SHARE undertook a comprehensive review of the cultural impact of brands in the whisky space across 4 countries to measure the cultural vibrancy of Johnnie Walker.
What did we need to do?
A brand is what people say about you when you aren’t in the room, and the whisky category is one where people aren’t shy of sharing their opinion.
Following the launch of the White Walker campaign that tied in with the final series of Game of Thrones, Johnnie Walker needed to understand how people perceived the brand. How was the social conversation across key countries evolving? Not only around Johnnie Walker but also competitor brands. Being part of that conversation would help us later understand how the whisky category and brands interplay with cultural relevancy.
Campaign spikes, and cultural heuristics
We scraped branded mentions of 5 brands from 4 key countries and fed the results through our natural language processing (NLP) package, ParseR. Subsequently, we understood what and how people were talking in relation to each brand over the course of a year.
We found that campaign activity can cause spikes in cultural relevancy. However, we only saw long term shifts in increased relevancy and changes in topics, themes and sentiments when the campaigns tied back into to the core cultural heuristics a brand was known for.
