How Convergence Marketing Empowers Your Brand and Customers

Posted on Oct 31, 2022Oct 31, 2022 by Emily Louise Spencer

Today’s world is all about data, and bringing your data together is the heart of convergence marketing. When every department can access it, your customers stand to win through personalized and improved experiences. Let’s dive in to understand how convergence marketing benefits everyone and how to apply it successfully.

Traditionally, a business’s marketing, communications, and IT divisions are kept separate. These sections run independently of one another, interacting only when necessary.

This allows businesses to operate smoothly without having the burden of double and triple-check everything.

It’s a good approach, born from times when most management strategies were being developed. Times when keeping everyone up to speed meant sending paperwork back and forth between departments. It’s a lot of hassle, and efficiency dictated people should know only what’s needed for them to perform their jobs.

But we live in different times.

In today’s world, with technology allowing for instant communication and data sharing, this approach might seem outdated. Siloing your departments might be what’s always been done, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only way to go. That’s where a new approach comes in, called convergence marketing.

Keep reading to discover what potential it holds for your customers and company.

What does convergence marketing mean?

Convergence marketing is more of a philosophy than a strict step-by-step approach. In essence, it’s the art of merging your marketing, information, and design divisions in order to allow a unified message across all forms of marketing media you use.

The main idea of this approach is to place the customer at the center of all forms of communication, seeking to ensure that all messages they receive present a single, unified front.

This reduces the number of mixed messages the customer receives, allowing for greater brand recognition and trust to flourish.

Convergence marketing generally applies the most to digital or digital-supported forms of marketing. That’s because digital information can flow freely and seamlessly, as it’s retrieved from a database within milliseconds.

As such, attempting to converge marketing strategies that are mostly offline will be very difficult.

Convergence marketing vs. integrated marketing

A similar yet different term is integrated marketing.

Integrated marketing is all about coordinating marketing messages across different communication channels to increase brand awareness.

While this might seem identical to convergence marketing, this approach only considers the marketing department, ignoring all other aspects of the brand that might serve as touchpoints for customer communication.

It shares the same idea as convergence marketing but applies it on a smaller, more isolated scale. That being said, integrated marketing often happens naturally when you do convergence marketing, as you’ll likely factor in all communication channels.

What are the advantages of convergence marketing?

Now you may be thinking, this sounds like a lot of work, and that’s because it is.

Bringing separate departments of a business together is never easy, doubly so if you want them to be able to communicate in real-time.

If it’s that difficult to employ convergence marketing (which means it’s likely to cost a decent sum of money), why do it?

The benefits of convergence marketing tend to outweigh the costs if done correctly, as presenting a unified message on all fronts has numerous benefits. Let’s go over the most immediate ones.

Customer empowerment

By putting the customer at the center of your marketing strategy, you’ll be empowering them to act and provide feedback, giving them a voice in future decisions.

Any customer-centric marketing strategy takes in feedback, but where convergence marketing empowers customers is the linking of marketing and communications channels. Each piece of information collected by the communications team will be passed on to the marketing team and vice-versa.

This has the effect of not only increasing the customers’ voice within the organization as a whole, which allows you to tailor your marketing campaigns appropriately but increasing brand recognition overall.

While it might seem as though useful customer data is difficult to get, it’s been proven that two-thirds of consumers will willingly share their data with you if they think it will improve their overall experience.

They’re also willing to let you use first-party tracking cookies and other means of observing their online behavior if they think they’ll get something out of it.

In other words, convergence marketing is like symbiosis. Each party gives and takes, and both benefit overall.

Improved customer experience

Convergence marketing necessitates a shared database of information to which all sections of the business have access.

By creating this cross-transfer of information, various departments of your business will have access to all data collected on customers, enabling them to see previously documented interactions, and provide a better overall customer experience.

A Google report showed that up to 85% of digital customer journeys use more than one form of interaction with you. That’s a lot of data that you might miss if you’re relying only on information from one IP address.

With all available information on a particular customer, you will be able to learn what experiences they’ve had with you in the past, what approaches they respond best to, and even what might cause them to walk away satisfied.

Remember, engaging your customers is the best way to make sure they walk away happy!

Integrated communication between departments

Convergence marketing requires departments to collaborate, which means you need to have a robust communications system between them. Integrated communication isn’t so much an unintended benefit as a necessary part of convergence marketing.

Once the channels of communication are open, they can be used for more than they were designed for. Departments can share ideas and get feedback on them, ask for help from one another, etc.

