’s shaving and grooming has changed rapidly in recent years because of new trends in facial
hair, eCommerce and culture. Men use razors to get a clean shave, of course, but also to trim facial
hair and shave off a beard or moustache. Beards and moustaches, however, are currently popular,
which translates into slower sales for razors. In fact, P&G recently cited an overall drop in the incidence
of facial shaving and Schick reported close to a 10 percent decline in razor sales for 2013.
Challenging the traditional category leaders, which are Gillette and Schick, are subscription-based
eCommerce startups like Dollar Shave Club and Harry’s. Dollar Shave Club’s value proposition is
expressed by their slogan, “Shave Time, Shave Money.” Harry’s also has a value proposition aimed at
disrupting the marketplace with a premium razor made more convenient, affordable and personalized
to the consumer.
Step 1: Identify Key Assumptions
Marketers can use social analytics to uncover emotions, behaviors and underlying sentiment drivers
affecting shaving purchase behavior for the entire category or an individual brand. Once marketers
understand consumer attitudes, they can glean insights that lead to messages they can use at key
points along the path to purchase.
For example, some assumptions marketers might make are:
• The popularity of beards reduces razor sales.
• Males bond over their facial hair.
• Subscription-based companies are using price and convenience to gain market share.
• There’s a rising trend in male shaving below the neck.
We can test each assumption with questions
to find out if it’s true or not, and in the process
gain insight into the consumer mindset regarding
men’s shaving and grooming.

4. Sharpen Campaign Messaging With Social Insights 4
Step 2: Formulate Questions
Starting from the assumptions, marketers can figure out specific questions they want to research. Here
are examples of a question for each assumption.
• The popularity of beards reduces razor sales.
Is there also a seasonality for growing facial hair?
• Males bond over their facial hair.
Do women like facial hair on men?
• Subscription-based companies are using price and convenience to gain market share.
Is there more positive sentiment for Dollar Shave Club than Schick and Gillette?
• There’s a rising trend in male shaving below the neck.
Is it becoming acceptable to talk about “manscaping”?

5. Sharpen Campaign Messaging With Social Insights 5
Step 3: Analyze the Online Conversation—Word Clouds
With social analytics, marketers can take a sizeable
conversation and pull it apart quickly to zero in on areas of
interest as they relate to a broader topic. These word clouds,
for example, highlight key terms in the discussion and alert
researchers to what topics are most discussed and possibly
most important to consumers.

6. Sharpen Campaign Messaging With Social Insights 6
Analyze the Online Conversation for Emotions and Behaviors
After looking at the topic “facial hair,” researchers can analyze another topic, “the act of shaving.”
By focusing in on shaving versus types of facial hair, they can gain a different perspective on the
conversation surrounding the category. These charts, for example, break down positive and negative
behaviors, emotions, and likes and dislikes regarding shaving.

7. Sharpen Campaign Messaging With Social Insights 7
Analyze the Online Conversation with Sentiment
and Gender Filters
Marketers and analysts also have the flexibility to see the category from different perspectives
by, for example, applying sentiment and gender filters. They can look for the positive and negative
conversations around shaving different body areas and see if those conversations differ between men
and women.
Step 4: Find Insights—Insight #1
Let’s look at the insights we can find related to our first two assumptions.
To test our first assumption, we asked if growing facial hair is more or less popular at certain seasons
of the year, and our analysis found that it is.

8. Sharpen Campaign Messaging With Social Insights 8
Whether consumers are commenting on No Shave November, winter beards, Decem-beards or
sweaty summers, it’s clear that facial hair is more popular at some times of the year than at others.
One thing remains true throughout the seasons: Most men notice an itchy period when they start
growing a beard that can make them want to shave it off.
INSIGHT FOR
MARKETERS
Make note of the
seasonality and
plan your media
and messaging
accordingly for
increased relevance
and impact.

9. Sharpen Campaign Messaging With Social Insights 9
Insight #2—Both Sexes Appreciate a Quality Beard
We wondered if women like facial hair on men, and it turns out they do.
There’s a lot of respect for “glorious” and “epic” beards among men, and there are quite a few
women interested in rugged, handsome fellows. Forums, blogs and Tumblr pages of “beard porn” are
frequented by men and women alike.
INSIGHT FOR
MARKETERS
Shaving is not just about facial hair removal—both sexes like
a quality beard. Helping people achieve their desired look
and style can sell more razors.

10. Sharpen Campaign Messaging With Social Insights 10
Step 5: Use Insights To Sharpen Campaign Messaging
The insights gleaned via social analytics can prove useful to shaving companies in many ways. They
can spark product innovation, surface ideas for improving customer care, influence strategies for
product launches and more. But we’re interested here in how they can be used to develop more
effective campaign messages.
Brands and agencies can include the insights in creative briefs for brand managers, digital marketers,
social media managers, art directors, copywriters, media planners and everyone associated with
marketing campaigns. Doing so gives them a solid, research-based foundation for creative concepts.
By essentially conducting research with the world’s largest focus group—the social web—marketing
directors can listen directly and in real time to the voice of the consumer in conversations unbiased
by research methods. They can use social analytics to tease out and understand the opinions,
emotions and behaviors expressed there. That process produces insights like those discussed in this
paper. Basing campaigns on such insights—as opposed to using untested assumptions, outdated
research, or research based on small samples—delivers higher quality insights, which can be turned
into more-impactful messages. Those messages lead to better creative concepts, which spell greater
success in reaching the objectives for your marketing campaigns.
Key Takeaways
A social analytics solution can help you sharpen your campaign messaging by:
• Delivering the entire social web as a focus group so you get the highest possible
volume of responses and the widest range of opinions.
• Enabling you to listen to and understand what people are saying across the social
web about your category, brand, products, competitors and existing campaigns.
• Giving you powerful capabilities to analyze the online conversation so you can
understand the drivers behind positive or negative sentiment—emotions, opinions
and behaviors.
• Highlighting the most important category, brand and product perceptions so you
can craft messages that give your campaigns the best chance to drive such desired
actions as creating awareness, prompting consideration, promoting purchase, and
fostering loyalty.

11. ©2014 NetBase Solutions, Inc.
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