Launchmetrics Unveils AI Tools to Measure Brand Identity & Relevance

Being at the “center of culture” and “a part of the conversation” is a kind of marketing holy grail. 

Every click, post, repost, short video and long thinkpiece keeps a brand moving forward — or at least alive in the public consciousness. 

But while fashion has long been able to tally all those consumer touch points — gauging just how loud their voice is in the conversation — it’s always been more uncertain exactly how what they’re saying is being perceived. 

Now Launchmetrics is layering a little emotional intelligence on top of its widely used media impact value, which gauges the reach of brands but not the reception. 

“The whole industry has been going too far in terms of focusing on the number of followers, engagement rate —  things that are good, but not instrumental to the resonance of the brand,” said Michael Jaïs, chief executive officer of Launchmetrics, in an interview.

Launchmetrics will continue to look at MIV, or Visibility, but will also be adding two new offerings: one that measures Identity and another focused on Relevance. Both of the new measures mix in the company’s new AI-based qualitative insights with MIV. The company will then start to roll out other measures to sharpen their view on how brands are perceived. 

“We’ve gone a little bit too far in terms of quantitative metrics and everybody’s focusing on, ‘How can I calculate the return on investment?’, and so on,” Jaïs said. “By doing that, a lot of teams lose the sense of why they are doing these things. What does it bring to the brand itself as an asset? What does it bring to the essence of my brand?”

Understanding how the context and tone of all of those news stories and mentions are received is a task fashion has typically taken on with consumer focus groups.  

But when consumers are not getting the message a brand is trying to send, where’s the disconnect in all of those moving parts? 

Launchmetrics’ new offering uses large language models to dig deep and analyze online buzz at scale, giving brands an opportunity to answer some of the questions Jaïs has been hearing lately, including:

“There are a lot of misunderstandings or missed opportunities because of the type of content that is relayed by the different voices,” Jaïs said. 

“It comes back to the emotional connection,” he said. “How does all the impact I’m creating contribute to the value that I want to push to my brand DNA and how strong it is?”

The twist is, the Launchmetrics system uses artificial intelligence to understand that emotional connection. 

The system digs through news stories, social media posts and more, determining the topic of the conversations, clustering the topics to find both the hot-button issues and detect weak signals and then classifies all by micro and macro narratives. 

Margot Lasseigne, chief data and product officer at Launchmetrics, said: “That’s the beauty of using large language models to run this analysis, they can understand context. They’ve been trained on all of this content that exists online and they can interpret how people would understand this piece of content.

“We are able to do this interpretation at scale on millions of documents if we want to,” Lasseigne said. “Of course it has a cost, but it’s possible. Before it was not even possible to have this qualitative layer and the quantitative layer on the same baseline.” 

It’s an approach that promises something new in fashion, an AI-based reading of how the world at large is perceiving a brand’s creativity or heritage and then comparing that to how another brand is viewed. 

By way of example, Launchmetrics looked at Balenciaga through the lens of Identity and gave it a Creative Intensity value of $38 million over the studied period. That was just under the $38.4 million in Creative Intensity value generated by competitor Prada.

But Balenciaga had a Creativity Strength reading of 13.69, well above Prada at 8.44.

Launchmetrics’ digest on Balenciaga showed how the former designer Demna drove the brand, receiving “widespread coverage for redefining Balenciaga’s Identity, becoming a central figure in the brand’s cultural narrative.” Demna also had his impact amplified by celebrity ambassadors like Katy Perry and Nicole Kidman.  Then the brand got additional creativity points for strategic partnerships with Lamborghini, Puma and Under Armour that blended product innovation with visibility.

But both Balenciaga and Prada were seen as much more creative than the affordable luxury brands.  

Coach received a Creativity Strength of 4.93 — just over a third of the position enjoyed by Balenciaga — but above Tommy Hilfiger at 3.45, Michael Kors at 2.8 and Kate Spade at 2.06. 

Some brands are just not as creative. And others are simply able to get their creativity to shine through. 

“You could have a brand that is in fact very creative, but no one is talking about their creativity and no one is highlighting it,” Lasseigne said. “In that case, maybe their score in terms of creative strength would be low, even though yes, in terms of product creation, they are [creative].”