Another factor is post-purchase customer service. Almost 60% of consumers would use social media to get this, but without information from the sales team on what’s been purchased, whoever is running the social media won’t be able to do their job.

Collaborations are also an option. With the traditional siloed form of organization, the different departments wouldn’t know about each other’s plans and, therefore, wouldn’t be able to offer assistance or request adjustments.

One of the greatest examples of inter-departmental collaboration in modern times can be found in Apple’s Transparency Report, designed to keep track of both government and private party data requests to Apple.

Apple’s aim here was to keep their customers reassured that their data was safe and wouldn’t be sold to third parties.

In order to achieve this massive task, Apple had to keep a record of any and all requests for data, the reason for such, and whether or not the request was granted.

This quite obviously involved their communications department. The collaboration also involved their legal team, who determined whether or not to release data in the face of law enforcement requests, and their information security team, who decided how to release the data.

They pulled all information together and released it in the form of their Transparency Report, released annually. In the above table, taken from their 2021 report, you can see that over 70% of private-party data requests were rejected. Apple is practicing what they preach, being open and honest about its responses to data requests when needed.

Apple scored a major PR win with customers who want to keep track of their data and be reassured that Apple would only release it as a last resort. It’s arguably their greatest collaboration and one that perfectly exemplifies convergence marketing.

Instant access to information

Converging your departments necessitates placing information within a shared database. It also means that your data will take a standardized form and that anyone within your organization who has access can use it.

Imagine you’re a member of the marketing team who’s had an idea about using some of the latest designs in your new marketing campaigns. Without a unified database, you’d have to:

Request the designs from the design team.
Wait for a member of the design team to read your message.
Wait for the design manager to okay sending the designs over.
Wait for the design team to actually send the designs over.

Each of the above steps takes time, whereas with a unified database, you can simply hop into the relevant folder and pull the designs out for use.

Where and how can you apply convergence marketing in your business?

Convergence marketing isn’t something that you can apply overnight. It’s a slow and steady process that brings different sections of your business together, requiring careful preparation.

The simplest, and altogether the most sensible approach, is to alter each of your departments’ approaches little by little until they’re aligned with each other.

Once the processes and guidelines that each part of your business uses are similar, you can begin the sync, allowing them to work in harmony.

Let’s go over what each department needs to do to get the convergence ball rolling.

Marketing department

Convergence marketing, as the name suggests, is focused on marketing. It should come as no surprise in that case that the marketing department will be at the center of your efforts to converge.

When implementing convergence marketing, the first step in the process is to begin documenting and recording your marketing efforts within a database. That is, if you have not already done so.

The next step is to take a look at the way you store information, including but not limited to:

Acronyms.
Filetypes.
Naming conventions.
Database layouts.
Access protocols.

These all need to be standardized into a form that the other departments involved in your efforts will be able to read and understand.

Once information is standardized it can be read by anyone who knows the syntax used, which should be provided to all other teams involved. Other teams may not necessarily use the same software as the marketing team, so you’ll need to take this into account.

You might be asking yourself, why is data standardization important? Surely anyone who needs to use the data can simply convert it into a form they can read.

The answer is two-fold.

Firstly, errors can crop up in translation. The data you end up with might not match the data you started out with, and it’s not feasible to manually check every piece that comes your way.

Secondly, your staff is only human. It’s inevitable that someone will forget to convert data, use the wrong conversion methods, etc.

If you think this is overstating the matter, please remember that NASA lost an entire Mars probe in 1999 thanks to someone forgetting to convert from inches to centimeters. Hopefully, any mistakes that crop up in your departments won’t cost $125 million and involve crashing objects into planets.

While standardized information is vital for all departments involved in the convergence efforts, it’s especially important for the marketing department.

And since marketing plays an integral part in your efforts, you should consider convergence within the department.

Internal convergence

Converging your marketing efforts can mean many things. Perhaps the most important aspect you should look at is converging your online and offline forms of marketing.

Due to their different philosophies, it’s common for businesses, especially larger ones, to silo these two forms of marketing into different teams so their operations flow smoothly.

Online marketing is a far more advanced approach, crunching big data from each particular consumer and personalizing ads and offerings based on behavior, interests, and more.

Offline marketing, on the other hand, needs to be far more general. It’s not that you can’t make offline forms of marketing more personalized; it’s that the amount of effort that it takes means it’s not always worth it.

In today’s world, attention spans are shorter than ever. It’s estimated that the average human’s attention span is just over 8 seconds, a drop of nearly 5 seconds from the year 2000. This puts the average human’s attention span at less than that of a goldfish!

