Audience Intelligence for Crisis Comms: Tracking Brand Backlash and Boycotts in Real Time
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Pulsar Power Up: Real world case study - boycotting brands
In today’s political and cultural climate, brand reputation is always at risk of becoming headline news. The Coca-Cola boycotts in early 2025 are a case in point. In this Power Up session, the Pulsar team explored how audience intelligence reveals not only why people are boycotting, but also who is driving those conversations, where they’re taking place, and which issues are gaining momentum.
In this webinar, Ed Bee demonstrated how real-world data, visualised and interpreted using Pulsar TRAC and our virality and visibility metrics, helped make sense of a volatile reputational moment.
Highly volatile, politically charged
Between January and May 2025, the volume of conversation about Coca-Cola fluctuated sharply, spiking with political news events. Moments like Trump receiving a commemorative Diet Coke and controversy over Coca-Cola allegedly paying influencers to oppose a food stamp soda ban, fuelled peaks in engagement.
Cutting through the noise: which boycott stories really matter?
Using Pulsar’s analytic tools, we surfaced ten distinct reasons for boycotting Coca-Cola. Outside of BDS-backed boycotting, audiences had other reasons for staying away from the brand - from plastic pollution and labour practices to tax avoidance, price hikes, and geopolitical ties. But not all reasons held equal weight.
By charting visibility per mention against sentiment, we could distinguish low-engagement topics from high-impact risks. The Latino Freeze Movement boycotting over Coca-Cola's ties with Donald Trump and the BDS-backed Palestine boycotts due to Coca-Cola's ties with Israel emerged as the most pressing reputation threats, with high visibility and sharply negative sentiment. Others, like food tokens or price complaints, had low traction despite volume.
Decoding vertical video with voice-to-text (VTT)
A significant amount of boycott content lived on TikTok, but relying on captions alone doesn’t tell the full story. That’s where Pulsar’s voice-to-text (VTT) technology gives a huge advantage. VTT automatically transcribes spoken content from videos, allowing researchers to analyse not just what’s written in captions, but what’s actually said - often revealing a much more emotional, persuasive, and politically nuanced message.
Finding what’s heating up vs what’s cooling down
To understand what might become the next reputational risk, the team used Pulsar’s Virality Matrix. This four-dimensional model evaluates conversation by growth rate, peak velocity, volatility, and lifespan. Plotting each boycott theme against these metrics showed:
- The Latino Freeze Movement, while currently dominant, was beginning to cool.
- The Israel-Palestine conversation had plateaued at high volume, with little new growth.
- Price emerged as a sleeper issue: steady, growing, and likely to persist.
This analysis helps brands act fast on new risks while understanding which issues are likely to fade.
Audience segmentation: who’s driving the boycott?
Audience intelligence brings clarity to who’s behind the noise. Using Pulsar’s audience mapping, the team found seven core communities driving Coca-Cola boycott discussions: Pro-Palestine activists, US Democrats, Conservatives, UK Socialists, Millennials, Mexican left-wing groups, and vegan activists.
The Pro-Palestine audience dominated volume, but other communities focused on distinct issues. US Democrats and Conservatives, for example, were more concerned with the Latino Freeze narrative and political symbolism.
Analysing audience visibility versus impressions revealed something important: Pro-Palestine conversations, while high-volume, stayed mostly within their own networks. Conservative-led conversation, however, travelled further, reaching broader audiences with fewer posts.
Why this matters for brand comms
Knowing which audience is driving which conversation helps brands plan nuanced responses. Some themes are hyper-specific to one group; others cut across geographies and political ideologies. Brands can avoid blanket responses and instead tailor messaging, partnerships, or silence accordingly.
What began as a reputation crisis also highlighted opportunities. Coca-Cola’s youth and education initiatives, for instance, had high sentiment but low visibility — an engagement opportunity waiting to be activated.
When reputational issues arise, audience intelligence helps brands do more than just firefight. It lets them:
- Track the real-time trajectory of emerging issues
- Identify the people and networks shaping the narrative
- Prioritise which risks need action
- Find positive messages worth amplifying
Understanding where backlash is coming from and how it's being shaped by different communities and platforms allows brands to respond with precision and foresight. Audience intelligence equips you to see not just the sentiment around your brand, but who is driving it, how it's spreading, and what it means in context. In a fast-moving media environment, that level of clarity is what helps turn a reputational threat into a strategic advantage.
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