Do Beliebers love Weetabix? Identifying celebrity fans affiliated to brands

For global brands and leading talent agencies, identifying synergies between brands and celebrities is an invaluable form of insight. By delving into social data, it's possible to map out different audience groups and gather affiliated brand intelligence - this data can then act as foundations for any future brand and celebrity collaborations.

For example: are FKA Twigs fans more likely to endorse Adidas or Puma - or are they actually more likely to be brand ambassadors for Louis Vuitton? Or, what if all those Beliebers out there just happen to be massive fans of Weetabix as well? One more: was Dior's recent decision to pick pop-powerhouse Rihanna a right move to attract a younger audience?

High profile and impactful decisions like these don't have to be as controversial as they sometimes might seem - it's exactly where social data can help. At Pulsar, we specialise in audience intelligence, and we help brands understand their audiences' demographics, ensuring their voice can be heard by the right audience. Using Pulsar’s capabilities, we can identify the brands that celebrity fans most associate with. A celebrity’s applicability to a brand is extremely important for effective endorsement, with brand ambassadors needing to come across as a genuine customer, which is why understanding organic association is key.

Pulsar’s unique audience search functionality takes keyword analysis one step further - allowing us to delve deeper into a brand or celebrity's audiences. An example of how we can do this is to track the Twitter followers of Beyonce - providing us with a holistic view of her fan following. Using our advanced filtering system, we can then sift through the results and identify brands who share an affinity. Any mentions of these brands will be highlighted, which will allow us to go deeper into the dataset and research the topics of conversation, sentiment and content.

We can view this data in a number of ways,  such as a keyword bundle (see below), which shows us the semantic links between topics.

Each colour within the keyword bundle corresponds to a topic and the strands connect to other topics that share a semantic link. This is type of visualisation is key because it tells us that when fans talk about X they also talk about Y & Z. This could be connecting a brand to an activity or a sentiment, e.g. Pepsi & Love or Pepsi & BBQ.

Using Pulsar in this way allows the querying of online focus groups in a non-obtrusive way. This organic consumer insight can then be used to uncover affinities between audience groups and brands helping identify the most effective ambassadors for your brand, or potential partnerships for joint commercial opportunity.

We work with a number of leading brands, advertising agencies and entertainment industry specialists who all use Pulsar in this way to discover actionable insights. If you want to back up your next commercial partnership or sponsorship deal with research rather than a hunch, we'd love to hear from you: [email protected].