Challenge: Measuring Brand Value and Industry Leadership

We’ve entered the era of Industry 4.0, a confluence of trends and technologies, that promises to reshape the way things are made. For a global leader in materials engineering solutions for the semiconductor, flat panel display and solar photovoltaic industries, maintaining momentum in this ever-evolving landscape is crucial. They are able to achieve this through an emphasis on constant innovation and investment in the emerging trends.

To help their company assert its thought leadership and dedication to cutting-edge products its PR/communications team needs metrics that are accurate and meaningful mirrors of its business goals. The team sought a solution that would go beyond simply tracking how many eyeballs were seeing mentions of their product or company. They want to shed light on both classic brand drivers like financial performance, product performance and the regulatory landscape, but also drivers like leadership and industry innovation. They also need an accurate view into up-and-coming industry trends as well as competitor SOV to be able to boost their brand value and industry stature.

Solution: Metrics that Matter, Data that Captures Industry Movement and Brand Penetration


The team needs to dive deeply into the context of their coverage to uncover the narrative of how well they are or are not performing against their business goals. Most importantly, the materials engineering giant needed to measure its achievement of corporate goals over time in order to build better communications strategies.

The communications group deployed PublicRelay’s media intelligence solution, which combines top technology and human analysis to measure brand driver effectiveness and track industry trends and coverage for key technologies like semiconductor or display articles, for its own brand and its major competitors. This multilayered measurement program includes several deliverables: daily coverage report, a weekly insight summary, a quarterly report, and ad hoc analysis on specific industry trends.

Result: Insights Guiding a Communications Team, its Agency Partner and Corporate Leaders

The client’s PR agency also relies on PublicRelay’s insights to inform their work – they provide the agency an accurate lay of the land which translates into a tactical plan for the week ahead. Reports are modified on a continuous basis to fit the needs of the rapidly changing Industry 4.0 and regulatory landscape and to incorporate breaking stories. In an industry with few players but constant innovation, these reports also serve as the clients’ pulse on the market, and are viewed but both teams and the client’s executive team.

Quarterly, data is compiled into detailed reports that have a competitive analysis, message penetration breakdown and a review of top stories. The SOV analysis data, also toned for sentiment, is parsed into topics so the company can see its SOV across brand drivers, and coverage across trends like IoT, Driverless Cars, Augmented Reality, Connectivity and AI. Competitor coverage is also analyzed for the same context – this view is paramount for the communications team and its agency partner, as they decide where to focus resources to influence positive coverage, revamp competitive campaigns and determine if there is whitespace for message expansion. The company can also enhance its influencer engagement strategy using insight from the top story review – a snap shot of the articles that yielded both the highest impressions and had the highest reach on social media. This interplay between social and traditional media, clearly illuminates which influencer outlets are dominating the conversations.

Lastly, the client can deep dive into any facet of this quarterly analysis which provides them an arsenal of custom data at their fingertips to create new microtargeted, spinoff strategies that highlight highly innovative thought leadership initiatives.

Result: Data that Empowers a Technology Leader by Strengthening its Industry Prominence

The head of communications uses PublicRelay’s analysis during his executive quarterly meetings to plan the earnings reports. Tying all this insight together and comparing it quarter over quarter allows them to focus on outcome-based metrics, such as strategic message pickup, share of voice versus the competition and impact of earned coverage on thought leadership dominance. The communications team can not only prove their impact on bolstering the company’s brand value, but they also provide key competitive insights to leadership as the company pushes to emphasize its innovation across major Industry 4.0 trends and emerging technologies – a strategy central to its profitability.

Related Resources