Understanding your customer’s behaviour is key to ensuring your brand/business thrives and continues to grow based on their needs. There are many different ways to get to know your target audience better, such as conducting market segmentation or performing brand tracking research.

However, actively listening to your customers and being aware of the public conversations they’re having about your brand, provides interesting insights into what your audience really thinks and feels about you.

This is called user generated content (UGC) and is the perfect way to understand your consumer’s behaviour.

What is User Generated Content?

User generated content (also known as consumer generated content), is media material or information such as imagery, text and videos that is created by the consumers about a specific brand or product, rather than created by the brand themselves. Although similar to influencer marketing, it differs as the customer is a paying customer, who is not enlisted or employed to discuss the brand.

Examples of user generated content include: posting reviews online, creating review videos that are shared on social media or online customer service experiences. Using videos or quotes direct from customers is a great tool to embed into marketing campaigns, to provide honest feedback from existing and happy customers.

The genuine and authentic nature of a consumer posting on their personal profile delivers an authentic experience for other consumers.

How does User Generated Content help to understand consumers?

UGC provides a wealth of information about your target audience outside of traditional research studies, by showing how consumers actually interact with brands and products in their day-to-day lives.

Consumer behaviour far extends the realms of personas and attitude and user generated content is a good example of this. Depending on the type of content consumers are sharing, we can draw out and highlight different behavioural insights.

For example; if someone is to share a video of themselves using a product, they may be delicate and gentle when handling it, this itself without discussions or comments, can provide insight about what the consumers think about the product or the significance of the product itself.

Alongside the content, analysing the reaction and interactions to the video or review, provides further insight into what other people think about the brand/product. Hashtags can also reveal whole communities of consumers who are posting about a specific brand, which can sometimes lead to product co-creation.

Discussions or interactions about a brand offer insights into what customers think, perceive and feel about a product or service. However, uncovering the behavioural intent will not be known until the research has begun.

How can User Generated Content measure consumer behaviour

Identifying the appropriate platform for your brand or product is the first step in being able to measure customer’s behaviour. Once identified, the next step is to find the right consumers on the platform to learn more about how they are interacting and showcasing your products. This then allows your brand to collect the right content and start interacting with any comments or posts.

Researchers have identified that consumer behaviour online is inherently different from behaviour offline, therefore measuring behaviour online requires a new methodology. This is what is known as netnography and is a relatively new way of measuring consumer behaviour.

What is Netnography?

A netnography is a qualitative research method observing the interactions with consumers online, such as forums and social media. It is derived from the anthropological method of ethnography.

Once data has been collected about the content (whether this be videos, reviews etc.), a visual context or text based analysis would take place noting behaviours observed. This is sometimes followed by a thematic analysis, grouping common behaviours into themes to understand how consumers are posting and interacting with brands online.

Although netnographies can be time consuming and require full immersion into the world of the consumer, they are extremely insightful. Netnographies provide depth to consumer behaviour by their own means of expression, allowing brands to understand their consumers' brand perception, awareness and attitudes.

Final Thoughts

Using user generated content presents marketers with alternative ways of marketing their brand and products. However, it also unearths rich, meaningful data about consumers that is constantly accessible online which can help inform your business or product strategy.

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