Welcome back to our “Accessing Culture Beyond Ethnicity” blog series where we break down how to decipher culture through technology. In the final post of this series, we tackle one of the most important elements, brand affinity. This factor is critical to decode a consumer’s culture using technology. In addition, it is something that all marketers have access to through technology today.
The definition of brand affinity is ‘an individual’s brand preference given a product category’. There is a fantastic exploration of the difference between brand equity and brand affinity here. In this article it is also explained that we measure brand affinity at the individual level. This is because it provides us with a concrete understanding of a consumer’s preference in a category set among a group of competitive brands.
WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM A BOTTLE OF SODA
Consumer loyalty and trust are the outputs of delivery of long-lasting experiences, which are the fundamental building blocks of brand affinity. This trust is based on past experiences, cultural tendencies, beliefs, habits and more. Brand affinity is an enduring and valuable consideration for any marketer looking to access culture as part of their digital marketing strategy. It can tell us so much about a consumers’ culture, let’s take the following image for example:
We can learn a lot from one little bottle of Jarrito. Like how when we see this bottle we begin to think of tacos, warm sun and fun-loving Mexican accents. Those who identify with Mexican culture in some way or are Mexican know and love this brand as Jarritos is a staple brand in Mexico. There are a plethora of brands for which we can conduct this same exercise. Products are carried across the world by consumers who know and love them, regardless of their origins. Identifying one or more brands that a consumer has an affinity for, teaches us about a user and enables us to reach our intended audience with greater ease and effectiveness.
ACCESSING CULTURE WITH DATA
Data from 1st, 2nd or 3rd party sources via pixels or audience segmentation techniques reveals past purchase behaviors, providing us insight into which brands are favorable. AcuityAds builds Live Audience profiles that map the data points in order to create a fingerprinted profile. Audience targeting across a vast array of devices is enabled using these profiles.
The ability to incorporate ‘culture DNA’ into the digital advertising approach is a huge game changer for advertisers. We help advertisers achieve greater scale and effectiveness with in-culture advertising initiatives. We do this with a diverse array of real-time signals from consumer interests, passions, intent, and brand affinities.
Click through to learn about our previous posts on the fundamental elements used to decode cultural cues: PASSIONS, INTERESTS, and INTENT. To find out how in-culture advertising can work for your next program, contact us today!