This drop doesn’t come as a surprise, given how technology has sped up in the past 20+ years. With this information in mind, it’s more important than ever to grab consumers’ attention early on in your interactions.

That doesn’t mean you should ditch offline marketing efforts. Some can work brilliantly. Take the billboard below as an example.

It was created as part of a Minnesota anti-smoking campaign.

It’s a simple design, with only the website link on the billboard itself, but the pole beneath dressed up as a cigarette makes sure that we know the purpose of the advert.

The green color often associated with hospitals is the final nail in the board, subconsciously reminding the reader why they should consider getting in touch.

In short, the billboard has conveyed:

What service is offered.
How to best contact them.
Why you should do so.

Online marketing can learn a lot from offline forms. Digital designers may be tempted to make elaborate and attention-grabbing content, but paradoxically it’s best to keep things simple even when you have a theoretically unlimited amount of space.

No one wants to keep scrolling forever, after all. It’s estimated that the average website user stays on a webpage for only 50 seconds, and that’s with an engaged audience, so you want them to take in as much information as possible in that time.

This is where the convergence of online and offline marketing comes into play, with the two learning from one another and leaning on each other. In all forms of media, you have to present information in a very efficient way. It’s not enough to simply make a consumer aware of your product. You need to tell them what it is and why it’s the best option for them to purchase.

The below images taken from IKEA’s website showcase how simple designs can convey a lot of information.

This image displays a sense of aesthetics that would make the viewer see IKEA positively while not being too complex or distracting from the point.

The second section, shown below, uses extremely simple outline images to get the point across, displaying all of IKEA’s services in a readable form.

Simple, easy-to-read marketing.

Communications

Communications refer to the part of your business responsible for communicating with outside parties. That’s anything from customer service helplines to writing emails to your shareholders.

In small businesses, this department might be merged with another or simply have its responsibilities spread across several other teams. Still, the principle behind convergence marketing extends whether you have a dedicated team or not.

Your communications department greatly benefits from convergence marketing, with the most obvious advantage being access to the other departments’ data.

With access to all the data your marketing department has collected on a particular customer, you’re better able to tailor your approach to them. This can extend to:

The channel of communications.
The tone used in communications.
The complexity of the language used.

You might think that that’s all there is to it, but there are other benefits as well. Not only can the information you get improve your communications department’s operations, but collaboration with your other departments can provide benefits that neither could produce alone.

Take this creative approach from Capital One as an example.

The company was on the ball with their Capital One Cafes, a re-imagined form of banking where their branches doubled as cafes with co-working spaces and workshops.

Despite the fact that most banking is done online, there is still demand for in-person interaction when dealing with problems. Capital One saw this and decided to use its spaces as a means of connecting with the community better.

This strategy was the brainchild of combined marketing and communications thinking. Not only is the cafe a great marketing stunt, but it’s also a relaxed setting that consumers can use to communicate with the business without fear.

Going up to a teller screen can be intimidating after all, and many consumers are put off by the formality of the whole process. By removing the physical barrier between the bank workers and the customers, a more welcoming environment is created.

It’s doubtful that either department would have been given the go-ahead without collaboration. Altering your entire business strategy is extremely costly and risky, but with multiple departments backing it, the alterations went ahead.

Management

Finally, let’s talk about the management side of things, specifically the upper management. While there isn’t much to say regarding implementation, it’s easy to see the benefits, especially in terms of decision-making and cohesiveness.

It’s often said that the upper management doesn’t know nearly as much about the goings-on below them as they should. This is mostly due to how difficult it is to pass information and manage it in a centralized and standardized manner.

CEOs and COOs make the decisions, but how can they make them reliably when they aren’t getting the complete picture?

In the traditional approach, department directors report to their superiors, passing along different strategies, suggestions, and requests at once. Keeping track of all of that can prove difficult even for the most qualified managers.

By converging your marketing, there is a single, unified goal that the business wants to achieve. This means that anyone who makes these decisions can always fall back on that, rather than having to keep track of all the different strategies your business might be going after.

Convergence marketing is all about passing on information in a clear manner. Better information means better decisions, which make for better business strategies, and a more unified organization.

What tools can help enhance convergence marketing?

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably looking to apply convergence marketing to your organization. There are many ways and tools to go about it. So many that you may get overwhelmed at first.

To help make sense of all of this, we’ve prepared a list of the most useful tools and why they’re useful in tackling convergence marketing.

