For many decades successful branding -- a holy grail of the corporate world -- had a clear set of rules. Produce quality goods at the right price. Frame the value in memorable messages seen by millions on television and in print. Then fine-tune the pitch by measuring sales and evaluating consumer responses through letters, phone calls, focus groups and surveys.
Nowhere have those rules been applied more effectively than in Cincinnati, the home of Procter & Gamble, which made a fortune turning Crest, Pampers and Tide into must-have items on household shopping lists.
But the branding game has changed radically, largely because of the myriad choices the Internet provides consumers and because of the economic influence of widespread Web pontificating, known as the blogosphere, which barely existed as a popular force until about four years ago.
As consumers eagerly post word-of-mouth commentary in online communities, message boards and Web logs, a question confronts brandmeisters: Who wins and who loses as time-tested practices of mass production and mass marketing are undermined by the informed and often cranky voices of the knowledge age?
A possible answer to that question can be found here, on the fourth floor of a 19th-century brick and stone building on Main Street, in the office of Nielsen BuzzMetrics.
The company, an A.C. Nielsen unit formed this year in a merger of three smaller companies, asserts that it has welded together technology, communications and business expertise in a new way. In essence, it can tap into the electronic musings of millions of people to learn about the values, desires and opinions that start marketing trends.
BuzzMetrics represents the convergence of brand and online-business specialists holding MBAs -- several of whom trained at Procter & Gamble -- with computer scientists who say they are building the digital equivalent of a crystal ball.
The firm's computer scientists and programmers, led by Sundar Kadayam, a 43-year-old software engineer, say they have developed sophisticated search engines to sweep the Internet and drill down into rich veins of extemporaneous word-of-mouth commentary and conversation found online.
The search engines retrieve phrases, opinions, keywords, sentences and images, and the company runs the data through processing programs powerful enough to sift millions of messages simultaneously. By analyzing vocabulary, language patterns and phrasing, the programs determine whether comments are positive or negative and whether the authors are men or women, young or old.
"The days of sitting behind the focus-group wall are going the way of the buggy whip," said Mike Nazzaro, president and chief operating officer of BuzzMetrics. "We are fundamentally changing the way marketing and market research will be done in the future. We're providing guidance to marketing decisions that was never possible."
BuzzMetrics maintains that blogs and their attendant message boards and forums are tuning forks for consumer sentiment that threaten to upend traditional branding efforts. An influential blogger can undermine a brand faster than any grapevine ever before encountered in the marketplace, as the computer maker Dell discovered. The company's level of service and quality was denounced by bloggers this year, and the complaints found broad exposure when one popular media Web site added its critical voice.
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