Case Study: Growth Kinetics Transforms Global Brand Repositioning with AI-Driven Insights

"We saw an opportunity to leverage advanced data analytics and AI to help this globally recognized hair care brand uncover a unique space in consumers' minds -- insights that traditional methods simply couldn't reach," says Alex Mrvaljevich, CEO of Growth Kinetics.

This context from Alex sets the stage for how Growth Kinetics approached the challenge faced by a leading hair care company, turning a strategic problem into an opportunity for innovation.

Identity Challenge in a Crowded Market

With approximately 8% of the global hair care market (making it the second-largest brand worldwide), our client enjoyed broad consumer recognition and trust. Its core brand identity has long centered on delivering "shiny, healthy hair" -- a promise of quality that made the brand synonymous with healthy hair care.

Over the decades, marketing reinforced this image, even launching campaigns to move beyond product features and signaling a modern, empowering twist to the brand's voice.

Despite its strengths, the company faced a strategic imperative: the hair care market had become intensely crowded with new competitors, indie brands, and shifting consumer preferences. As one industry analysis noted, the shampoo market is saturated with alternatives, and the brand recognized it needed to differentiate itself to stay ahead.

Limitations of Traditional Research Methods

Initially, our client relied on its traditional market research playbook to tackle the repositioning challenge. The company organized focus groups, consumer surveys, and internal workshops to gauge brand perceptions and test new positioning ideas. These conventional methods -- long staples of brand management -- provided some insights, but they proved insufficient given the scale and subtlety of the challenge.

Focus groups revealed differing opinions on the brand's image, but the data was limited and potentially skewed. In small group settings, participants can influence each other or hold back honest opinions due to group dynamics. It's well known that focus group responses are often vulnerable to biases, making findings less reliable.

A handful of people in a room cannot capture the diversity of a global consumer base; by design, focus groups only gather feedback from very limited samples (often just 4-8 participants), so they cannot provide insights at scale.

Moreover, these sessions are time-consuming and costly, requiring recruiting, moderation, and analysis, which slows down decision-making. Surveys could reach more people, but they often suffer from respondents giving superficial or socially desirable answers rather than revealing deep, unprompted feelings about the brand.

The depth and nuance of insight needed -- how consumers organically talk about the brand and its competitors, the unfiltered associations they have -- were not fully accessible through questionnaires and guided discussions. In summary, the client's internal research methods faced critical limitations: high cost, potential biases, small sample sizes, and shallow data.

The brand team realized that while traditional research provided snapshots, it might miss the richer narrative swirling in the wild -- in everyday consumer conversations, social media chatter, and user-generated videos where people freely express what brands mean to them. The company needed a more expansive, unbiased window into consumer perception.

This is where Growth Kinetics stepped in with a novel, data-driven approach.

Growth Kinetics’ Data-Driven Approach and Project Journey

Growth Kinetics began by immersing itself in the client's situation to ensure a clear understanding of the problem and strategic opportunity at hand. The consulting team recognized that the key to repositioning was uncovering how the brand and related concepts lived in consumers' real-world discussions.

The client didn't just want a new tagline -- it needed to pinpoint a unique conceptual space it could credibly occupy, one that would set it apart from competitors and resonate authentically with consumers' experiences. Identifying this space required casting a much wider net for insights than any focus group or survey could offer.

Growth Kinetics structured the project in iterative stages, each building on discoveries from the previous phase.

By project end, the client had not just a data science report, but clear direction on how to reposition its brand in a way that is both uniquely theirs and grounded in real consumer sentiment.

Throughout the journey, the partnership was marked by shared commitment to innovation. The client's team remained open-minded as Growth Kinetics introduced cutting-edge analytical techniques, and Growth Kinetics remained focused on translating technical findings into business context. The result exemplified how marrying expert human insight with AI-driven analysis can solve complex marketing challenges.

Innovative Methodologies: Harnessing Web, Video, and AI at Scale

One remarkable aspect was the technical methodology Growth Kinetics deployed. To tackle the repositioning question, the team had to gather and analyze data on a scale -- and of a nature -- far beyond conventional market research.

Large-Scale Web Scraping of YouTube Content: Growth Kinetics identified YouTube as a rich vein of consumer discourse on beauty and hair care. The team built web scrapers to collect thousands of YouTube videos relevant to the client and the wider hair care category.

These included product review videos, beauty vlogs, shampoo comparison videos, commercials (and reactions to them), and tutorial or advice videos where the brand might be mentioned in passing.

Importantly, scraping targeted content in multiple languages and regions (from North America and Europe to Asia and Latin America) to capture cultural and linguistic diversity in how people discuss hair products. By phase end, Growth Kinetics had amassed a vast repository of unstructured multimedia data -- representing hundreds of hours of video and dialogue -- far exceeding what manual research could cover in scope

Speech-to-Text Transcription for a Massive Text Corpus

To analyze video content, Growth Kinetics transformed it into text. Using state-of-the-art speech-to-text models (automatic transcription engines), audio from each video was converted into searchable text transcripts. This was a non-trivial task: accents, languages, and audio quality varied widely, so the team leveraged robust AI transcription tools capable of high accuracy across contexts.

