Competitive intelligence is any bit of intel that gives your brand an edge over the competition. And having a large dataset of social conversations and the ability to slice and dice the data to get to the roots of trends or brand shortcomings is indispensable in today’s business landscape. Here we’ll explore some ways that brands can employ Quid Social for a competitive intelligence win.
We’ll use Quid Social to open up a window into brand possibilities by looking at:
- Peloton pushing past the competition.
- Men’s grooming brand Manscaped making smart moves.
- And why consumers are running to Ross Stores.
Before we get going though, here are a few consumer statistics that are meaningful for brands:
- 67% of consumers say they are likely to spend more with a brand if they have had a positive customer experience.
- Public social media feeds account for 52% of online brand discovery by new consumers.
- 44% of consumers between 18 and 34 have purchased based on an influencer’s recommendation, while 79% say that user generated content (UGC) has influenced a buying decision.
Peloton Pushing Ahead of the Competition
With 2.6M subscribers in the U.S, UK and Canada, home fitness brand Peloton has weathered the pandemic remarkably. Consumers are all about their fitness journey these days and the ability to not only workout at home, but connect with trainers and workout programs digitally has been just the ticket during the pandemic. And it reflects in the stock market as Peloton has been trending steadily upward since March.
Recently, Peloton released an Apple TV app that lets users access their workouts with their television and it’s been a hit with consumers. It tracks neatly with consumers’ desire for flexible accessibility and a heightened user experience. And with 67% of consumers willing to stay and spend more behind a good user experience, it certainly pays dividends for brands to pay attention here.
Since competitive intelligence is all about analyzing market strengths as well as weaknesses, let’s see how Peloton is stacking up. Here’s a scatterplot snapshot in Quid Social in which we looked at conversation size juxtaposed with social sentiment.
As you can see, much of the conversation is in the upper right quadrant indicating high traction and positive sentiment. This is definitely a good sign of the general conversation trending in a positive light.
Understanding Outliers
Outliers in clusters such as weight loss and cycling classes indicate areas that could yield information into customer needs or frustrations. These areas could potentially be rectified by focused social media marketing. You can’t fix what you don’t know, so the first step in competitive intelligence is identifying outliers to inform building a comprehensive approach to addressing consumer need.
In our quest for competitive intelligence, we found an area of interest surrounding posts and authors by gender. While it should be obvious that not all social media accounts are identifiable by gender, it’s good to know where you stand in share of voice among those that are.
Therefore, we sliced Peloton’s social conversation by identified author gender and follower count and found it skewed highly male. Would you expect that from a fitness brand? Maybe, maybe not. It’s good to know for sure though!
So – if your brand finds itself in a similar situation, what do you do? Well, we wanted to know where most of the female conversation is taking place and how it looks over time. It’s a great way to familiarize your brand with any gender specific narrative. And it serves as a precursor to targeting influencers able to speak to uncovered needs and help balance gender disparity.
Demographic Data Intelligence
Here we sliced the data to only include female social media accounts active on Reddit – which held the majority of the conversation by far. We then put it on the timeline view to identify how the conversation has changed over time.
Here we can identify spikes in the conversation for deeper dives into the causes. And since each of these threads are searchable, it’s a wealth of information for brands to better understand how consumers are using and experiencing their products.
But let’s connect back with the men for this next brand . . .
Manscaped Making Many Right Moves
The up and coming men’s grooming company Manscaped has only been around since 2016 but is already making quite a splash online. Here’s a look at Manscaped’s online conversation over the last three months.
Tongue-in-cheek product names like The Lawnmower and the Perfect Package Kit coupled with a strategic marketing campaign has launched Manscaped into the global conversation.
And their influencer game is laser-focused as evidenced by a look into the top primary mentions of people. All of the top ten people returned are writers for the popular sports website and podcast Couch Guy Sports. Men love sports and it’s a smart way to get promo codes and brand awareness out to your target demographic.
Chris Jones is actually taking up 5.8% of the online conversation so we decided to take a closer look. After all, any brand wants to know how their influencers are measuring up. Below we opened up a timeline view and filtered just for the promo code keyword to get a better idea of how the conversation may have changed.
We can see that Chris Jones enters the picture in mid-July and happens to coincide with boosted numbers in the last half of our three-month timeframe. Increased share of voice is a great thing in our noisy online world, so it looks like a move in the right direction.
This is just one example of the myriad ways that brands can take a data point that piques their interest and slice it down to extract actionable further meaning. And this works as well for every day retailers as it does for high-end services. We can look at Ross Stores to see why . . .
Consumers Running to Ross Stores
At first sight, low-priced retailer Ross Stores appears to be an anomaly in the retail industry. It was quite healthy coming into this year despite never having an e-commerce presence. While most retailers scrambled to go online, Ross had the staying power to close its doors for a while in March and trust in its business model to see it through. And sure enough, when they opened up the customers came back looking for the low-priced deals they were accustomed to.
Here’s a look at the online conversation in Quid Social surrounding Ross Stores and you’ll see there’s a lot of stock market conversation.
That being the case, we took a look at how Ross Stores ($ROST) has been performing in the stock market this year. Unsurprisingly for retail, it took a dive in March. But what is interesting is that it recovered somewhat and has held steady throughout the pandemic.
Armed with that knowledge we isolated the three clusters related to Ross Stores’ stock and ran them through a timeline analysis to see what was going on. Our main analysis was for three months and you can see that the stock clusters really got their legs in the last half of August.
Digging deeper reveals the stock market reacting to positive earnings reports, with tweets to match:
Location-specific Competitive Intelligence
We then switched to a bar chart analysis with bars representing location (primary mention) and PageRank for our value. At each of its locations, Ross’ focus was on keeping employees safe and unloading existing inventory before taking on more:
In discussing the current inventory position, the company is taking a cautious view and being very prescriptive about purchasing additional inventory for back-to-school and fall. The company stated it needs to understand where consumers are spending money and the main priority is to focus on getting through the liquidation period and current inventory from spring.
They read the room and realized they had to hunker down. Social intelligence undoubtedly informed their response, and they’re weathered the storm far better than competitors as a result. And in a time when it’s tough to do anything right, they’ve managed a good bit of positive sentiment:
When your brand is ready for a deep dive into competitive intelligence that gives you the edge, be sure to reach out for a personalized demo. Through the power of next generation artificial intelligence (AI), we help top brands mine the social strata for actionable insight every day – and we can do the same for you!
