Competitive Dashboard
A Case Study on seeking observations instead of answers.
Earned Media Value (EMV) is Tribe Dynamics’ prescribed metric that quantifies the estimated value of publicity gained through digital earned media and their respective engagement levels.
A History
By the end of 2015, Tribe had just started to spread its wings. Being one of the first software offerings in the then-budding influencer marketing space, our earliest experiments had resulted in the development of a metric that was seeing wide adoption in the beauty space: EMV.
New, indie cosmetics brands with small budgets were starting to leverage the power of digital content creators to spread the good word about their products, and our published EMV rankings in CEW and WWD were showcasing their success.
When our rankings ended up predicting acquisitions and overall revenue growth of the brands that ranked at the top, Tribe Dynamics’ EMV became central in connecting the dots between digital earned media and revenue.
Brands started to look to us to guide their digital strategies, with some even vying for a spot on our published leaderboards.
The Opportunity
While the prolific spread of EMV throughout our SaaS and Reporting products was successful in both the adoption of the metric and our software as a management tool, a brand was only able to benchmark itself.
To that end, brands would have to wait to see if they ranked on a monthly cadence through our publications partners; if they didn’t make the top ten, then they had no idea how they performed relative to other brands.
The Experiment
What if we offered the raw EMV data for the top one-hundred brands to clients on a monthly basis?
This was a relatively low-risk and low-cost experiment. We already had the data, and our riskiest assumption was that our clients wanted to know how they ranked. So, we hopped on some calls with some of our more mature clients and asked the question:
What might you do with this data?
Instead of asking for an immediate answer, we sought to observe their unhindered behavior by delivering a years worth of monthly rankings in an excel document; asking our seed set of clients to share any internal presentations or documents they may make with this data to help us develop our ideas collaboratively.
Here, we were looking for an intent to solve. While it would have been simple to spin up a Leaderboard, it would have been expensive to guess how and how regularly clients would make use of this data. What else might they include? Would it be their own data? Some combination?
The Results
Out of the ten clients that received our initial ranked data set, some common patterns emerged in the presentations that were shared back with us:
- Brands weren’t measuring against all brands, only those they saw as competitors
- Brands were more interested in growth than rankings
- Several brands even plotted themselves against their competitors over time, and placed product launches on the same timeline(!)
- Two had even taken screenshots of relevant influencer content to include in their slide decks(!!)
Inspiration to Production
Suffice it to say, we had found more than we were hoping for, so we invited the same clients to help us envision our first iteration of a software offering of our leaderboards: the Competitive Leaderboard 🎉🎉
Our first version allowed clients to select five competitors, which would be ranked by EMV at monthly, quarterly, or yearly granularity.
Further, clicking into a competitor’s brand gave you additional metrics, as well as Top Posts and Top Ambassadors to provide context to the rankings.
Future Iterations
Since then, the team has iterated through whole-brand styling updates, as well as iterated to ship additional functionality leading to its current form:
The REAL Opportunity
After launching our initial version, it wasn’t long until brands started to share access to the leaderboard with their umbrella companies. These corporate entities started to reach out to us, asking for 10, 20, and even ALL brands that we were measuring in one dashboard.
While originally designed for brands to measure themselves against their competitors, corporations wanted to use our Competitive Leaderboard to measure their entire portfolio of brands, attempting to measure ROI on digital earned media spend.
With a few minor adjustments, namely a more compact view, and the ability to search and filter, we started to sell into corporate partnerships.
This, in turn, led some of our corporate partners to set internal KPIs around EMV performance which gave Tribe Dynamics the perfect avenue to sell into and capture the lion’s share of the Influencer Marketing space in Beauty and Color Cosmetics.
Since our initial launch, the competitive and corporate dashboards have spawned countless reporting products, while providing brands and their umbrella companies a common language around Earned Media Value.
All of this because we asked for observations instead of answers.