The payoff was enormous -- once videos became text data, they could be mined with natural language processing techniques at scale. This approach allowed the team to analyze vast amounts of consumer commentary efficiently, uncovering patterns invisible in small samples. By harnessing YouTube transcriptions, companies can gain valuable insights from huge content volumes, finding trends and sentiments that might otherwise go unnoticed.

The resulting text corpus included millions of words of real consumer language describing experiences, opinions, and values related to hair care and beauty.

Image Extraction and Vision-Language Modelling

Video isn't just about spoken words -- visuals carry meaning too. Growth Kinetics extracted key frames and images from collected videos (product shots, scenes from commercials, visuals of hair before/after using products, influencers demonstrating usage, etc.).

These images were analyzed with vision-language models, a form of AI connecting visual content to semantic concepts. Using advanced models (in the family of CLIP and other deep neural networks), the team could identify and categorize what was shown: Was the client's logo or bottle present? What hair styles (color, texture, length) were depicted? Were there recurring visual themes like laboratory settings (implying science) or nature backdrops (implying natural ingredients)?

By mapping these visuals, Growth Kinetics quantified the client's visual identity as it appears in online content and compared it to competitors. The analysis might reveal that brand-related videos frequently show imagery of shiny, smooth hair under studio lighting, aligning with traditional "healthy shine" positioning, whereas a competitor's videos might lean toward outdoor, natural imagery.

Identifying such differences helped illustrate the current visual "space" occupied and opportunities to evolve it. Vision-language modeling ensured non-verbal, aesthetic aspects of brand perception weren't lost in otherwise text-centric analysis.

Language Modelling and NLP for Semantic Analysis

With a giant text corpus of video transcripts (spanning multiple languages), Growth Kinetics applied powerful Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to extract semantic insights. This included both classical NLP methods and modern large language models.

The team performed topic modeling to find recurrent themes in how people discuss the brand -- topics might emerge around "hair damage repair," "salon vs. home haircare," "ingredient quality," or "self-confidence and hair."

They built word embeddings and semantic maps to understand associations: what words or concepts cluster around the client's brand in embedding space versus those around other brands? The NLP analysis could show close associations with terms like "vitamin formulation," "shine," or "strong hair," whereas a competitor might cluster with "gentle," "moisturizing," or "natural."

Additionally, sentiment analysis gauged tone -- whether the brand was spoken of with excitement, criticism, or ambivalence in different contexts.

This multilayered language modeling allowed Growth Kinetics to create a rich semantic profile: essentially a map of ideas, attributes, and emotions linked to the brand in collective consumer consciousness.

Given global reach, a critical methodology component was comparing insights across different linguistic and cultural contexts.

Growth Kinetics didn't treat English-language data as the only truth source; the team separately analyzed content in Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and other relevant languages to see perception differences. Advanced multi-lingual NLP models enabled concept alignment across languages -- "hair fall" in English vs. "queda de cabello" in Spanish -- ensuring apples-to-apples comparisons.

Findings revealed fascinating regional differences. In some markets, messaging about "strong hair" resonated deeply, whereas in others, the brand was more closely tied to celebrity endorsers or local beauty norms. By plotting these differences, Growth Kinetics helped understand where one-size-fits-all repositioning would work or where tailoring was needed.

This regional analysis proved crucial for strategists: it provided concrete evidence to balance global brand consistency with local relevance. The project delivered a panoramic view of brand perception worldwide -- something traditional research, confined to one country or a few focus cities, could never achieve at this granularity.

Throughout these technical endeavors, Growth Kinetics remained focused on why it mattered: every scrape, model, and analysis was designed to illuminate how the client could redefine its brand.

The innovative use of AI and data wasn't for novelty's sake, but to answer strategic questions posed by leadership. As Mrvaljevich put it, "we weren't just playing with fancy tools -- we were homing in on the brand's future identity, guided by what real people were saying and feeling."

Deliverables: Analysis, Semantic Mapping, and Strategic Guidance

After intensive analysis, Growth Kinetics delivered comprehensive outputs -- tangible deliverables translating complex project work into actionable intelligence:

Detailed Analytical Report:

The cornerstone was a deep-dive report compiling all findings. This report included data-driven answers to pressing questions about brand perception. It documented key themes discovered (top 5 emergent concepts consumers associate with the brand versus top competitors), supported by verbatim quotes from transcripts and quantitative metrics.

The report highlighted both expected findings (confirming "shine" and "healthy hair" are strongly linked in consumer language) and surprising insights (perhaps discovering underrated associations, such as users praising scent, or unintended perception of being more "salon-like" than realized).

Each insight was accompanied by significance explanation and Growth Kinetics' recommendations on leveraging or addressing it. Analysis rigor gave executives confidence -- every claim was data-backed, often with citations of concept frequency or sentiment ranking.

