‘Conversational Capital’: The Brand Asset Your Dashboard Doesn't Measure

Did you know four out of five of U.S. consumers say they actively try to tune out ads? And that instinct doesn't stop at advertising, it applies to everything a brand publishes. Which is a little strange because most brands tend to go all guns blazing when it comes to marketing.

But despite having access to data and channels in abundance and churning out content in volumes never heard of before, the results have little to no relevance to show for it.

We see why at scale, across thousands of enterprise brands.

Social listening lives in one tool, publishing in another, customer care in a third — so insight reaches the person writing the post too late. Every new channel your audience adopts becomes another place to publish and another place to listen, rarely with the headcount to do either well. And unifying all of it on one platform removes the excuse without changing how a communication team decides what to say. You can consolidate every channel, every listening feed, every workflow, and still publish exactly what you published before. Just faster.

That's an operating model problem. And the people closest to solving it are the practitioners who rebuild communication operations for a living. Which brings us to the Raffish Agency, one of Sprinklr's trusted partners — a specialized CX consultancy that has built its entire practice on Sprinklr. Since 2022, they've been developing a framework for exactly this problem.

It's called "Conversational Capital."

The relevance problem

Raffish benchmarked communication planning across ten enterprise teams. What they found is that only 10–20% of planned communication is built around what the audience is currently discussing. Everything else is planned around what the brand wants to say.

It essentially means four out of every five messages your organization publishes were decided without reference to the live conversation they're entering. And this is where real-time listening quietly stops being enough because listening without a mechanism to change the plan is just confirmation, and expensive confirmation at that.

Consider a bank building a communication calendar for younger customers. The themes write themselves: student accounts, first mortgages, financial education. But by Q3, that audience had moved. Now the conversation was about housing affordability, economic anxiety and financial independence — not the products the bank sells, but the fears those products sit inside. The calendar wasn't wrong when it was built. It was just built once whereas the audiences’ concerns and priorities keep shifting continually.

3 behaviors that build relevance

Brands that stay relevant don't stick to just one channel or one message. They balance three distinct communication behaviors, each doing a different job for the audience.

Provoke — creates attention

Provoke refers to you introducing an idea your audience feels compelled to discuss. Not a hot take, but a genuine question the category hasn't resolved.

The critical distinction is that provocative content is category-centric rather than product-centric. People rarely share products but they share ideas all the time. In other words, your audience is already having the conversation that will decide your category. The only question is whether your brand is in it.

And if you're not creating conversations, something predictable happens: you become dependent on paid media to stay visible, which can be a hit or miss.

Did you know? Sprinklr is the only platform that offers out-of-the-box support for 30+ social and messaging channels. With the ease of adding new channels quickly, teams never have to worry about missing conversations that matter.

Own — creates consistency

Own is the communication your audience expects from you. Product launches, campaigns, customer stories, events, corporate news. The things your enterprise cares about, said consistently.

Most organizations understand this pillar. Many execute it well. And it still has two limits that rarely make it into a planning deck.

The first is lock-in. Sustained Own communication builds a loyal audience that comes to expect a specific kind of content from you. That's the point until you want to change direction. Shift your themes or drop your cadence, and you risk losing the interest you spent years earning. Consistency isn't only an asset you accumulate but an obligation you take on. If you as brand become a steward — a source of truth for specific information — you essentially become a leader of the respective field, that is both expected to innovate and stay consistent.

The second is the ceiling, and it's the one that should concern you. Own reaches the audience already paying attention. It rarely converts people who haven't encountered your brand yet, or who have encountered it and haven't been given a reason to care. You can execute Own flawlessly, hit every metric on the dashboard, and still not grow.

Participate — creates trust

Participate alludes to entering conversations without immediately trying to sell something.

It takes two forms. Through personality and through expertise.

For enterprise, expertise is the stronger route. Your organization participates through its people rather than its logo, and your people become the distribution.

The data backs this harder than most CMOs realize. Edelman's 2026 findings (referenced earlier in the blog) show that globally, what people not paid by the brand say about it carries far more weight than what the brand says about itself — with unpaid advocates, customers and peers weighted most heavily of all. Edelman's own recommendation to brands is to lead with earned and scale with paid, in that order.

Most organizations do the opposite. They pour nearly everything into planned and reactive communication, leaving the two behaviors that actually build attention and trust underused.

Related Read: The Hidden Costs of Scaling Paid Social

Conversational Capital: the answer to "so what?"

