To remain competitive, brands must stay ahead of emerging trends. With a rapidly changing landscape, how can they know which trends will resonate with their audience? Enter sentiment analysis—a tool that helps brands check the vibe of emerging trends and stay on top of trends already in play. Let’s see how it looks!
By using sentiment indicators, brands can gather comprehensive awareness of audience opinions and feelings toward upcoming trends, allowing them to make informed decisions about which ones to pursue.
As we can see in the infographic below, a variety of consumer behaviors are shared when we explore the “must have” desire. And depending on the item in question, knowing which lever to pull and which behaviors to message out can mean the difference between making a sale and alienating a consumer base.
So, depending on the desired topic tracked, the love expressed can take different forms. But underneath it all, the nitty gritty of the intel lies the passion, which is revealed by sentiment analysis
And sentiment analysis is meaningful for brands for a variety of other use cases as well. Let’s touch on those as it all applies to a brand’s overall consumer and market understanding, which should inform data-driven strategic planning as we enter the second month of 2023!
Why Sentiment Analysis is Meaningful for Brands
Sentiment analysis is a dynamic capability for brands to understand consumers’ emotions and opinions. These people’s feelings are critical to offering the products and services consumers crave. And it’s even essential for understanding the brand itself—its consumer perception.
It identifies customer pain points, uncovers areas for improvement, and builds better relationships. Sentiment analysis also helps brands anticipate consumer trends to ensure they are ahead of the curve when offering new products and services. With this data, brands can make informed decisions about their strategies and develop a strong relationship with their target audience. Let’s count the ways:
1. Evaluating Competitors
The technology can help companies keep track of consumer feedback on competing brands and products. This information can be used to craft clever strategies, recognize trends in the market, and stay competitive by understanding how a brand is perceived compared to its competition.
2. Finding Audiences
Understanding an audience is necessary for any successful marketing strategy, and sentiment analysis helps to uncover more comprehensive data about their preferences. By taking the time to understand their motivations and behaviors, brands can create tailored campaigns that lead to improved customer loyalty and higher ROI.
Extracting demographic information and identifying gender-specific preferences.
3. Identifying Influencers
Sentiment analysis also helps identify influencers who are passionate about a brand. It helps establish better connections with those influencers, thus increasing reach and a brand’s products.
4. Identify and Resolve Issues
Brands can monitor customer conversations and respond to negative feedback in real-time. It allows them to quickly assess the severity of an issue and offer personalized solutions that improve customer satisfaction.
5. Measuring a Brand’s Health
Sentiment analysis measures the public opinion of brand image. Social media monitoring investigates why sentiment fluctuates. By understanding what customers think about a brand, decisions for maintaining a positive reputation and keeping customers engaged and loyal can be quickly implemented.
6. Revealing Emerging Trends
Using sentiment analysis, brands can uncover emerging trends in their industry, see how invested the public is, and consider regional differences. It allows brands to capitalize on trends before they take hold and stay ahead of the competition.
7. Proper Feedback
AI-powered sentiment analysis helps brands capture an accurate understanding of their target market’s opinion before launching a new product or campaign, allowing them to make informed decisions that will maximize their success.
What Sentiment Summaries Reveal Over Time
Sentiment summaries provide a precise estimation of how customers feel about a company’s products and services. And collecting and analyzing customer sentiment helps companies determine how effective their campaigns are and how to optimize them for future endeavors. Summary metrics reveal spikes in mentions but also in view (positive or negative):
Sentiment analysis provides a reliable, convenient way for businesses to monitor customer opinion and make adjustments to ensure their offerings meet customers’ needs and expectations and to forecast whether or not people are likely to accept new ideas—like increased interactions with strangers or if caffeine will phase out.
Will Talking to Strangers Become a Thing?
Analyzing comments and conversations in social media, combined with surveys, provides insight into how people feel about talking to strangers in public. If sentiment towards this idea shifts, it may become more socially acceptable to talk to strangers in the next few years. How will that impact your brand? Only time will tell if it will become a thing, but if it does, you’ll want to have customer-facing ambassadors ready and waiting to level up and amplify your messaging.
Is Caffeine Intake on the Out?
For centuries, caffeine has been part of our diet, and its status is unlikely to change anytime soon. Thanks to sentiment analysis, companies can evaluate how the public views this stimulant. We can track conversations to see if people are transitioning to decaf options or continuing to rely on caffeine.
With increased health-conscious consumers and the growing demand for alcohol-free beverages, sentiment analysis can reveal if this is still a developing trend. Brands can use this data to shape their product design, keeping them on top of new fads.
How will we know if these conversations start to spike? You guessed it – sentiment analysis. And it hinges on the accuracy of the sentiment you’re using. Fortunately, we’ve set the standard for NLP.
Understanding the Intricacies of NLP
Natural Language Processing (NLP) offers brands gain valuable insight into customer opinion, emerging trends, and the competitive landscape. Our NLP technology processes and standardizes consumer conversations, offering a perspective into the emotions of the masses about whichever specific topics.
It can detect subtle nuances in conversations and uncover insights that would otherwise be missed, parsing the emotions, behaviors, hashtags, objects, attributes, people, and brands mentioned in each piece of data.
As we shared previously in our interview with an in-house data scientist, the danger comes when brands assume all NLP offerings are the same; many tools base their resulting analysis on shaky assumptions.
For example, many labor under the false impression that a document can in totality be summed up as “positive,” “negative,” or “neutral”—and this is incorrect. At NetBase Quid® we focus on linguistically detailed “aspect-based” sentiment. In contrast, many of our competitors and open-source sentiment systems cannot provide this level of detail and continue to label entire sentences or documents even though advanced models have proven this methodology is flawed.
When sorting out which trends or product ideas will resonate in the coming months, it will be essential to check that consumer vibe with an accurate sentiment analysis option. And we know a place to help you. Reach out for a demo today!
