157: MI Diaries: The Development of a Research Project as a Brand

Voiceover

Presenter(s)

Alexis Furkioti, Jacob Rechsteiner

Abstract or Description

It is unusual for a research project to require brand management, but we quickly recognized that it could be essential to the attraction and retention of participants in a longitudinal study. The MI Diaries research project from the MSU Sociolinguistics Lab has adopted brand management practices to establish its credibility and generate awareness to Michiganders, to ultimately serve its goal of documenting life and language beyond the COVID-19 pandemic. Traditionally, in order to build trust and collect unselfconscious speech, a sociolinguistic researcher sits down with the participant and audio-records a casual conversation. However, social distancing has led the MI Diaries project to collect self-recorded audio diaries instead. Brand management has historically been utilized to progress an established company's value over a period of time; however, MI Diaries was a new research entity without any awareness or trustworthiness. The project needed to build a brand that would invoke a sense of safety and honesty, so that diarists would feel as comfortable sharing stories from their lives with a non-visible researcher as they would with a co-present one. To address this disconnect, we constructed a social media strategy, defined our mission, vision, and values, created a visual identity, managed our press and publicity and utilized promotional incentive programs. As a result of implementing these branding strategies, we are successfully recruiting, retaining and engaging participants and have finally established the MI Diaries brand identity.