OPEN

A story about the Body Shop‘s brand "buzz" suffering caught my eye in yesterday’s Observer, and I see it is doing a brisk trade for the  YouGov PR team (nice work, there) according to Google News:

Body Shop loses its buzz following sale to L’Oréal Guardian Unlimited 
Sold-out Body Shop loses public favour Scotsman
Body Shop’s popularity plunges after L’Oreal sale Independent
Body Shop ethics bite back The Observer
Body Shop takeover ‘hits image’ BBC News, UK  

Interesting to note that the buzz-measurement approach taken by YouGov with its new Brand Index service (ah, yes there’s a new service to push behind the story, what would Cristina Odone say?) is markedly different from that established purveyor of buzz-measurement, Nielsen BuzzMetrics, which provides tools for monitoring and evaluating what people are saying on messageboards, blogs and other social media.

At £25k a year (a fair bit less than Brandpulse will cost you, not that they’re directly comparable) the YouGov service uses traditional market research methods (asking people questions) rather than divining the sentiments of millions of bloggers, to give clients…

…a daily measure of public perception of more than 1,100 consumer brands
across 32 sectors, measured on a 7-point profile: general impression,
‘buzz’, quality, value, corporate image, customer satisfaction and
whether respondents would recommend the brand to a friend. We interview
2,000 people from our online panel of more than 130,000 each weekday,
more than half a million interviews per year.

Good luck to them.

I do find it interesting to see the new service dressed in Web 2.0 clothing – it even has a quote from the cheerleader of Web 2.0 himself, Rupert Murdoch ("It’s not about big companies beating small companies any more … It will be the fast beating the slow").

The real value, as with any research, is going to come from the perceptiveness and skill of the analysts, which YouGov has in spades. I’m not saying this isn’t a useful service – it demonstrably is just taking a look at some of the news alerts

I do wonder though if they will add blog/social media analytics anytime soon? I also suspect this won’t be the last Web 2.0-alike marketing we see in media and marketing services. You want to see buzz, just take a look at the interest in social media and all things web right now in Soho.

technorati tags: YouGov, market_research, buzz, brand