Uncover Your Brand’s Hidden Advocates – Then Market to Them

Last week in the Brands App:

This week’s installment of the weekly blog comes to you from Jack, who’ll drill down into the brand personality of a prolific venture capitalist, Mark Suster, and compare his to Wells Fargo. The results may surprise you!

This week’s sections:

Hidden Brand Advocates
Now You Know


Brand Personality: Wells Fargo vs Mark Suster

As you probably know, we hang our hats on our personality analysis algorithms. We’ve spent countless months testing, correlating, re-working, then doing it all over again. It works sort of like sentiment analysis, but with one big, massive, important distinction: we look at the people as individuals, digging deeply into all their tweets or facebook posts – not just those that interact with the target brand. We used industry-credentialed research to begin the correlation, then more research on how to use text analysis with Twitter to derive the results.

So let’s get to Suster versus Wells Fargo. Mark Suster is an LA-based venture capitalist who’s been very successful both at investing and building his personal brand. He has an excellent blog for entrepreneurs and is prolific on Twitter, which makes him a pretty good proxy for the industry. I also ran Brad Feld and Fred Wilson, and the results were consistent. Mark’s just has the most scale (most interactions/engagements).

You can check it out for yourself in the brands app.

You may have predicted the lead personality segments for both Wells and Suster: Wholesome and Sophisticated. But let’s look at the verbose definitions to give you more color:

  • Wholesome (Wells Fargo): down-to-earth; family-oriented; small-town; honest; sincere; real; original; cheerful; sentimental; friendly
  • Sophisticated (Suster): upper class; glamorous; good looking; charming; feminine; smooth

It’s what you’d expect, isn’t it? People who interact with banks should be Wholesome. Those who interact with edgy VCs should be Sophisticated.

Their secondary segments are surprising though, aren’t they?

  • Daring (Wells Fargo): excited; trendy; spirited; cool; young; imaginative; unique; up-to-date; independent; contemporary
  • Reliable (Suster): competent; hard working; secure; intelligent; technical; corporate; successful; leader

These seem reversed! What’s up with that?

These are people Suster and Wells may not know about – and thus may not be “pointing” content to them, especially because it’s a little counter-intuitive. They are surprising, hidden gems – a persona (segment) of people which cares about their brand but they’re unknown.

Recommendation:  Both Suster and Wells could grow these hidden segments by creating blogs and tweets with stimuli specifically for these groups. Check out the words and phrases each responds to below:


Now You Know

Are you wondering what the Interest Data Only segment means? It’s intended to show you followers used in your brand profile who didn’t have enough content to determine personality. The number doesn’t really mean anything which is why you’ll see this segment removed soon.

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