Semantic Maps and Visualizations:

A deliverable highlight was semantic mapping of brand space. Growth Kinetics produced visual maps depicting relationships between the brand and various attributes or ideas in consumer minds. In these maps, concepts clustered based on how closely they appeared together in speech and text.

One could literally see conceptual territory -- the brand might sit centrally in a cluster of terms like "shine," "vitamin-enriched," "strong hair," and "confidence," whereas another cluster might contain "natural," "organic," and "sulfate-free" (areas where perhaps the brand was more peripheral).

These semantic maps proved invaluable for the marketing team: they provided clear pictures of which conceptual territory was already owned, which territories were overcrowded with competitors, and where open space existed to stake claims. Maps helped visualize where credible repositioning for maximum differentiation was possible.

Deliverables included comparative maps by region, illuminating how the "brand concept cloud" in Asia differed from Europe. By examining these, the company could ensure repositioning strategy either narrows gaps (for unified global messaging) or intentionally diverges (suiting local tastes).

Institutional Learning and Workshops:

Growth Kinetics didn't just deliver reports and maps; they facilitated executive workshops and presentations embedding learning into the team.

Deliverables included interactive sessions where Growth Kinetics experts walked marketing and brand managers through findings, encouraging questions and discussion. In these sessions, the team translated insights into practical guidance.

If analysis found opportunity to own "scientific efficacy" concepts (due to vitamin-enriched heritage) in ways competitors didn't, Growth Kinetics guided on reinforcing that concept in messaging and innovation.

They provided scenario planning:

"If you lean into this positioning, here's how consumers might react, with supporting evidence from data."

By workshop end, decision-makers not only understood analysis but had clear sense of applying insights to upcoming marketing campaigns, product development (emphasizing certain ingredients or benefits), and brand communication strategies.

Guidance for Future Strategy:

Importantly, Growth Kinetics delivered forward-looking guidance extending beyond immediate repositioning. The engagement equipped the client with new institutional knowledge on leveraging data for brand management.

Growth Kinetics provided best practices for maintaining pulse on consumer sentiment using similar techniques -- essentially creating a playbook for the insights team to continue tapping big data and AI.

They recommended key metrics to monitor going forward (brand's share-of-voice on certain concepts on social media, or sentiment trends in user-generated videos).

Deliverables also advised on content strategy: suggesting encouragement of more user testimonials on YouTube around narratives the analysis found potent.

Beyond solving immediate challenges, deliverables served as foundation for continuous learning, ensuring the company could keep refining brand positioning with data-driven feedback loops.

By project end, the client had not just analysis but strategic compass. Comprehensive deliverables meant leadership could make informed decisions confidently, armed with nuanced understanding of brand perception far richer than anything previously available.

Value Delivered: Uncovering Unique Insight and Real-World Impact

The collaboration delivered transformative value. Ultimately, the client gained deeper, more nuanced understanding of brand perception and how to reposition for truly unique conceptual market space.

This understanding built on evidence and real consumer voices, not just gut feeling or isolated survey data. Insights were often revelations -- aspects of consumer sentiment invisible prior to this project were now illuminated.

These insights traditional research alone could never uncover: subtle emotional undercurrents in how consumers discuss "confidence" and hair, or niche cultural associations emerging only when analyzing millions of spontaneous user words.

It became clear the brand lived in consumers' stories and conversations in ways not fully realized, and now those hidden stories came to light. Armed with this knowledge, brand strategy could be refined with precision.

The company could confidently answer: What space can we own that no other brand owns? What should we stand for in hearts and minds of consumers, in each region, for differentiation yet authenticity?

Data-driven semantic maps and analysis pointed directly to answers. If the project revealed unique positioning at intersection of "scientific credibility" and "empowering confidence" in consumer perception, the company can double down on that positioning, knowing it's defensible niche supported by genuine feelings.

Conversely, findings might caution away from too-crowded spaces (every brand discussing "natural ingredients") or areas not credible to claim. This strategic clarity guides marketing investments, product messaging, even R&D focus, ensuring alignment with compelling brand identity.

Beyond immediate repositioning, broader implications emerged: Growth Kinetics helps enterprises harness bleeding-edge technology deriving real-world value from data. Here, AI was applied innovatively yet pragmatically -- blending large-scale data mining with human strategic thinking -- solving classic business challenges (brand positioning).

Project success demonstrated techniques like web scraping, natural language processing, and vision-language modeling aren't just academic exercises; guided by expert analysts, they become powerful business strategy tools.

Leadership gained confidence in data-driven decision-making, seeing firsthand how analytical rigor marries with creative brand strategy producing winning outcomes.

In conclusion, Growth Kinetics' work enabled brand rediscovery through consumer eyes. The case underscores how established enterprises can reinvent by listening to right data in right ways.

The client emerged with clear paths to rejuvenate market identity, supported by insights richer and more authentic than traditional methods could provide.

For Growth Kinetics, this project stands as testament to its mission: combining cutting-edge AI with savvy business consulting helping organizations uncover hidden insights and translate them into strategic advantage.

The result: win-win -- technology delivering real-world value, and a brand poised to shine stronger than ever.