This isn’t an exhaustive list. It has to be on the general side of things, as each industry and context requires a different approach. So, if you think you have a better option, we encourage you to go for it.

Social media

Social media is a powerhouse of the current digital marketing age. It’s a tool that can create a lot of data for you to utilize, while also allowing for better interaction between your communications department and your customer base.

Social media communications is a tricky business, with even the most innocuous of comments being able to spark outrage or dissent among your viewers. By looping back real-time information into your marketing department, you will be able to mitigate any crises.

This is where social media monitoring comes in. Social media monitoring software can assist you in keeping track of your online statistics, flagging any urgent or suspicious data, and allowing you to give feedback and responses to questions rapidly.

The software is fairly new but has already made great strides. Some countries have even used it to monitor the accuracy of news shared on social media sites, with the aim of keeping their population informed when electing their new leaders.

In short, social media can be used as both a form of marketing and a form of communication, sometimes simultaneously.

The platform you use will depend on your market, target demographics, etc., but all share the advantage of global reach. Their downsides are also similar, with rapid responses and careful monitoring being crucial.

Mailshots

Mailshots, also called direct mail marketing, is the art of using mass production of a single advert to market to large numbers of consumers at once. Typically, the term has been used to refer to letters or leaflets you send through the post, but it is also applicable to email marketing.

The advantage of convergence marketing when using email mailshots is immense.

You can combine clicks and conversion statistics, along with other forms of data you’ve collected on customers to further personalize communications. Something you wouldn’t see in a siloed system.

And it’s a big deal, as segmentation and personalization are by far the most effective email strategies.

Consider the following scenario – a customer is after a specific brand of eyeliner, so they send an email to a store, asking if they have it in stock.

If your departments are siloed, the marketing department won’t know about this instance, and future newsletters and promotions will be less relevant for that person.

With your marketing and communications departments converged, this information will be communicated between them, allowing for it to be used in future personalized marketing efforts. The customer gets more relevant content, and you get a happier customer. Everybody wins.

To sum it up, mailshots are all about information. The more relevant you can be, the greater their chance of paying off. Keeping the flow of information open between departments means everything can be considered, not just what the marketing department has immediate access to.

Apps

When you create an engaging app for your brand, customers are more likely to use it for browsing, purchasing, and interacting with your company.

This gives you heaps of data about your customers in a simple and efficient manner. It’s especially true with apps as they’re usually linked to an individual account, leaving less margin for errors.

Another great thing about apps is they can be heavily personalized according to the data you just collected. Whether that’s to do with how the content in your app is laid out or specific times you’d like to use push notifications. There are even capabilities to change the design with AI-generated art, though these processes are still in the early stages.

All in all, apps are a sandbox for you to create your perfect customer contact point.

Cloud software databases

Market Report

To move information between the different sections of your organization, you will need a database of some kind. In essence, each division needs to know what the others are doing and why they’re doing it. This prevents your sections from conflicting or producing mixed messages.

Cloud software is a particularly efficient method to use, with many tools to choose from. The main players are SalesForce, PipeDrive, and Zoho. Your choice will mainly depend on your organization’s:

Size.
Goals.
And ability to implement technology.

Let’s go through a list of the benefits that cloud software can provide and discuss why they’re superior to other options.

Scalability

If you’ve ever used a flash drive or similar device to store your files, you know that they can very quickly become full. Data takes up space, and the amount of data you collect won’t always fit into the storage space you’ve allocated.

If you’re using traditional data storage means, you’ll need to physically go out and obtain more storage space, install it, link it to your data collection software, etc.

All that takes time, time in which valuable data will be lost. Cloud-based services offer expansion as your organization’s data storage needs grow. Perhaps more importantly, you can also decrease the capacity when you see a drop in your needs.

Cost-effectiveness

Cloud software is a far more cost-effective solution than traditional forms of information storage.

For one, you don’t have to store the data yourself in a physical location which would come with maintenance costs. You also don’t have to maintain and replace the storage drives every few years when the technology moves on, which is quite costly.

Another factor that bears mentioning is the time cost of duplicating files, emailing them to relevant people, and of those people downloading them. This might not seem like much, especially with smaller files, but when this process happens thousands of times a day, it starts to add up.

Easier collaboration

As mentioned before, the instant transfer of information between different people greatly benefits cloud software. However, the ability to collaborate goes further than that.

In traditional collaboration, one person might send a draft to a second, who suggests edits and sends it back. Then, if the first person doesn’t like some of those edits, they would suggest something else.

