Know your brand's influencers

If you grow your brand advocacy, you grow your business. Such a simple rule, yet brands tend to lose their way when it comes to advocacy marketing. Steve Knox, senior advisor, The Boston Consulting Group, cited a Havas Media study at the India Strategy Leadership Summit 2014 organised by BCG, which states, "If 70 per cent of the brands disappeared, consumers wouldn't feel very much affected." This highlights the need for brands to be reinforced, and, hence, the solution lies in advocacy. Combined with offline, digital expands advocacy opportunity and facilitates customisation, according to BCG.

Some of the critical questions a brand needs to answer include: does it have a robust segmentation model, does it know who influences its target audience in each segment, does the organisation know how to build true relationships with advocates, what schemas (mental assumptions) are at play with the brand and how should these be disrupted, and lastly, is there a systemic way of measuring brand advocacy?

The Brand Advocacy Index (BAI), a proprietary BCG tool, measures word-of-mouth recommendations for brands. BAI equals 'advocacy minus critics'. According to a BAI analysis, Walmart was found to have significant negative non-customer advocacy in the US around the first half of 2013.