Enterprise

BIC

BIC is a family-owned company listed on the Paris Stock Exchange and a world leader in stationery, lighters, shavers, and promotional products. People around the world use BIC’s products on a daily basis, and the organization wanted to better understand what consumers were saying about the products they used online. The company had never monitored sentiment or online mentions to gauge consumers’ perceptions of BIC, which is why the organization turned to Meltwater. To understand how BIC and its products were perceived in the market, the company had conducted one-off surveys. However, surveys have their limitations. To get an unfiltered view of consumers’ thoughts around the brand and the company’s products on a global scale, BIC turned to social listening and media monitoring as a way to collect this information. By looking at what people and the media were saying about BIC online or in the news, the team thought that they’d be able to capture a more complete picture of how their reputation looked than one or multiple surveys could.

Products Used

Media Intelligence

Social Listening & Analytics

“Using Meltwater has allowed us to show the leaders of the company the impact and value that PR brings. Having the qualitative data to reinforce the value of communications — and the value of our strategy — with trackable data monthly has been really helpful.”

— Rob Miller, Senior Manager, Global External Communications, BIC

Challenge

“Understand BIC’s reputation on a global scale”

“For a company like BIC, we're ubiquitous around the world. We make a CPG product. Therefore, there's a lot of talk about us — negative or positive; relevant or not relevant,” says Rob Miller, Senior Manager of Global External Communications. “We needed to understand: What are the global perceptions about us? And, we really hadn't done that before.”

BIC had been using numerous agencies in specific regions to track brand reputation through one-off campaigns, but that didn’t help Rob and his team understand the perception around the brand on a global scale. The organization needed to capture coverage on an ongoing basis across all geographies in order to build a clear picture.

BIC was already using Meltwater for basic media monitoring, but the team realized that they could use the platform to help them better understand BIC’s reputation on a global scale. By using Meltwater as the single source of truth for collecting this information, the team would also be able to streamline workflows and align KPIs on a global scale.

“With Meltwater we truly have this global snapshot and everything is flowing through one process, one system. We feel confident that, yep, this is capturing everything we need.”

Rob Miller, Senior Manager, Global External Communications, BIC

Solution

Curated qualitative insights from around the world

As the amount of information online grows, the task of separating the noise from relevant content becomes increasingly challenging. BIC’s leadership wanted an easily digestible snapshot of the news and themes impacting their organization, so they tapped Meltwater’s team of experienced analysts to put together a daily newsletter.

The hand-curated newsletter outlines the top 25 articles about BIC or its competitors. The news is selected by Meltwater’s team of analysts and reviewed by the Communications team at BIC before being shared with leaders all across the organization.

Meltwater’s AI-powered platform scans and analyzes around one billion pieces of content daily, and the team of experienced analysts enriches the quantitative findings with qualitative analysis so an organization’s leaders can have an understanding of the who, what, why, when, and where.

“I would say the human side of it is probably my favorite feature. Knowing I've got people who are reading our news coverage and using their judgment to determine what makes it into the daily newsletter and what's most relevant means that I'm able to not only get the numbers, but also a breakdown of what's actually driving them. The support and the flexibility that I've seen from the Meltwater team, and their ability to customize the product and really be able to meet our needs, has been great,” according to Miller.

In addition to ad hoc reporting, Meltwater delivers monthly and quarterly scorecards to BIC, which provide metrics around the number of impressions, the volume of mentions, the quality of coverage, the tone or sentiment of each mention, and breakdown by geography.

Fragmented monitoring and analytics make reporting a painful process. Meltwater helped BIC define its reporting workflows, frequency, and KPIs on a global scale. By using one centralized global media intelligence solution for its brand reputation management and reporting, BIC was finally able to get a full picture of its global marketing and communications ROI that they were struggling to capture in the beginning.

Summary

How Meltwater Helps BIC

Align on KPIs and reporting

“Meltwater helped us establish a cadence and structure with regards to our reporting — structuring both what KPIs we're measuring and how frequently we're doing it. We can feel good that the data that's being included and presented is correct.”

– Rob Miller, Senior Manager, Global External Communications, BIC

Access valuable insights from media outlets around the world

“It’s super helpful having the month over month or year over year quantitative data as well as the personalized qualitative analysis of ‘the main news drivers’ from the analysts.”

– Rob Miller, Senior Manager, Global External Communications, BIC

Create a more data-driven PR strategy

– Rob Miller, Senior Manager, Global External Communications, BIC

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