This takes time, causes great delays in projects, and is very inefficient overall. The key issue here is that each person cannot see what the other is doing until the edit is complete, and if they disapprove of it, that’s time and energy (and money) wasted!

With cloud software, the projects can be hosted online in a place that both participants in this hypothetical example can see. Each edit can be reacted to live as it is being done, saving time and effort in both parties’ cases.

Enhanced data security

Physical means of data storage aren’t the most secure. Once a connection is made, it’s very easy for a hacker to steal data and very difficult for you to stop them without physically severing the link to your server.

Cloud computing offers a unique opportunity in the data security world. Since your providers will necessarily have great data security measures in place (that’s their entire point), your customers can rest safe and easy knowing that their data won’t be stolen.

Cloud software is necessarily shared over multiple parties, which needs to be transmitted in real-time. This makes it an ideal candidate for blockchain security measures, which are considered almost unbreakable.

While data can be extracted from an external source, doing so requires the consent of all parties involved, so hackers would have to go the extra mile. Furthermore, a complete block in the chain cannot be altered, making most run-of-the-mill hacking methods ineffective.

Wrapping up

It’s not always easy to switch to new methods of thinking, but converged strategies are the future as customers are expecting a more personalized approach.

Convergence marketing ensures your customers will get it, as each department will be able to fetch, understand, and send data from across the company.

The next step would be to measure how customers feel about your new approach. Luckily, it’s something you can measure via advanced tools that provide sentiment analysis, providing valuable insights for your business. Read more about it here.

Customer Perception: Making Consumers See Your Brand Positively

Posted on Oct 6, 2022Nov 1, 2022 by Emily Louise Spencer

The concept of customer perception might seem like a simple thing, but in reality, there’s far more nuance involved than you might think. At its core, customer perception is your customers’ opinions of you and is a key factor in a consumer’s choices.

Being seen positively by consumers is a must to generate new leads while also retaining your current ones. Almost 70% of consumers say they’re more inclined to spend more money with a company they trust to treat them well, rather than go for a cheaper alternative.

And trust plays a big part in how customers perceive your brand.

But where should you start? Customer perception is a big topic, and countless factors influence it.

This guide is a good start. It will help you understand what’s behind customer perception and, most importantly, how to measure and improve to thrive in today’s market.

Let’s get started!

What is customer perception?

Customer perception refers to your customers’ awareness, opinions, and general feelings about the brand and its products or services.

It’s shaped not only by direct experience with your brand but by all surrounding interactions like news reports, advertisements, word of mouth, etc.

It’s important to remember customer perception isn’t the same across sectors. It can differ based on location and demographics.

For instance, Home Depot is very well regarded in the US, but when they tried to expand into China they didn’t consider Chinese culture’s adversity to DIY. By the end of their six-year expansion attempt, they had to shut their stores and deal with a $160 million loss.

Customer perception can be tricky to quantify. It isn’t necessarily directly connected to the overall quality of the products or services you provide but how they see you.

You must remember your customers are human, and emotions and logic mix together. It’s not enough to look at the value proposition.

That’s why you need to dig deeper to measure how customers feel about you. Good places to start are:

Analyzing customer reviews.
Looking at social media platforms.
Conducting surveys.

This NEPA global survey on food habits is a great example of how perception affects our purchasing behavior. When asked about sustainable meat alternatives, only 25% of UK consumers said they would like to see lab-grown meat on their local supermarket shelves.

What is the customer perception process?

The customer perception process is exactly what it says on the tin. It is the process by which customers sense, organize, interpret and respond to anything related to your brand – be it a particular product, the brand as a whole, or somewhere in between.

Let’s break down this process by looking at an advertisement.

First, the ad is seen by the customer.
Then, they organize the information, taking it in and understanding its meaning and the message it conveys.
The customer can then interpret the information based on the current situation and history with the brand.
Finally, the customer responds to the advertisement, forming an opinion and associating emotion with it.

This all happens within a second or so, leaving little to no room for conscious thought to be involved.

But just because this process happens quickly and automatically, it doesn’t mean we can’t predict quite well what will happen.

When running an ad campaign, you don’t just whip up a graphic and run along with it. You try and understand what your target audience will take from it and how it will affect their perception of your brand.

Later, you can collect customer perception data via the previously suggested methods. This will help you better understand your ideal customer and the effects of your latest campaign.

You can find a great example of this if you look to KFC’s 2018 ad, which issued as an apology rather than a simple advertisement.

