Case Study: North Carolina State University develops a crisis management framework with YouGov BrandIndex

Creating a new framework for crisis management with YouGov

Jim Pierpoint, a lecturer at North Carolina State University, sought to measure the brand and business impact of reputational crisis events to inform a new risk management framework. The challenge was that traditional media monitoring data had significant limitations for capturing true damage to brand perceptions during a crisis. To address this, Pierpoint utilized YouGov and its BrandIndex product, a global brand tracking tool with extensive historical data.

Using YouGov BrandIndex, Pierpoint analyzed over 24 crisis events. The solution enabled him to identify clear crisis "signatures" and a reliable risk threshold, such as when Negative Buzz spiked to two standard deviations above the mean. The key result from YouGov was the development of a new "shock barometer" framework for identifying and tracking brand crises, with the findings being published in the Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management.

North Carolina State University

Jim Pierpoint

SVP, Global Risk Management