Improving brand relevance in DEI social media storytelling

The client is a highly specialized running shoes and apparel company. The company started back in 1900's in USA, making ballet slippers and bathing shoes. Much has changed in the last century, except that the client is just as committed to specialized gear for a specialized activity. Starting in 2000's the company decides to focus solely on what they do best: specialized running shoes. 

The client believes that every run brings us closer to our best selves and they exist to inspire us to run our own path, however diverse each of our paths might be.

Measuring DEI communications impact on the brand.

The client knew the importance of a brand that reflects the company’s beliefs in terms of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). The client had been working on improving its internal DEI programs to make them tangible and impactful across the company, with partners and with customers, but the brand was not yet reflecting this core belief.

The challenge was trying to measure and track DEI content on external communications. The internal programming was equipped with well-established metrics to measure progress but measuring the impact of external communications on the Brand and how it progresses against other brands in the space was something that had not been done before. The reason being the massive technological undertaking it would be to capture public data at scale (from multiple social channels and multiple brands) to analyze against DEI pillars and identify how this content was impacting the brand.

The Hypothesis was that a brand that honestly reflects its commitment to DEI, making it core to the brand’s narrative, instead of an isolated program, would be more relevant to its audiences and would win reputation and trust while having a sustainable positive impact on their communities. 

Why they chose the DEI Monitor

After carefully reviewing all the options in the tech space the client decided to work with Cheryl Overton Communications and Crant because of their deep understanding of multicultural marketing and their cutting-edge technological innovations to use AI to track DEI communications. A system that measures Brand Love (reputation and trust) and DEI index to learn about the relevance of a brand’s DEI programming and communications. 

The market offers a variety of social listening tools that are great for monitoring conversations about specific topics or even brand mentions but the need required a more sophisticated approach. One that could track and compare the brand against competitors and benchmark brands on equal terms and across social media platforms on the highest brand level to measure improvements but also to reveal the secret sauce of the most successful brands in the world. 

How the DEI Monitor was used

The client’s goal in using the DEI Monitor is to use AI like computer vision and NLP to empower their content teams to uncover insights and make informed decisions against DEI dimensions like sexual identity, race and ethnicity, gender, age, class, and disability and thus have a positive impact on the running communities they serve.

The tool provides information related to each Brand’s DEI Index and Brand Love helping the client navigate massive amounts of data and making DEI concepts concrete and trackable. 

The Results

Since the client started working with Cheryl Overton Communications and Crant, they has seen an increase in the DEI Index of 8X (see figure 1). The DEI Index measures how relevant the brand is in terms of DEI for its audience and compares it against competitors and benchmark brands.

Proving that DEI programming is a core pillar of a modern brand, Brooks Running has also seen growth 5X (see figure 2) in Brand Love (the most important brand metric). The Brand Love metric is engineered to capture the relevance of a brand for its audiences across all social media platforms. 

The logic: Increased your Brand Love (reputation and trust) → better lead conversion →  to more revenue

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Figure1.

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Figure 2.

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