Consumer drivers, the emotions and behaviors that signal consumers’ intent to buy, can feel like elusive creatures some days. But what if what you’re looking for is right there within your own data pool? Often, all it takes is running the dataset that you already have through the proper data analysis platform to discover the information you need. Those consumer drivers are hiding and we’re going to help you find them!
Today, we are going to share a few tips to help you identify consumer drivers that are hiding within your data pool and hopefully the next time you feel like you don’t understand your own customer you will remember where to turn.
Your Data Pool is Vast
Did you know you have enough data to cover all the existing information gaps blocking your ability to understand your target consumer? Consumer, market, and proprietary intelligence is at your fingertips and offers everything you need to identify consumer drivers so you can improve your messaging, enhance customer service, and meet product demand.
That datasets above represent everything you need to identify consumer drivers. Let’s explore each in turn:
Consumer Data
Consumer data can be obtained from various social media platforms where you know your target audiences spend their time. This is where they are talking to their peers about products and services they are interested in as well as their experiences with different brands. According to research, 71% of consumer buying decisions are heavily influenced by social media. But that’s not all; the internet as a whole is a great resource for consumers. This is why it is equally important to analyze blog comments, forum discussions, and review sites.
Market Intelligence
Next, you have market intelligence sources that reveal what is going on in the industry in terms of news and business activities. NetBase Quid®has formed strategic partnerships in this area to make sure you don’t miss anything that may be of interest to your brand. Particularly, make use of our partnership with LexisNexis to autonomously analyze a wide variety of global news sources from household names to regional outlets. LexisNexis allows brands to analyze more than one billion indexed articles and a host of other top and mid-tier publications. Beyond the news sources, NetBase Quid® let’s you view relevant information on what your competitors are doing including new technologies, patent applications, funding, and more.
Proprietary Data
Finally, you have your own proprietary data. This includes all you have within your customer relationship management (CRM) systems, sales reports, and legacy system data that can be imported into the platform regardless of its format.
Putting It All Together
NetBase Quid® reaches across all these sources to ensure you’re never in the dark. Still, you might say, “This information is good, but how does it help us identify consumer drivers? How do we interpret it to get the kind of intelligence you’re talking about?” We’re not done yet
Understanding Emotions & Behaviors
To know what consumers are going to do next, you need to get into their minds. This is what successful research companies do––like 113 Industries, one of our major clients. We had a team from 113 Industries on one of our NetBase Quid® LIVE events and they explained how consumer choices are influenced by interconnected dynamics of the heart and mind.
Probably not surprisingly, consumers are not always conscious of what they want or the actions they are going to take. But what’s surprising is that they express it in their behavior all the time! It’s the words they use and things they do while interacting with their peers, brands, or products. It is the job of the analyst to untangle this complex decision-making process and streamline it to eventually provide the perfect solution to the problem.
But it is all hidden in the mind of the consumer, and s/he only knows how to give unconscious cues. Your data is filled with these cues – these indicators of consumer intent.
To illustrate, below is a word cloud that we recently generated based on conversations around a range of hot topics: Inclusion, diversity, equity, and sustainability.
You can see how easy it is to pick out the emotions. First you have the green-coded words denoting positive emotions in contrast with the red-coded ones that indicate negative emotions. See how words like “excited”, “love”, and “great” stand out? This shows that more conversations contained them than all the rest. Notice how the red fades into the background because what do you expect? There are not very many people speaking against these trending topics.
Now look at a different cloud based on the same trends, but this time filtered by people’s behavioral cues:
“Broaden”, “google”, “support”, “want”, “celebrate”, etc. These jump right at you. They reflect the action-oriented consumer conversations around the topics.
Imagine if you were to conduct a survey asking people different questions trying to come up with that level of depth in feedback. It’s not feasible or even possible from a business standpoint. Not because surveying is not an effective mode of data collection but just because that’s not its place. NetBase Quid® is designed to uncover consumer emotions and behaviors from the conversations they have in their natural settings.
Through AI-based sentiment analysis, the platform reveals what is going on within the minds of consumers, at scale. Meaning, you don’t just know what one consumer is thinking, you discover the zeitgeist. Our sentiment analysis feature is built on now well-known AI technology referred to as natural language processing (NLP). It parses unstructured (text-based) consumer data to extract consumer sentiment and help you identify consumer drivers with a thorough understanding of the emotions and behaviors that precede their purchasing decisions.
Opus Upload & Intelligence Connector
Now, evidently, you need to have your data pool in order. You may have your data scattered all over the place and for a good reason: You use different tools to gather data from various sources and some of it you’ve had for a long time tucked away in legacy systems that don’t match up to modern needs. However, all your data needs to be pooled in a single place if you are to comprehensively analyze it and get the right depth of intelligence. If you do not have access to your entire data pool in one central place, you will not be able to identify consumer drivers.
Luckily, there is a solution for this. Two solutions, in fact: NetBase Quid®’s Opus Upload and our Intelligence Connector.
Our Opus Upload is a feature that lets you visualize and analyze any set of text-based data. It lets you bring your own data into the platform. In other words, you can upload any kind of text-based dataset from unread emails to earnings calls or chat logs – it’s all valuable.
You can use Opus to bring to the platform data such as product reviews, forum discussions, survey responses, social media conversations, job postings, clinical trials, corporate filings, professional profiles, academic and scientific papers, Net Promoter Score data, employee surveys, call center transcripts, project reports, and other internal documents.
The other solution, Intelligence Connector, is a feature that helps organizations extend the value of their data by allowing integration of different data sources to support analytics. The feature combines consumer analytics data, market data, news data, social media data, product review data, survey data, external company data, internal CRM data, and proprietary data into a single source of truth.
The feature enables you to pull the insights and metrics from the NetBase Quid® platform and connect the database to any other business intelligence tools used in your business such as Tableau, Looker, Domo, etc. Once uploaded, the integrated data is structured and contextualized for easy analysis and interpretation. This is the perfect solution for an enterprise facing challenges with scaling its insight. It is also democratized, supporting rapid decision-making across the entire organization.
The modern business thrives on data. Each morsel of data you collect should be used effectively in growing your business. If you would like to know how to examine the full extent of your data pool, reveal the intelligence contained therein, or simply to integrate data from your various sources in order to identify consumer drivers easily, reach out for a demo today! We’re happy to help you uncover those gems and set up systems to identify emerging insight moving forward!
