Using Discourse Analysis to Fuel

Brand Strategies

Ray Poynter

The Future Place

Agenda

1. Brand and service discourses

2. Introduction to Discourse Analysis

3. Conversation Analysis

4. Discursive Psychology

5. Foucauldian Discourse Analysis

6. Pragmatic approaches

7. Lines of enquiry

Brand & Service Discourses

Actors

� Organisation ↔ Customers

� Customers ↔ Customers

� Organisation ↔ Organisation

� Outsiders ↔ Organisation, Customers, Outsiders

Brand & Service Discourses

Locations

�Social media

�Face-to-face

�Telephone

�Letters & emails

�Survey responses

�Media

�Official reports

Introduction to Discourse Analysis

Family of approaches

Common themes

– Constitutive

– Contextual

– Dialogical / contested

– Discourse as an end not as a proxy

Three Illustrations

� Turn taking

� Footing

� Language games

Traditions of Discourse Analysis

o Conversation analysis

o Discursive psychology

o Foucauldian

o Bakhtinian

o SocioLinguistics (inc. corpus research)

o ‘Critical’ – (inc CDP and CDA)

o Pragmatic extensionsSocial media monitoring

Conversation Analysis

Harvey Sacks

Close examination of what people do when they speak

4 examples

– Mental health calls

– Construction of delicate subject

– Why just saying No is not so easy

– A non-Western example

Mental Health Calls

Operator: Go ahead please

A: This is Mr Smith (B: Hello) of the Emergency

Psychiatric Center can I help you.

B: Hello?

A: Hello

B: I can’t hear you.

A: I see. Can you hear me now?

B: Barely. Where are you in the womb?

Havey Sacks, Lecture 1, 1995

Construction of Delicate Subject

1 C Let’s finish this HIV thing . . . Hhhhh So do you

2 understand about the antibodies.=

3 P =Yes I [do:.

4 C [Ri:ght. .hh So: .h how lo:ng is it since you

5 think (.) you might have been at ri:sk (.) of being

6 infected with HIV.

7 P Well uh- (0.4) uhuh to tell you the truth it’s only

8 I- like er Friday I had a phone call from a .h ex-

9 girlfriend- my boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend .hh to say

10 that uh:m (0.5) she’d been to the VD clinic (0.2)

11 and she thought that I should go:, {Continues}

Extract of counselling in interview (C=Counsellor, P=participant), from Siverman’s “Construction of ‘Delicate’ Objects in Counselling”, 1997

Why Just Saying No is not so Easy

Just Say No? The Use of Conversation Analysis in Developing a Feminist Perspective on Sexual Refusal, Celia Kitzinger, 1999

“

”

Korean Air flight 801

Discursive Psychology

What if neuroscientists are looking in the wrong

place?

Traditional Psychology

Discursive Psychology

What is thinking?

"the experience of thinking may be just the experience of saying” Wittgenstein, 1958, here ‘saying’ could be external or internal.

Attitudes

Traditional definition

– “an enduring organizational , motivational,

emotional, perceptual, and cognitive process with

respect to some aspect of an individual’s world”

But

– Anchoring?

– Framing?

– Contradictions?

Kretch & Crutchfield, 1948

Common sense & Contradictions

Many hands make light work

Knowledge is power

Look before you leap

Clothes make the man

Portmanteaux of ‘Attitudes’

Memory

Is memory is collective and negotiated?

Is it largely made of words?

Foucault & Foucauldian DA

Shifts the focus away from the individual to the society

Post-structuralist and constructionist

What is said is governed by what society has created and is creating

Meaning is created socially, not within the head or even within individual conversations

– Epistemes/regimes of truth

– No simple top-down model of power

– Genealogies

Downloaded from http://assets.starbucks.com/assets/960b83c436e34f5ea4a1e5c7e6d5191e.jpg March 22 2011

Pragmatic DA

Several Names

– Social Media Monitoring

– Blog Mining

– Buzz monitoring

– Listening research

Usually little theory

– Model

– Epistemology

Is it a sort of ‘critical’ DA?

Social Media Research

Influence and the flow of memes

Turn taking within online discussions

Sentiment analysis → actions

CA for communities, what are the

analogies for pauses, repairs, repetitions?

Key Lines of Enquiry

• Tactical Issues– Training off-shore call centres using CA

– Improving social media monitoring

– Customer interaction training, e.g. use of change of footing

• Strategic Issues– Rethinking customer satisfaction

– Brand positioning, friend, advisor, expert, …

– Advertising, creating speech acts, sayable ideas, genealogies, …

Rethinking Cust Sat

Old school

– How can we turn people from unhappy customers into happy customers?

Discourse Analysis model

– What has to happen to get people to stop using phrases we associate with dissatisfaction and to start using words and phrases that are ‘beneficial’?

1. What are the words/phrases we want them to use?

2. Are they sayable in our context?

3. Can we change what is sayable?

4. What other words/phrases might be good for us?

Screen grab from http://www.busabeats.com/ March 22 2011

Let’s talk

Presented at the International conference on

Qualitative Consumer Research & Insights

7 & 8 April 2011, Malta

For more information

Please visit: http://www.merlien.org