When it comes to the soda giant’s war against Coca Cola, its grammar is holding it back.
An agency based in London, Disruptive Communications, has released the results of one of its most recent studies, which has shown that when it comes to social media marketing from brands, consumers feel that proper grammar is more important than any other factor.
When their favorite brand fail in that area, it hurts their opinion of that company.
This is exactly why Pepsi’s social media marketing efforts have actually been more damaging than helpful, recently. This is particularly true in its battle against Coke, when using the LinkedIn network. The reason is that Pepsi makes a notably larger number of grammatical errors in its posts than its primary competition.
The same can be said about the errors in the social media marketing from GM when compared to Ford.
Ford has been using more accurate grammar on its social network posts when compared to General Motors and it appears that consumers have taken notice. Disruptive Communications took the responses of 1,003 consumers from the U.K. into consideration, when they conducted their poll. These participants were asked for their opinions in July. When asked about the factor that was the most likely to harm their opinion of a specific brand when reading a post on social media, the top result was “poor spelling or grammar”.
In fact, that leading issue was the top choice for 42.5 percent of the respondents. This was far more commonly seen as a turn-off than the second most popular choice, where 24.9 percent of respondents felt that the most damaging issue occurred when “updates are too ‘sales-y’”.
Among the results from the study, it was curious that among the participants within the age group from 18 to 24 years, the most harmful behavior from brands on social networks was “Does not post updates enough,” as 22.1 percent felt that. Nearly at the same percentage of respondents in that age group felt that way about bad grammar, as 20.9 percent of the group made this their top choice.
This is rather enlightening for social media marketing companies, as it is clear that customers are paying closer attention to details such as grammar than many of them may have assumed.