In early 2018, KFC in the UK ran out of chicken. That’s right, a business that mainly sells chicken ran out of chicken.

Since this naturally grabbed the attention of the local press, KFC responded in a manner that resonated with the British public – posting a full-page ad in the Metro with their initials rearranged to almost form an explicit word. It’s almost as if they were going “FCK, this is embarrassing”, a phrase that struck the bullseye with the British public.

Underneath, the company apologised for it’s failure, promising to do better in the future. KFC’s ability to laugh at itself took classic British humor, owning up to their mistake, and an appropriate form of advertisement to create one of the best responses to a PR crisis in the last decade.

Why is customer perception important?

While a positive customer perception is bound to net you new customers, it can help also drive growth via repeating customers.

By forming long-term, lasting relationships with your customers, you increase loyalty and customer retention rates.

Focusing on metrics such as these is key in ecommerce, as it’s considered much cheaper to retain existing customers than attract new ones.

Customers who have already purchased from you, and have built a positive relationship with you, are far easier to convince to purchase again than those who haven’t. To attract new customers, you need to:

Convince them that their existing brands aren’t working for them.
Show them that your brand can fulfill something their current one cannot.
Overcome the human resistance to change with enough incentives.
Convince them to buy from you.

You skip the first three steps with existing customers, making it a much more efficient and cheaper affair.

The key to customer retention is to align with their values and beliefs. This will depend on your market, who your customers are, and what demographics your customers belong to.

Older generations emphasize different things than younger ones, men on different factors than women. These are all generalizations, of course, and won’t hold for every customer of that particular demographic, but it’s important to keep them in mind.

Customer perception has two particular factors which promote strong loyalty and even advocacy:

Value alignment

A customer who perceives your brand as having the same values as them will intrinsically align themselves with you. Conversely, a brand with lacking or conflicting values will see customers migrate away to greener pastures.

The same Ipsos Global Trends Report 2021 also found that consumers’ three most common expectations of brands are:

Committing to fighting climate change.
Standing up for social issues, and
Paying their taxes.

This is true worldwide, with the report looking at all six continents.

Businesses that are perceived to have outdated or harmful business practices will be met with rejection and even protest, while those who keep an eye on the values their customers hold will be embraced.

But it’s not enough to talk the talk. You also have to walk the walk, with actions speaking much louder than words. Shallow and meaningless gestures will be seen through, yet genuine commitment will be held in high esteem.

Microsoft is an interesting example of a company that shifted its value to keep up with the times. Historically, it was known as a combative and aggressive company. But with the appointment of Satya Nadella as CEO in 2014, it shifted towards more collaborative tactics.

The software giant now provides support for open-source software, PaaS, and IaaS solutions and, in general, is far more open to working with other developers.

Trust

Good customer perception signals to the consumer base that you are a trustworthy brand that will not lie, misdirect or cheat customers.

To build and maintain trust, the best practice is simply to be trustworthy, to say what you mean, and to be honest and open about your business practices.

Costa Brazil, for instance, laid out their Roadmap For Change earlier this year, stating their sustainability targets and their pledge to plant new trees to replace those their products required.

Unlike similar press releases and statements from similar companies which only showed the positive, they were open and honest about the difficulties of building a sustainable brand and admitted that they weren’t experts in the field. Many other businesses switching to eco-friendly means of production haven’t been willing to admit difficulties, leaving Costa Brazil as one of the few who will publically acknowledge setbacks.

At the end of the day, customer perception is about developing positive relationships with customers, which leads to increased sales and success.

Past experiences

It’s no wonder that past experiences can determine loyalty and retention.

As we’re all conditioned by our past, our reactions and knowledge are entirely dependent upon our previous experiences. In this way, good customer perception relies on having consistent good experiences.

A well-known phenomenon is hyper focus on particularly good or bad parts of an experience with a brand, with one bad experience tainting a person’s perception of that brand as a whole.

Thus, consistency is key in building good customer perception.

How to determine & measure customer perception

We briefly talked about the ways you can measure the elusive customer perception. Now’s the time to dive deeper.

It isn’t easy to keep track of all the factors that affect customer perception, but with a little investigation, you can usually find out what customers expect of you.

Using one method of information gathering alone will usually get you part of the story, but not all of it. For example, reviews, by their nature, are only left by those who have purchased from you. Thanks to the human tendency to only leave reviews in the case of particularly strong experiences, whether positive or negative, you’ll tend to get a skewed view of things.

