Passionistas – the New Empowered Customers

These are notes from an event held by Yahoo during AdWeek, looking at their new report on the ‘Passionistas" – people who are passionate about your brand and tell the world.

Jim Kite, President, Connections Research and Analytics, MediaVest; Edwin Wong, Director, Consumer Insights Organisation, Yahoo!, Ben Jacobson, Partner, Conifer Research,

• JK: the consumer voice is not a tactic..but an overarching strategy.  There has always been a subset of consumers that become more important due to their role as an influencer.  If these people are upset or excited about your brand, they tell people..amplify the relationship.   76% of Americans talk about brands a day, on average, 10 brands are discussed and 70% leads to some form of recommendation.  Most will always be face to face but the digital world has changed how you think about consumer advocacy.  The web is becoming the source for more conversations as well as a tool.   The behaviour can be tracked, measured and manage   Mediavest is being looking at who they are and what influences and how they do it.   So why do some poeple surface from the sea to become the true passionistas?
• EW: advocacy has been changed by the digital space..it can be planned strategically up front.  it become important that we take hold of this advocacy and understand what motivates some.  went into the research to find why some people become infleuncers why and how do they take control of the tools and why do brands benefit from this.   We borrowed heavily from the Long Tail imagery to create a language   Through passions you see a welling up of power at the right of the tail…aggregation of the passion can be scary as it is hard to manage.  if you start to plan strategically, understand the why, then you become empowered marketers to partner and leverage these consumers to push out the message.   Methodology – a lot of time spent talking to people in homes and environments talking about their passions..it felt like we were moving in with them..
• BJ: main cities, 21 2.5hrs at home interviews, hi web access but outside info as well
• EW: with ComScore surveys…Clickstream behaviours….added all these together,
• BJ: when we started we were worried all we would discover ’star trek ‘fans in their mothers basement. this was not true.  we saw how well they can leverage these tools to support this passions to get beyond time and space.  A change in attitutde..then it was first to own, now it is first to share.  when people talked about past passions, they tended to do this in terms of objects..but in the present tense and into the future is was not about the physical nature but about sharing.  All of our passionistas have a thirst for arcane nity grity info and are always looking for it.  enjoy the thrill of the hunt
• EW: 3 key elements: Expertise (i stay up to date, i stay current, I’m considered and expert) Obsession (I could not live without, I’ve been known to obsess) Communicate/Share – tell everyone, share with network.   Demographic – similar btw passion and engaged….but psycho graph is different.  Not a small spectrum of the audience.  We chose categories with large audiences/brand reach.   23-43% of the population.  Sports is 43%; food 34%, movies 29%, health 23%.  not the trad group of influncers…it can be a reality big group.  Role of web:   not too much diff in size of network btw pass& engaged…what is differ net is the number of touchpoints.  passionistas spend 6x as much time on web above average.  across full spectrum of the types of sites…photo, email, user crated…text, rss, IM, blogs etc..they leverage all the tools.   the search 184% more time.
• BJ: quantitative was backed dup with a lot of qualitative work.   (RC: at this point he was talking about this behaviour as though it was pretty unusual.   For me, it’s pretty normal, so I guess I may fall into the category.)
• JK: it’s always hard to follow voice of the consumer…we want to know how to take the research and activate it to bring it to business.  does passion make advertising more effective.  when we spoke to them about brand…they were more likely to think well about brands if associated with what matters for them…..I love you if you understand me.  when you earn that affection they are more than happy to reciprocate by recommending your brand. Affinity and passion are correlated….we asked passionistas to rate 20 brands and associated themselves with the brands,   we also looked at an online copy test..we asked our food passionistas about Tassimo..we mocked-up test pages.   half people – yahoo food site and other half to yahoo news.  the advertising  affinity was up 21 on news and 26 with food page.  Same ad on both pages….go after tight audience then better results
• EW: we talk about the trigger effect a the head of the curve..passion is like a needle that threads through the media vehicle. leasing to an amplification.  mass media creates sparks..get pushed to long tail by the passionistas.   Passionistas will digest the sparks and then create own content.   They bridge channels to follow a story or ad.  
• JK:  a lot of reasearch…the opportunity is huge.  everything we have done to create excitement now reverbs  into long tail,  we must embrace the bevahiour..the scale is dramatic..act strategically to manage this..we can justify it.   Find a passion your brand can own; use  events to stimulate behaviours; track digital engagement into the long tail. Turn your most passionate consumers into an asset,   Trust the consumer.

Tags: passionistas, yahoo, engagement, passion