Key statistic
Using the Adoreboard platform along with behavioural science, Behave have guided TikTok to a userbase increase of 1157.76% in Europe.
Introduction
Behavioural Consultancy firm Behave stand proudly at the forefront of behavioural science in commerce. They help their clients achieve sustainable growth by teaching them to truly understand their customers as people and have helped some of the biggest brands in the world grow even larger.
No brand is too big to ignore the behaviour of their customers, which is why industry giants like TikTok turn to Behave to truly understand what drives their people. They blend behavioural science with strategy and technology, which is where Adoreboard comes in. Behave incorporate the Adoreboard platform and predictive insights to give their clients a holistic, humanised view of their customers as people: individuals with genuine concerns, desires, and motivations.
Lea Karam is Behave’s Consulting Director, and a recognised industry pioneer. As part of Behave’s services and growth, she has led Adoreboard and Behave’s partnership and has been the principal agent in incorporating the platform within the behavioural solutions that she has developed and grown. From the ground-breaking outcomes, she has been a long-time advocate for Adoreboard and has happily agreed to discuss how the two companies bring even more value to her clients.
Lea was also featured on Campaign Media Week’s prestigious 30 under 30 – so she knows value and quality when she sees it!
Going beyond surveys with Adoreboard
Lea highlights the dangers of relying too heavily on ‘claimed behaviour’, or the surface level information brands can get from customer surveys.
“There are hidden opportunities to solve business challenges, grow effectively, mitigate threats, and develop a solid picture around true behaviour.”
According to Lea, the nuance, context, and emotion behind what customers are saying should act as a pillar of behavioural science when companies examine their CX. Working with Adoreboard, Lea and her team have had storied success advising their clients and challenging them on their misconceptions of their own customers.
“A lot of companies think that their customers are rational, but we’re the most irrational creatures. We don’t know what we want and we’re very impulsive. Adoreboard help us get closer to highlighting and leveraging that reality.”
Behavioural science is the cornerstone of Lea and Behave’s approach to CX. They find that Adoreboard is the best way to gain access to the reams of emotional data and instantly analyse it for future strategies.
“You can look at millions of conversations and can’t manually analyse them on your own. The fact that Adoreboard has such a great way to look at the market is perfect. Its AI platform facilitates an understanding of what’s really happening out there in the world.”
TikTok learn what makes their users tick
Lea and her team have been working with TikTok since 2019, during which time they’ve helped the brand explode into the social media powerhouse we know today. Using the Adoreboard platform along with behavioural science, Behave have guided TikTok to a userbase increase of 1157.76%. That’s not a typo, the writer didn’t accidentally add an extra 1 there, thank you very much: one thousand, one hundred and fifty seven point seven six percent.
They did this be achieving their goals of ‘ageing-up’ TikTok’s very young userbase, and focusing on growth in specific global markets.
“When we were starting with TikTok in 2019, we wanted to make sure we tapped into Europe in a strategic way and educate stakeholders. We used Adoreboard as part of our broader strategy to grow the adult database.”
There were many markets across Europe that Behave boosted TikTok’s popularity in but one strategy that stands out for Lea is their work in Germany.
“The goal was to understand perception. To do that, we used the Adoreboard API to scrape conversations across 18-34 year olds to understand what content brackets people were interested in.”
By scraping social media and other online outlets for what young adult Germans were talking about, they found, using Adoreboard, that an overwhelming proportion were interested in video games, particularly the Gamescom exhibition. After taking the Adorescores and emotional responses around various drivers at the event, Behave plotted a SWOT analysis to see how they can leverage TikTok against Gamescom itself. One of the main pain points that gamers identified was the long waiting times, and missing out on certain events and influencers.
In order to develop a rapport with gamers and foster a positive experience with TikTok, they provided an ‘in’ through live content and streaming pods to the moments missed.
“This associated the brand with an emotional high-point for the community and an “always-on” gaming fan. Based on opportunities spotted, TikTok reinforced that with giveaway competitions and raffles from top gamers during those moments.”
Quantifying customer confidence
It’s not just within business development that Behave have leveraged Adoreboard to help the social media giants. Together, they quantify the value of TikTok in reducing buyer’s remorse in eCommerce.
One of the benefits of using the Adoreboard platform our many happy clients often cite is the opportunity to provide a fresh evidence base to stakeholders and customers. In Lea’s own words:
“I never say data-driven, I say evidence based.”
When looking to expand their operations, TikTok weren’t going to expand more into an eCommerce space without evidence and quantifiable confidence. Lea and her team ran a research project with Adoreboard, analysing millions of data points in online shopping. She compared the emotional responses and intensity of general shoppers against those with mentions of TikTok and found the evidence they were looking for.
With general shoppers, eCommerce transactions often elicited a sense of fear of buyer’s remorse, leading to a high rate of drop-off prior to conversion. On the other, much happier hand, those within the online shopping discourse who mentioned TikTok’s influence relayed much less of this fear.
“We were able to quantify the strength of TikTok in driving more positive shopping discourse and reducing buyer’s remorse to onboard more brands to the platform.”
Before this research, TikTok had struggled to quantify its role in this space. The findings fed directly into board-level decisions and sparked a push in highlighting the consumer confidence that TikTok provides.
Let them eat chicken
Like most global food brands, KFC are constantly looking for new ways to diversify their menu to offer an option for as many people as possible to enjoy. Unlike their herbs and spices, human emotions come in more than a blend of 11 types and needed to be taken into account.
Always with an eye on the future, the brand had decided to try some more healthy options on the menu in order to appeal to a wider audience, but weren’t getting detailed enough feedback to see if continuing with the strategy was worth the investment in the long-term. Lea warns businesses of the dangers of going gung-ho on an opportunity because competitors are doing it.
By using Adoreboard to pinpoint the core opportunities and challenges across millions of data points scraped from national topics of conversation, Behave got a comprehensive SWOT analysis of how the public viewed certain things around KFC’s place in the fast food industry.
There was a major strength and intensity around ‘delicious food’ and much less around ‘healthy options’.
“The emotional intensity data shows that just because you see an opportunity, doesn’t mean that this is something to jump on.”
Lea was able to evidence that the best strategy for KFC would be to focus on their strengths and they dropped the healthy options soon after.
“The data really enables people to go in a strategic direction to stay on course and keep to the core of what they really are.”
We’re all only human
Working with Adoreboard has helped Lea and her team at Behave develop new approaches within behavioural science. Emotional, text based data is readily available across the internet and this partnership has helped some of the biggest companies in the world continue to grow. No matter how big a brand is, sometimes they need reminding that it’s people, not statistics, that make purchases.
Lea’s approach has always been from a behavioural science standpoint. As someone who truly understands the value that human emotion holds when understanding that behaviour, her support for Adoreboard stems from that shared understanding.
“I wanted to develop behavioural science solutions using behavioural technology but had to find a partner that was able to shed the right light on consumer emotions. Adoreboard helps me power our behavioural science thinking by understanding the pain points which are being openly discussed in the world.”