You need to use multiple methods of data collection if you want to get the complete picture. That means complementing review data with other methods such as surveys and social media monitoring.

Collecting feedback via surveys

Surveys are great, as they can tell you the little details that you specifically need to know. You can ask the specific questions you want answered, and those who complete your survey will give you the answers. Sounds simple enough, right?

In reality, things aren’t so simple. Consumers tend to only answer surveys when they’re particularly motivated to do so.

A popular motivational tool is a monetary incentive. While it will get people to answer your questions, some may simply tick boxes randomly to obtain the reward.

That being said, you can somewhat overcome this by placing reverse-scale questions, helping you to weed out such responders.

For example, if marking 5 means an excellent experience in most of your questions, create an item where marking 5 means a terrible one. In surveys where all items are marked with 5, you’ll know people didn’t bother reading the question, and you can disregard their answers.

Another issue with surveys is they’re usually limited to your clients. Would you look at an email from a company you have never interacted with directly and think, “I’m going to complete this survey!”?

Finally, only people interested in answering questions will complete your survey. The issue is that your sample is limited to a specific subset of people that don’t necessarily depict your entire audience.

That said, surveys are still a great tool to gauge customer perception. You just need to keep their limitations in mind.

Once you’ve opted for one, it’s important to know how to read them and what you can get out of them.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The net promoter score is a value that’s based on a specific survey question:

“On a scale of 1 (very unlikely) to 10 (very likely), how likely is it that you would recommend us to someone else?”

Those who answered 9 or 10 are considered “promoters” of your brand, whereas 0-6 denotes a “detractor,” those who will decry you.

The relative ratios of these will give you an idea of how well your product or service is received and help quantify your overall customer perception.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

Similarly, the customer effort score is based on the question:

“On a scale of 1 (extremely low effort) to 5 (extremely high effort), how difficult was it for you to find a solution to your problem with us?”

The CES measures the effort that customers feel like they have to go to in order to get what they want from you, which is a crucial component in a customer having a good experience with you and therefore having a good perception of you.

Analyzing review data

Review data is solid. It’s information on your products or services provided by those who purchased from you and therefore is a reliable data source, right?

Well, not exactly.

First, you have to consider that you’ll get a skewed perspective from reviews thanks to people’s tendency to only leave them after standout experiences.

I’m sure you’ve come across review STAR ratings online and seen a lot of 5-star and 1-star reviews, but not very many in between.

Secondly, reviews can be faked. Whether that’s by competitors, the platform you’re using to sell on, or by people who have nothing better to do than make everyone else’s life difficult, you can’t necessarily rely on review data that isn’t directly linked to a purchase.

The problem then comes that, by only taking into account verified reviews, you might leave out plenty of genuine reviews that simply didn’t bother going through the verification process.

With Revuze’s data collection engines, you can take information in brands, product lines and even individual products, analysing them from every angle in order to pull as much information as you can from that data.

We use sentiment analysis, SWOT analysis, and more to give you a full 360 degree view of your brand, market standing, and competitors.

Social media listening

With the advent of the internet, the things people talk about daily suddenly became recorded and publicly available to analyze.

Using software, you can collect millions of text pieces relevant to your brand and analyze them with sentiment analysis in order to get a clearer picture of how customers feel about you.

Like previous strategies, social media listening is not without faults.

Social media is volatile, and one negative opinion can turn into thousands when passed on, then die out. If you’re not segmenting your data by time, this can give you a much lower figure than you’d otherwise expect.

Furthermore, not everything that people post on the internet is their actual opinion. Influencers get paid to say certain things; some people look to fit in by posting opinions others might hold, and others look to stir up outrage for amusement.

The lesson here? Take everything you get from social media monitoring with a grain of salt. It’s a good indicator, but it might not be reliable.

As you can understand, all data-gathering tactics present challenges. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use any. Quite the opposite. By acknowledging these challenges and employing more than one tool, you’re bound to get as close as possible to the real picture.

And once you have that, you can start working on improving your image.

What factors influence customer perception, and how do you improve them?

Many factors affect customer perception. In fact, almost every facet of interaction between customer and brand that you can name will have an impact of some kind. These can be tangible, measurable things or more abstract ideas.

The key to positively influencing customer perception is to do these things regularly, as it not only will tell you how your actions have been perceived but can tell you if customer expectations have shifted in the time between surveys.

This might seem far-fetched, but large scandals and world-shaking events can shake up the market and shift customer priorities over just a few months.

The top factors influencing customer perception will depend on your market, target demographics, location, etc.

