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I decided to supplement the work we’ve been doing with the Brand Passion Index to highlight ConsumerBase’s ability to mine social media sources for brand-specific consumer ideas and verbatim. My brand of choice for this particular ConsumerBase adventure? The very recognizable, and apparently all-purpose, household name, Alka Seltzer.
Using ConsumerBase to research brands and the chatter about them, I have access to an enormous amount of information, some of it very surprising and unexpected—who’d have guessed that Snickers pair well with Madeira wine (see my earlier blog post for more inspiring wine matches)?! While a few of the results are just fun and quirky, many others can prove to be a real “aha!” moment for researchers and brand managers—genuinely useful insights that can lead to new products, applications or markets.
To demonstrate the power of ConsumerBase to read and understand millions of sites, postings, tweets, etc. on the Web and unearth some real gems, we put it to work on Alka Seltzer.
Our search revealed a range of uses, functions and thoughts on Alka Seltzer within the social media universe:
- Use Alka-Seltzer instead of baking powder to make a cherry cobbler qualify as a healthy snack.
- Children with any type of flu symptoms should not take aspirin or any medicine containing aspirin such as Pepto-Bismol and Alka-Seltzer because it could lead to Reyes Syndrome.
- Alka-Seltzer is cheaper and safer than most proprietary cleaning products, and is sometimes already in the home.
- My husband won’t even take Alka-Seltzer because “braving” the symptoms becomes a testosterone-soaked badge of manliness, like “walking it off” or “taking it like a man.”
- I just found out I am pregnant and the heartburn is excruciating but I can’t take Alka-Seltzer or anything with aspirin. Help!
So what do you think? Alka Seltzer as both a cleaning product AND a healthy baking alternative? Let me know your thoughts – and what brands you’d like some insight on next time.
This column shows ConsumerBase in action-I use our tool to discover insights about brands and report back what consumers are saying. As always, feel free to join the conversation or suggest brands you’d like to see next.
I must have had dinner on my mind at the time, when I found that numerous consumers have come up with some pretty novel wine pairings. Sure, we all know that white wine goes with fish and cabernet goes with steak.
But – did you know…
- Cool Ranch Doritos go well with a rosé
- Salt-n-vinegar potato chips match with pouilly fume
- Krispy Kreme donuts are a dream with sparkling wine
- And my personal favorite: Snickers bars & sweet Madeira wine. Yum
How about it? Maybe Krispy Kreme could break out of the breakfast market with a new dessert offering. We’re moving beyond listening. We understand what consumers think, feel and even drink – discovering insights based on social media chatter.
Drop me a line and let me know what you’d like me to look at next.
More and more companies today are looking at the sentiment consumers are voicing about their brands in online forums, blogs, microblogs, etc. There’s good reason for this as it has been shown that positive and negative word of mouth correlates with growth. “Answering The Ultimate Question” is a book I’ve been reading recently makes a strong case for the positive word of mouth as a leading indicator for revenue growth. What that means is a brand manager should be able to predict their revenue growth based upon what’s currently being said about their brand.
With the amount of data being generated by consumers out there, managers need tools to detect and analyze sentiment automatically. The hardest thing about getting sentiment analysis right though is uncovering exactly what is being said by a piece of sentiment-rich text. There’s a big difference between a customer saying they merely like a brand and saying that they love it. What’s more is sentiment has many rich and nuanced dimensions that need to be teased apart to make it truly insightful. One person posts on Twitter, “Old lady at Wal-Mart told me warm Dr. Pepper was delicious.” Another comments, “I loved Dr. Pepper because of Dude.” Aside from avoiding the common blunders of associating the sentiment with the wrong brand in the tweet, deep sentiment analysis needs to unpack the specific drivers of the sentiment. In the first sentence, the sentiment for Dr. Pepper is positive because someone thinks it’s delicious. Contrast that functional benefit with the rich nostalgia expressed in the second sentence where a Baby Boomer recalls the famous Dr. Pepper “Dude” in the “I’m a Pepper” TV commercial . The best algorithms out there have to go deeper than sentiment detection. They need to be true sentiment analyzers that can precisely identify sentiment, extract it, and classify it as a functional, emotional, or behavioral insight, etc..
In the coming year, I believe we’ll need sentiment analysis that can get to very fine levels of detail while keeping up with the enormous and growing volume of social media. For instance, the “Ultimate Question” book I referenced earlier is all about whether a consumer likes your brand enough to recommend it. Loose sentiment detection isn’t precise enough to answer this type of question because it lumps everything from the high-end of recommending to the low-end of merely liking into one positive bucket. Managers will demand this type of precision as they look more and more to make critical business decisions based on insights derived from sentiment analysis.
Michael
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