Using Text Mining to Explain Consumer Behavior Regarding Brands

Advertising Age is a site with a good content on Marketing and Media. Walking through the content of the site, I found an interesting article about the use of Text Mining to Explain Consumer Behavior regarding brands, entitled Text Mining Provides Marketers With the 'Why' Behind Demand, written by Michael Bush.

He tells the case of Stephanie Hoppe, 7-Eleven's senior director-marketing,that knew there was an incredibly competitive market for iced coffee. But before entering the battle by expanding its own product across its network of stores this past June, Ms. Hoppe and 7-Eleven needed to figure out the why that was driving consumer demand. He defines Text mining as a process in which an agency can mine the conversations taking place on blogs, Twitter or other social-media sites in order to identify the emotional aspects and reasons behind consumer behavior. Typical database information supplies marketers with the who, what, where, when and even the how, but not the why.

Ms. Hoppe Used a tool called Digital Anthropology from Omnicom Group agency Rapp, and got a deep-dive analysis of what consumers were saying about why they drink iced coffee, what flavors they prefer, what presence its competitors had in the social space and what people were saying about their offerings.

"Text mining can't replace traditional data, but the combination of the quantitative and qualitative data they both offer creates a more holistic view of the consumer. In most cases there is no name connected to the data compiled from text mining or text analytics but that may soon change", said Megan Bannon, cultural anthropologist at Rapp.

According Sid Banerjee, text analytics is starting to replace the focus group because it's cheaper and faster. Clarabridge collects data from three sources: survey responses, customer/representative interactions and social-media sites. He is CEO of the Clarabridge, a customer experience management firm. He said these data are significant in a recession because it helps you make sure you are cutting the right marketing dollars. "Being able to micromarket when you're marketing is important but being able to microcut is also important," he said. "You want to take a scalpel to your business, not an ax."

This article shows how the use of Text Mining is an interesting approach to know the consumer behavior. Using Text Mining, a company can collect data from many sources, knowing about what the consumers are saying about their products.