How YouScan Social Listening Drives an Innovative Strategy: Multi-Brand Insights by Dentsu Creative

When smart data meets creativity, great ideas follow.

With the help of YouScan’s social listening tools, Dentsu Creative has been fueling creative strategies for three different projects across industries — from fashion and homebuilding to retail grocery. 

During our recent webinar we co-hosted with Dentsu Creative, Charri Harris, Senior Research Analyst, shared the secret sauce behind how her team turned YouScan’s social listening insights into actionable strategies that win pitches, uncover whitespace, and redefine brand narratives for their clients.

How YouScan strengthens creative strategy for multiple brands 

Dentsu Creative works with clients from a plethora of industries daily. To make their creative and strategic recommendations truly data-backed, they leveraged YouScan to analyze online conversations and visual content for three clients: a clothing brand, a homebuilder, and a retail grocer.

1. Clothing brand: competitor benchmarking & Visual Insights

For the clothing brand, the main goal was to understand how it stands against the competitors, identify the ways in which they were succeeding & falling short, and discover whitespace to overtake them. 

These three YouScan functionalities pushed the team of Dentsu Creative over the edge while working on this project:

• Image recognition capabilities to identify logos

Dentsu Creative wanted to look at topics like sports teams, licensed merchandise, and find brand logos. Their goal was to understand which types of brands drive what type of content. Their main questions in the context were which brands and content performed the best, and where the whitespace is. 

• Broad platform coverage 

TikTok & Instagram were extremely helpful for Dentsu Creative when they analyzed the UGC content. Thanks to YouScan and its coverage of these platforms, Dentsu Creative analyzed 90x more mentions than other tools. That helped uncover whitespace in fan merch content.

• Share of Voice 

Dentsu Creative was able to reveal how the clothing brand stacked up against its competitors in the category. 

As a result, the client realized they were already leading the conversation but not owning it publicly, which led to an improved brand strategy.

2. Homebuilders: Landscape analysis

The goal for the homebuilders was to perform a landscape analysis and understand what homebuyers in the USA really care about and where builders fall short.

By using YouScan’s advanced toolset, Dentsu Creative used tagging, micro-conversation mapping, and sentiment analysis. 

Moreover, they realized what drove negative mentions, how consumers respond to owned content, and found the disconnection between homebuyers and homebuilders. The breakthrough tool in this context was Insights Copilot, YouScan’s AI agent for social listening, which helped discover pain points and top positive drivers.

"One of my favorite things is that whether you're an advanced prompt writer or new to AI, Insights Copilot gives you a quick, pre-built prompt. We have these cases where you can ask it to generate a word-of-mouth analysis, and it does a great job filling in the prompt for you and getting what you need" — Charri Harris, Senior Research Analyst at Dentsu Creative.

Speaking of the findings, only 33% of conversations came from builders themselves. Consumers, on the other hand, talked about trust, partnership, and design quality.

The main insight was that the pricing wasn’t the main component – it was about empathy & human connection.

As a result, the client repositioned their brand around transparency and long-term relationships, shifting focus from specs to human connection.

3. Retail Grocer: defining “value” for consumers

The ultimate goal for the retail grocer was to uncover how consumers define “value” while grocery shopping, beyond the price, and form a strong marketing & brand strategy.

Dentsu Creative analyzed organic mentions and viral user-generated content (like fans of the grocer’s branded chocolate milk) using YouScan. By leveraging our mention analytics and Insights Copilot, they discovered what was driving the conversations for the grocer positively and negatively. 

Besides, the team behind Dentsu Creative found top themes for the client, such as product quality & loyalty, variety, integration in life, and comparisons.

Moreover, the “groceryhead” audience was uncovered – the new type of shoppers who love grocery shopping and are socially motivated. 

The key insight was that the price wasn’t the main driver — emotional value was.

The client redefined their brand strategy and positioning to focus on long-term partnership, emotional connection with consumers, and transparency instead of discounts. 

The big “aha” moments that changed a creative direction for brands

Across all three cases, YouScan consistently disproved initial client hypotheses, revealing untapped opportunities:

• 👚Clothing brand: with the power of YouScan, Dentsu Creative discovered that the clothing brand was, in fact, the leader in the conversation, but the conversation was small. They built a strategy to tie the brand’s clients to being leaders in licensed fan merch.
  

• 🏠Homebuilders: they thought that the issue was pricing, but in fact, they soon uncovered the real gap: lack of empathy and partnership.
  

• 🥦Retail grocer: the retail grocer assumed value meant discounts — but they found it really meant connection and trust. 

Each “aha” moment reshaped the creative direction and deepened brand understanding. This is the ultimate proof that the best creative ideas start with social insights.