What are Grey Lists and how do I use them?
Grey Lists are lists of words and phrases that our system can optionally exclude or deweight during the analysis and scoring steps. By applying these lists, we’re more easily able to determine audience appeal and brand alignment within industries.
The Pluralytics ValuesFinder platform finds the relative voice of our copy / content by analyzing the words and phrases used. When we’re writing in an industry or field, the words we choose are often dominated by the common words that span our content and our competitors. When writing for compliance purposes, some words are required by law. This has the effect of skewing the analysis of our content, along with our competitors. When this happens, we want to reduce the impact of these words and phrases so that our brand and audience signals are clear.
Let’s look at an example.
Main Street Bank (A hypothetical Bank) is writing about checking accounts. All banks have checking accounts, so do other related financial institutions. All of them write about checking accounts and do so regularly. For Main Street Bank, this is one of their most common phrases, and it’s unavoidably common.
Main Street Bank wants to assess their audience appeal - and do so in a way that provides context on their appeal within the Banking Industry as a whole. When they treat “checking account” as a normal phrase, the entire industry starts moving towards certain values segments (read about ValuesVoice Enclaves here). Our whole ValuesVoice profile starts skewing for the entire industry. This means the entire industry might all pass a common benchmark and fail others. But this isn’t a true representation of where Main Street Bank lies, or any other bank because everyone needs banking to some degree and we want to understand where alignment is within banking!
Main Street addresses this by adding common industry phrases, like “checking account” and “bank” to their grey lists. This has the effect of removing the industry-wide signal so that their audience appeal and brand alignment within the industry becomes clear.
A word of caution. Grey listing is a powerful feature for finding signal within the noise. However, adding the wrong words and phrases can lead to unexpected results. For the best results, focus on the words and phrases that you and your competitors can’t avoid. E.g. industry standard words, legally required words and phrases. Another successful strategy is to look at the most common words for potential grey list options as these often contain unavoidable words