Every CMO knows the moment. You present the quarterly numbers — engagement, reach, followers, clicks, etc. — and someone at the table asks the question that undoes the whole deck.

So what?

It isn't a hostile question. It's a fair one, and the numbers genuinely don't answer it. McKinsey's research with the ANA found that 70% of CEOs measure marketing's impact on year-on-year revenue growth and margin — while only 35% of CMOs track that as a top metric. Two-thirds of the room is measuring one thing. A third of the room is presenting another.

Conversational Capital is Raffish's attempt to close that gap in language a board will accept.

Participate, Own and Provoke, sustained together over time, compound into something an audience can't be bought into: a brand that is present in the conversations that shape its market. That accumulated presence builds relevance. Relevance builds trust and preference. Trust and preference build advocacy and retention. And advocacy and retention are where customer lifetime value (CLV) comes from.

It's a reasoning model, not an attribution model, and it should be presented that way. But it gives you something the dashboard never has: a sentence connecting what your social team did last quarter to a number your CFO already cares about.

Why this is an operating model problem

Here's the difficulty. Provoke and Participate cannot run at enterprise scale on instinct.

Provoke requires knowing what your market is already discussing, in real time, with enough resolution to spot an unresolved question worth entering. Own requires continuous listening to stay aligned as priorities shift underneath a signed-off calendar. Participate requires governed workflows so that hundreds of employees across dozens of markets can speak in public without creating legal, brand or regulatory risk.

Unified data, listening, publishing, governance, AI are platform problems, but the platform doesn't rebalance the ratio for you. It makes rebalance possible. Somebody still has to go into the organization, look at where the 80% is going, and change how the work gets decided.

What this looks like in practice

Raffish didn't arrive at this framework theoretically. They arrived at it from inside the problem — from two directions at once.

Ieva Vaitiekūnaitė was working with Sprinklr on the client side at Signify, where the platform was delivering real results in social media management: global coordination, content governance, operational clarity. Then a COVID-driven restructure cleared out internal teams, and the agency proposals started arriving. Reference calls, project scopes, sample deliverables — all of it expensive, underwhelming, and well below the standard her own team had been holding. Which raised an obvious question: why not build an agency that actually understands Sprinklr, both the platform and the business around it?

Philip Könings was freelancing at the time, brought in to fix a broken Sprinklr implementation and repair a client relationship at Jumbo Supermarkten. He expected technical problems. What he found was a vocabulary problem. Sprinklr is too complex for most clients to brief effectively, and too strategic for many implementation specialists to configure meaningfully — leaving a gap not just between strategy and execution, but between what the platform can do, what the business needs, and the language to connect the two.

The Sprinklr network introduced them. A LinkedIn message became six months of remote collaboration before the two ever met in person — which is why Raffish was built fully remote from day one. Earlier this year we signed a reseller agreement with them, making Raffish a full-service Sprinklr partner across implementation, resale and referral.

The clearest illustration of their thinking is Jumbo — Philip's original client, and Raffish's first. The platform was already bought. The value hadn't landed yet: three modules had been implemented but the business was still struggling to make the most of the investment.

"Raffish Agency provided invaluable support in taking a significant workload off our shoulders. Their understanding of our needs has brought us more clarity in what we need to do for a successful implementation."

— Elke Van Looveren, Head of Digital Channels, Jumbo Supermarkten

What Raffish built was Participate at scale: an HQ-to-store operating model connecting hundreds of local social accounts, with adoption driven through internal marketing and gamification rather than mandate. The store network now reaches four times the audience of the corporate HQ account — and does it on a content system where half of all assets are reused or repurposed rather than recreated. Read more about the use case here.

Hundreds of local voices, speaking with the brand rather than for it. That's the hardest version of the thing the framework says is hardest.

The question worth changing

Most communication planning starts with a question about volume. How much should we publish? Across which channels? At what cadence?

It's the wrong question, and it has been around for a while. The audience never asked how much you were publishing. They asked whether you were worth listening to.

The better question — the one Conversational Capital is built to answer — is this: how often do we create, sustain, and join the conversations that matter to our audience?

We work with a lot of partners. The ones we learn most from are the ones who show up with a point of view rather than a services menu, and who have earned it by doing the work inside organizations that had to change. Raffish is one of those, and it's why this collaboration keeps growing.

Learn more about the Raffish Agency here.