By Robert Passikoff

With the Internet, and all those digital platforms, a lot of stuff gets written -and published. Some of it is pure opinion, some if it is pure drivel. Jon Stewart said the "Internet is a world passing notes in a classroom," and that's often the case.

So when it comes to knowing where look for leveragable brand knowledge, we like dealing directly with consumer insights. And, preferably insights that tell you how things are going to be, rather than hearsay.

As brand researchers, we looked back at what we had written about where brand success could be found in a variety of categories, based off Brand Keys Customer Loyalty Engagement Index insights, which we collect each January. Then we examined how closely our engagement and loyalty metrics predicted how brand marketing / advertising activities actually matched real market results. In short, to see what happened.

We invite you to listen to (or download) the results of this examination in What Happened? Successful Strategies, Marketing Misdeeds, and the Brands That Loved Them, and see for yourself.

It's a collection of eleven recordings - stories from categories from athletic shoes to video games, smartphones to social networks, including Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Nike, JC Penney, and Google+, even Twinkies. All to see if what we said would happen did happen and to help brands get a better fix on consumer tendencies and marketplace trends.

While the Internet might guarantee that everyone will have their 15 megabytes of fame, we find that accurate and predictive insights are only to be found via emotionally-powered loyalty and engagement metrics. Using such metrics makes marketers read of customers' attitudes and behaviors a less risky proposition.

About the author

Robert Passikoff is Founder and president at Brand Keys.

http://www.brandkeys.com/