Consumer tension is a brand's best friend.

Consumer tension is the determined villain in a good story.

A well defined consumer tension is the well portrayed villain, like the Joker, who makes the story:

• more exciting
• less predictable
• builds anticipation and
• creates engagement

But let's not forget, any tension needs a solution, the hero, the Batman for the Joker. A story without a hero is just going to be unremarkable. Of this story, the hero is your brand, the solution to the consumer tension. People love heroes with purpose and good intent! In real life, any start-up will fail if it isn't addressing a relevant and sizable consumer tension and the biggest of brands fade out if they aren't evolving and keeping a tab on the relevance of the tension. Through the product life cycle, you have to ask what's the tension you are solving for, else you are setting up for failure. Like the well defined characters of a villain and hero in a good story, what any innovation or marketing initiative needs, is to ensure there is a well defined tension and a solution to the problem. We all are divided consumers and each one of us wrestle with escalating individual, social, economic, political, attitudinal or experiential tensions that affect our daily lives. We may or may not share all the good that happens to us, but as humans, don’t we all talk about issues and what isn’t really going right? In the world of Social Media, one unsatisfactory experience and we will be the first one's to share it.

The question then is, how do brands understand and keep track of the relevance and size of the consumer tensions?

With AI powered technology, brands have easy access to consumer sentiments and emotion data that can be leveraged to understand the range of consumer tensions and even your performance and role in addressing them. At D/A we work closely with multiple brands where the focus is on tracking all the struggles and issues in the life of the consumer and in their interaction with various categories and brands. The actionability of all consumer data on their tensions, powers brands across product innovation, marketing/communication and branding initiatives to enable the brand to be the hero who people resonate with. Faisal Khan, VP of Products. D/A.