Page 217 - Overthrow_Black&WhiteVersion

commercial proof of concept, then, Verlinvest has further developed its own criteria and methodologies to help determine the right challenger to back.
They begin with what they call consumer passion: how people talk about the brand and how much they talk about it:
“Consumer passion is very important. This is hard
to gauge through Nielsen data, so we’re subscribing now to a couple of new social media tools that tell us precisely how people talk about this particular brand, how much are they talking about it, what they say – is it positive or negative – and so on. And that gives us very strong evidence whether that brand owner is starting to insert themselves into popular discussion and become ‘the talk of the town’.”
They then look to see if this energy is reflected in buying behaviour – in particular frequency of purchase and consumer loyalty:
“Knowing that there is a small group of heavy
users that love and consume the brand is extremely important to us when we’re considering a potential investment. The small brands have a fairly small group of loyalists, and I think there are fairly scientific ways to understand whether this group
of loyalists is truly loyal or just dipping into a brand. There has to be a real, fundamental reason why they like the brand, as opposed to just thinking ‘this is cool and fashionable'.”
216 'This time is genuinely different'