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Defining “Digital Branding Success” Using Audience Interest
Analysis
Note: All images are courtesy SimilarWeb
Defining metrics of success is of the utmost importance when it comes to establishing a brand
in the online realm. Out of the many metrics in use today and one of the most important ones
which define a brand’s true strength is one that is most often overlooked, an audience
interest graph. A brand’s true strength is the perception that it holds in the minds of its
consumers. There are many metrics that online marketers use to define a brand’s success
however an audience interest graph is most often either un-heard of or completely
overlooked. This happens mostly because there are so many other metrics available that are
easy to understand and completely misrepresented in the industry, such as monthly number of
visitors, average time on page, social outreach metrics such as number of likes, shares or
comments, bounce rates, click through rate, average cost per click etc. What people fail to
understand is that this speaks nothing about a brand’s true strength or recall value. How then
should one define this very valuable metric of a brand’s overall online grasp within its
consumers or target audience? How does a brand know that it has successfully positioned
itself in the minds of its consumers?
An audience interest graph can come in very handy here. It can be defined in many ways
however in essence; it is a list of interests of the consumers of any brand represented in a
graphical format. The “kind” of brand is defined by the “kind” of its audience and the kind
of audience is best defined by their interests, therefore by the transitive property, a good
metric of defining “a kind of a brand” is “the kind of interests of its audience”. It is a simple,
quick and effective way of defining the strength a brand holds in the digital world as it
defines the kind of audience it attracts.
When a brand is about to be launched there is extensive research done to define the
“personality” of the ideal consumer of that brand. An audience interest graph is a great way
to prove that a brand has hit its consumer personality definition goal within a given time
frame.
Let’s look at some examples for clarity on the subject:
Apple vs. New Entrants
Here Apple is a developed brand and the rest are developing brands. Therefore we should see
how mature Apple’s audience’s interest graph is vs. that of the rest of the brand’s audience’s
graphs and it should show us a stark difference.

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Apple
Here we can clearly see that the audience that reaches Apple’s website is already aware about
the brand and has shown interest in visiting similar websites, therefore their interests are
closely related to what Apple’s audience should ideally look like. Their audience are people
who are interested in the Mac OS, tech blogs, apple news, iPad, Firefox, android &
technology news. (Granted there are a few random parameters showing)
Micromax
Micromax’s audience are not necessarily showing such strong interest in any particular sort
of a genre. Granted there are some cases of Nokia & android showing however it can clearly
be seen that the random elements such as Indian rail, income, online shopping, coaching,
Olympiad, breaking news, distance learning, admission, iit etc. Now remember, Micromax is
a leading player in the Indian mobile phone market and hasn’t really tried to brand itself till
its latest “Nuts.Guts.Glory” campaign. Ideally this graph should start to show adventure
seeking audience if it maintains its branding campaign and given that it succeeds in
positioning itself as such. It has tried very hard to brand itself using super stars such as Hugh
Jackman and Akshay Kumar in the past however we can see that an audience interest graph
doesn’t really show any strong indicator of a particular “kind” of audience when compared to
Apple. Of course one could forcefully define an audience segment looking at that graph
however that is imprudent to say the least.

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Gionee
This graph also shows something similar to Micromax’s audience a totally random
distribution with no particular common factor relating it to Gionee’s brand image. This is also
mostly because neither Gionee nor Micromax has really tried to brand itself strongly at all.
Most of these cell phone manufacturers have focussed on immediate sales rather than overall
branding success.
Vivo
Vivo’s audience interest graph follows closely in line with Gionee and Micromax without
any particular branded genre to associate the audience to. Most of the audience is showing
random signals such as product management, press release, business intelligence etc.
To end the cell phone segment we look at a great branding success which has now begun to
collapse:
Blackberry
This graph shows interest in cell phones and specifically blackberry products and even RIM
is in there somewhere. This shows that the audience can be categorized into having
understood the brand message that the company was delivering.

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For developing brands the audience is usually in the “discovery” phase of formulating a
brand’s image or understanding its communication. In this phase the audience will be driven
to a brand’s websites via several different channels and not necessarily a “direct acquisition”
path. Therefore the audience interests would vary strongly when compared to a developed
brand’s audience. A developed brand’s audience will have already been subliminally affected
by its branding strategy and would now have strong direct recall of the brand and similar
interests to its “defined” audience. In other words, the brand would hold strong equity on the
basis of this audience. In the traditional model of AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire and
Awareness) the “discovery phase” can be termed as the Attention and Interest phase. The
Desire and Action are foregone conclusions in the “developed equity” stage.
Now let’s analyse the effectiveness of this method using various sectors at random.
The Bombay Shaving Company vs. Truefitt and Hill
The Bombay shaving company is trying to tap into the growing men’s grooming sector in
India. In order to declare itself a branding success, it can easily use this method. For this
reason an established brand in the market has been considered a competitor, Truefitt and Hill
(although not exactly similar but proves the point).
The Bombay Shaving Company
This developing brand shows a random set of audience interests.
Truefitt & Hill
This brand shows branding success as relevant audience interests are shown.

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McDonalds vs. Burger Singh
McDonalds shows an audience interest graph with fast food, restaurants, burgers, menu,
nutrition etc.
Burger Singh shows a graph describing technology, IT, business news etc. Not what it wants
to be branded as for sure.
Star Poker vs. Adda52
Star poker is an online poker playing website that is still trying to establish itself in the
market. Its audience graph proves this too.
Adda52 is an established poker site and its audience graph speaks the same story.

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It can be seen how relevant an audience interest graph can be as an indicator of a brand’s true
strength within its online audience. Therefore in today’s world of brand’s being built purely
based on their online presence, this metric should be one of the most important branding
success indicators. Even though a brand might be selling well online, it doesn’t necessarily
mean that it has developed a strong brand online. Simply put, a strong brand shows a
strong audience interest graph.