AllSaints is a British fashion brand specialized menswear, womenswear, and fragrances. It was created in 1994 and, since then, the company has grown into a global enterprise with more than 3000 employees working across 28 countries (Business of Fashion, n.d.). The brand has a wide presence in the online sphere and is active on multiple platforms, including Instagram, Youtube, Twitter, and others. Considering a substantial number of AllSaints’ followers, digital audience research can help the brand obtain informative and useful results needed to support and improve its current marketing strategies.
Advertising is one of the primary marketing activities, whereas its main purpose of reaching the right audiences by using appropriate messages can often be hard to perform without a proper analysis of customer characteristics. Thus, the goal of the present project is to identify various consumer behaviors to help AllSaints create efficient, targeted advertising campaigns that would be not only appealing to existing customers but also attractive to the new, potential consumers.
To achieve this goal, the Behaviors, Emotions, and Moments (BEM) model will be applied. According to Brennan (2017), behaviors imply the demonstration of interest to certain products and product areas. Emotions refer to product relevance, and, lastly, moments are specific environmental triggers making a product relevant (Brennan, 2017). Overall, by analyzing these three aspects of the model separately, it will be possible to form a comprehensive picture of consumer motivation. By evaluating qualitative and quantitative data associated with distinct BEM elements. AllSaints will become able to comprehend consumer characteristics better and obtain valuable information needed to influence their purchasing decisions more effectively through relevant advertising messages.
Research Questions
In accordance with the introduced BEM model, the three main research questions will aim to explore behaviors, emotions, and moments. The first question is as follows: how many times did users mention the menswear/womenswear product? It is intended to identify the extent of interest to a certain type of products or a single product. The second question reads as follows: what are the users’ emotional responses to the menswear/womenswear product? The answer to it will allow clarifying if customers show particular emotions that would make them more receptive to certain advertising messages (Brennan 2017).
Lastly, the question “what makes the menswear/womenswear product relevant to you?” will help investigate a broader context in which consumers wear AllSaints apparel and why they choose to purchase from the brand.
Research Methods and Analytic Plans
Before describing research methods, it is important to clarify that the search and analysis will be narrowed to the investigation of social media users’ behaviors linked to a few of AllSaints bestsellers/product categories, such as leather jackets, because they reflect the brand’s values and capture consumer interests and preferences best. Moreover, it is suggested that different types of products may be associated with distinct sentiments, and this variation may reduce the possibility to make an ad message truly targeted. However, posts mentioning the brand, in general, will be considered during analysis as well but users’ messages about specific products will be prioritized.
The first question will be analyzed through the Netvizz tool that assists in gathering Facebook data. The types of information one will be able to retrieve through this method include engagement statistics, posts by both the brand and other users, and their comments. These data will inform researchers about consumer attitudes and emotional reactions, yet the main purpose of utilizing Netvizz, in this case, will be to estimate users’ interest in AllSaints leather jackets.
For this reason, each mentioning of relevant products will be taken into account. Afterward, the numbers will be analyzed by administering such a descriptive statistics instrument as the measure of central tendency (namely, arithmetic mean). This method will help identify the distribution frequency of messages about AllSaints leather jackets against the total amount of all posts. In this way, researchers will measure the popularity of the product type and consumers’ interest in it.
To answer the second question, the information located through Netvizz (namely, posts and messages containing emotional responses to AllSaints leather jackets) will be analyzed by using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). Each of users’ posts will be processed through the LIWC to identify its emotional tone (from 1 to 100). Along with this, since a contextual evaluation of emotions is required in this case, the word clouds tool will be applied as well.
This method will allow generating a list of most commonly used words in messages that received high emotions tone scores (above 50). Consequently, to identify if some consumer responses would make them more responsive to certain ad messages the inductive analysis approach will be implemented. This approach implies “the search for pattern from observation and the development of explanations – theories – for those patterns through series of hypotheses” (“Inductive approach,” 2018). In other words, suggestions regarding advertising messages will be made based on the identified common themes in emotionally positive posts.
The data to answer the third question will be collected through a survey placed at the MTurk platform. Before providing the questionnaire to respondents, general demographic data, including such variables as age and gender, will be collected from them. Preferably, there should be an equal number of male and female participants in the study to reduce the risk of biasing. After that, as part of the main question, “What makes the menswear/womenswear product relevant to you?,” respondents will be asked to state what they value in the brand most (quality, style, uniqueness, and so forth), where and when they wear AllSaints most frequently (for instance, casually or on special occasions), and also where they purchase it (online or offline).
Several answer items will be provided under each question from which respondents will be able to choose up to three options. Additionally, participants will be able to respond to the question in a free form. The information saturation will be achieved after receiving 300 completed surveys. Then, the data will be categories, and the inductive analysis method will be used again. Overall, the acquired information will be helpful in discerning attitudes and values of different gender and age groups.
Ethical Considerations
Privacy and confidentiality are the primary ethical principles in marketing research. According to Clark (2014) researchers and analysts should not collect and disclose information that may harm respondents in any way yet, at the same time, without getting personal data, it may be hard to ensure the reliability of findings. In the given project, researchers will mainly use those data which were openly shared by users online, for instance, in their Facebook posts.
At the same time, final reports will not indicate any names and will have a form of impersonal summaries. In this way, any chance of harm to sample members’ identities and well-being will be minimized. As for the survey that will require respondents to give their personal data directly, it may be possible to ask them to provide informed consent for participating in the study and also guarantee a non-disclosure to them. In this way, ethical principles will be honored while, at the same time, a sufficient level of result validity and reliability will be obtained.
References
Brennan, L. (2017). Behaviors, emotions and moments: A new approach to audience targeting. AdAge. Web.
Business of Fashion. (n.d.). AllSaints. Web.
Clark, L. (2014). Ethical marketing research in the digital age — How can academics and practitioners work together? Journal of Direct, Data and Digital Marketing Practice, 15(4), 258-259.
Inductive approach (inductive reasoning). (2018). Web.