Netnography as a Strategic Tool

Netnography is establishing itself as base tool used to understand the consumer’s behavior and desires for the construction of strategies that meet the expectations of the target public. Brands such as Coca-Cola, Johnson&Johnson and Fleischmann use netnograhy to renovate their relationship and communication methods with the consumers and to create new products.

The method of netnography when used in an appropriate way allows truer insights without the need to meet directly with the consumer. The research is less intrusive and the consumers enjoy participating.

When a company already has a very well established profile of their target group, netnography is an option to go through their tastes and habits more deeply. Coca-Cola search with the method a way to find musical themes connected to their Zero product consumers. To do so, they performed analyses of the brand territory aiming to understand the best ways to communicate with the client, and ways to capture new customers.

After tracing social and cultural portraits of the brand users in the social media, the company realized how the related to the drink and what was their lifestyle. Doing so, Coca-Cola Zero recognized elements in common with the consumers that could be used in a contact point with the young people to present their products and create a closer relationship.

Listerine also used Netnography and realized that some consumers associated the color of their products to aliens, while other said that the smell of the mouth washers reminded them of their grandparents. Those connections that seemed unusual were repeated in blogs and online discussion forums, which gave the Johnson&Johnson brand the opportunity the list to the true voice of their consumers.

The goal of netnograpgy is to find insights in an honest way, using emotion in a way that no software can do. We need to have an anthropologic view and Marketing knowledge to interpret the data in a meaningful way for the company’s strategies.

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