NetBase: Insight Delivered

PSFK, a creative think tank, just released a Good Brands report that lists the top brands for “imagination, innovation, environmental responsibility and social consciousness.“. What I really like is the 10 point list of key learnings from the study of these brands.

• Constant innovation and experimentation
• Re-imagine the world
• Create the game you want to play
• Live your brand & teach others about it
• Build value By sharing Knowledge
• Align around good
• React daily
• Rather than a product to purchase, provide a mentality to buy
• Present products as stories
• Partner with Likeminded brands to create improved products & services

Here’s the document from slideshare:



Good Brands Report 2010
View more documents from PSFK.

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It does according to a post on Vigetengage by former staffer Jen Krupey. In a section of her post entitled “Sentiment Stinks,” Jen wrote that, “Overarching consensus was that no tool does a ‘great’ job getting sentiment right. Human review is still needed.

But that was before Jen or anyone else had seen our ConsumerBase product, which addresses the exact problem she’s highlighting. She’s saying that sentiment analysis stinks because the accuracy/precision levels of current tools are so low that a human analyst needs to clean up the tool’s output to make it usable. That means wasted time, and time is money, so it really means wasted money.

There’s no denying that Natural Language Processing is a hard problem for sentiment, but I think users will find ConsumerBase does a much better job at it and results will require far less manual clean-up.

Here’s an example: For a search on Listerine, ConsumerBase can pick out all these negatives:

That’s great precision, which will save you a lot of time. But you’re still going to want to do some “laddering up” of these insights into “themes” that make sense to the business. For example, you would probably group these all under the theme “Too Harsh.”
We recognize this “laddering up” is essential to doing analytical work, so we’ve baked theming right into ConsumerBase. In fact, once you’ve grouped your insights into themes relevant to the way you look at the world, you can then automatically build a pie chart from the data. Our improved precision and the theming capability should be a big time saver for any analyst whose job it is to track sentiment.

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I’ve had the privilege to work with some of the world’s biggest brands as they begin to incorporate consumer insights from social media into their market research. These companies have traditionally relied on a range of qualitative and quantitative techniques conducted in parallel or serially, such as focus groups, surveys, interviews and ethnographies. These techniques rely on the direct observance of human behavior. While effective as standalone entities, each approach is subject to bias, and the triangulation process to combine results into one comprehensive output is costly and time-intensive.

Now, with blogs, forums, social networks and the plethora of information posted in social media, data on consumer sentiment and opinion is readily available. Companies don’t need to resort to expensive and time-consuming techniques to find out what consumers are thinking. They just need a way to efficiently collect and analyze that raw data from the Internet.

Enter netnography, which uses the Internet as a proxy for the voice of the customer.

Netnography is the process of accessing and analyzing sentiments and opinions expressed by consumers chatting in blogs, forums and online discussion groups. It’s ethnography done via the Internet. You can download a paper on the subject authored by Rob Kozinets, the university professor who is the “father of netnography”.

Using netnography, major companies can conduct research to identify the most frequently mentioned consumer opinions pertaining to their products and marketing methods with a much quicker turnaround time, cheaper price tag, and results that are arguably more authentic expressions of opinion and need.

The sooner companies realize this and begin to use netnography, the sooner they’ll begin saving themselves millions of dollars and end up with better, more relevant information to boot.

Starting the triangulation process with netnography, which is cheap and fast, can save companies time and money and help them determine what their next research steps should be.

A netnographic study can be a very valuable first step in a larger research program and the first corner point in the process of triangulating research to reach valid conclusions. Performing a netnographic study before launching into more expensive and time-consuming methods can expedite the research cycle by providing researchers with preliminary information that enables them to immediately dive into more focused and valuable tasks. What’s more, doing a netnography as a first step allows companies to streamline their research efforts and get more significant results out of the more resource-intensive phases.

The take-away message–Using netnography, researchers and decision-makers can now quickly and cheaply check on whether an idea presented to them will resonate with consumers–before spending any further time or money on it. Doing netnography first as the first step in the process of triangulation gives them a quick and accurate read on where to direct their future research and marketing efforts.

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It’s amazing that this video has only got 55 views on youtube, talk about under the radar. In the video Grant McCracken talks about the end of mass marketing, the end of smithsian economics, and how organizations need to become better at reading and participating in culture. Brings out great examples from Steve Jobs to Ford Fiesta.

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The original vision for NetBase was this: Create a tool that makes it possible to harvest insights from the web about people’s unmet needs, then match those needs with new technologies that could be productized to meet them. For me, that’s the definition of an innovation.

I’m proud to say that on April 30, we will have delivered on that vision. That’s when we release ConsumerBase, which helps marketers understand consumers and their needs. We’ve already released illumin8 with our partner Elsevier, which helps researchers find answers to technical questions. Now, by combining the capabilities of ConsumerBase and illumin8, companies have the tools to marry consumer and technical insights.

So how does that lead to innovation? By helping R&D and Marketing work together to marry needs with technologies and develop innovative solutions. R&D can use ConsumerBase—the marketer’s tool—to quickly find answers to key questions about consumer attitudes. They don’t have to wait for Marketing to conduct focus groups or do an ethnographic study. If they find there’s an unmet need for a product they could develop, they can proceed with confidence, knowing they’re developing a product that will produce revenue for the company.

Likewise, Marketing can use Illumin8—the technologist’s tool—to do preliminary research and determine if there’s a technology that can be used to satisfy an identified need. (True, technologists are more likely to do market research than marketers are to do technical research, but it’s just as feasible.)

Here’s a condensed example of how this process could work.

• Using ConsumerBase, a company does a social media analysis on Listerine. It reveals that many consumers make comments such as, “Listerine is too strong, it stings, it’s too harsh.” That insight into consumer sentiment suggests that there may be a market for a new flavor of Listerine that preserves the strength but is less harsh—Listerine with Soothing Power.
• Another consumer made this comment: “It’s pretty cool [doesn’t burn], and normally one can find peroxide for less than a dollar a bottle, whereas Listerine is quite expensive and burns while peroxide does not.” This comment mentions a technology—peroxide—that can meet an identified consumer desire.
• At this point, a researcher could turn to illumin8, which is designed to do searches in scientific and technical sources, and search for a peroxide-based mouthwash. Maybe a lab somewhere has already developed one; maybe it’s just for medical use. The researcher may find a ready-made solution, or at least greatly reduce the time a company spends investigating the status of peroxide-based mouthwash products.

Above: Page from presentation on social media analysis of Listerine using ConsumerBase.

What’s the take-away message? Companies that take advantage of the power of ConsumerBase and illumin8 to marry technical and consumer insights can increase the synergy between their R&D and Marketing functions and develop new products with solid sales potential much faster.

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Jeff Esposito recently posted a great analysis of a few of the many listening tools out there. Very interesting to see that for just one topic he had been spending 10 hours a week just categorizing sentiment manually. Imagine how long it would take to code for attributes, emotions, behaviors, and all of the other insights that ConsumerBase understands and codes automatically.

We have used our ability to help understand consumer sentiment from online conversations to support an powerful way to do ethnography online called Netnography. This concept and practice was conceived by Rob Kozinets, a marketing professor at York University who is has partnered with us at NetBase to help inform the market. Download the free paper here. Netnography, the marketers secret weapon

You can find out more about Prof. Kozinets on his blog and of course you can follow him on twitter (he looks a little like Seth Godin).

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