Product lines: measure each line of your brand in AI, in its own arena

Take, for example, a consumer-electronics brand that sells phones and air conditioners. When someone asks “What’s the best mid-range phone in the United States?”, AI compares that brand with other phone brands. When they ask “Which inverter air conditioner uses the least energy in the United States?”, it compares it with air-conditioning manufacturers. Different questions, different rivals and different attributes: battery and camera in one case, energy use and installation in the other.

If both lines are measured together, three things happen:

• The competitor list stops making sense. Phone rivals and air-conditioning rivals end up in the same share-of-voice table, splitting a total they don’t share.
• The average describes no one. If the brand has 40% of mentions in phones and 6% in air conditioners, a combined 23% is the situation of neither line (illustrative numbers).
• Perception gets mixed. Adjectives about battery life and adjectives about power consumption land on the same list, and one line’s desired traits dilute the other’s.

The same happens with a household-cleaning brand that sells air fresheners and floor cleaners: the two lines share a logo, but not the shelf or the rivals.

1. 01

   Its own identity

   Each line has its own profile in Identity & DNA: its category, its market, the traits it wants to convey and its competitors.

2. 02

   Its own competitors

   The phone line is compared with phone brands and the air-conditioning line with air-conditioning brands. Each line’s share of voice is calculated in its own arena.

3. 03

   Its own questions and topics

   Each line has its own Prompts Library, with questions in the market’s language that name the country, and its own topics in Performance by Topic.

4. 04

   Its own reports

   Each line has its own results and reports, just like a standalone brand.

The lines don’t appear as separate brands. The platform shows a single brand and, inside the report pages, a line switcher to move from one line to another without changing context.

The group’s portfolio view shows one card per line, so you can see the state of every arena on one screen. Each card is read against that line’s competitors, not the other lines’.

The website is usually one site for every line, so anything that depends on the site is analyzed once. Anything that depends on the arena is worked on per line.

The group PDF opens with an executive summary per line, followed by each line’s full report. It serves the conversation with leadership, who need to see every line together, without losing the detail each category team works with.

It makes sense when your lines compete against different brands or answer different questions. If your products are variants within one category and share rivals, a single scan broken down into topics is usually enough to see where you win and where you don’t.

Lines combine with the other enterprise capabilities: each market is measured separately and in its own language, and a client account can hold several brands, with client admin and viewer roles. More in solutions.