In the previous section of this article, we talked about value alignment, trust, and past experiences as factors that affect customer perception and loyalty. Now, let’s take a look at other common ones.

Pricing/Quality

Pricing and quality often go hand in hand, so let’s discuss them as a pair.

A product’s overall quality strongly impacts customer perception, with certain prices bringing expectations of quality standards. When the quality of your product or service meets or exceeds expectations, customer perception rises.

Prices that are too high will put customers off, and ironically, so too will prices that are too low as they give the impression that your products have some hidden defect.

Setting a price for your products when launching them is never easy, but you can look to the other similar quality products on the market and what they are charging as an indicator of what might be a reasonable price to charge.

This doesn’t mean you should blindly follow your competitors’ pricing strategies. You should always monitor the sentiment around these prices, ensuring that customers are happy to pay these prices.

For an established product, the key is to keep an eye on the sentiment around your products’ pricing, quality, and how they combine.

You can do this with the help of sentiment analysis, text mining, and other forms of social monitoring, which tell you more about the overall picture than a simple survey would.

There is also the factor of brand value: a well-established brand can charge more for its products than an unknown one, owing to the trust consumers have in you.

You should also keep in mind that prices are dynamic. What customers were willing to pay upon initial release won’t be the same as what they’re willing to pay six months afterward, for example.

Customer service

When customers have an issue with your products or services, your ability to make them feel heard, listened to, and have their feelings respected greatly impacts your customer perception.

Good customer service relies on knowing your audience, what they desire and what they expect from you. In general, you should be able to learn a few things about your customer base and what they expect by monitoring reviews, social chatter, and surveys that you put out.

You can go further by segmenting these into demographics, allowing for personalization of customer service to a particular demographic or even individual if enough data has been collected.

The processing power required to personalize customer service isn’t something a human brain can output. However, advanced AI can assist you by analyzing the data and providing recommendations for how to approach the particular customer, problem, etc., based on previous customer service interactions that were successful.

You can take this process even further with hyper-personalization, which takes the philosophy to the individual level, using data and information collected on a specific individual.

Take, for example, the following interaction:

You phone a company helpline, asking for assistance setting up your software.
The person taking your call asks you for information on your software, then redirects you to another person who is more able to help.
You then must explain everything you’ve already explained to the second person, wasting your time and theirs.

You’d feel quite annoyed at the repetition, wouldn’t you? Well, if the company had a database of information on their customers and their problems, the interaction would go more like this.

You phone a company helpline, asking for assistance setting up your software.
The person taking your call asks you for information on your software, enters it into a database, then redirects you to another person who is more able to help.
The second person now has all the information that the first person entered into the database and can take over without wasting time.

In that case, you’d feel like somebody listened to you. The company took your words, kept a record of them, and used them further down the line to help you.

Businesses can also take things a step further by noting down common issues, keeping a record of their solutions, and making them accessible to users. Why bother calling a helpline if you can find the answers on the website?

At the end of the day, speed is key in customer service. Providing a personalized customer service experience can help solve problems quickly and efficiently.

Branding

Your branding sends a clear message to customers.

Your logos, artwork, packaging, and all other visible, tangible factors specific to your brand affect customer perception.

You can think of your branding as an extension of value alignment. You need to position yourself in a way that attracts your audience and aligns with their beliefs.

Brightly colored, shiny plastic packaging will catch customers’ eyes.

However, plain, more recyclable packaging may boost your customer perception with certain audiences.

Usability

The customer’s ability to use your product significantly impacts customer perception.

Placing step-by-step instructions on your products will make use easier, including easier-to-read instructions on boxes or packaging. You can even delve further into the design process by editing the shape of your products so that their use is intuitive even to someone unfamiliar with them.

A highly specialized brand of computer parts aimed at consumers who can construct their own devices doesn’t have to be as simplistic as a brand that focuses on the general public, who aren’t expected to have the computer know-how of the aforementioned specialized customer base.

Further additions you can make include so-called “poka-yoke” or “mistake-proofing,” where your products are made so that misuse is made difficult to achieve to prevent customers from damaging your product while attempting to use it.

A good example of poka-yoke is USB cables, which can only be connected in the correct direction and will refuse to slide into ports the wrong way, preventing any potential damage that could arise to both the device and the person operating it from a backward connection.

How you deliver your advertisements, as well as the contents of them, have a massive impact on customer perception. This is especially true of the former, with different target audiences having different preferred modes of communication.

Choosing the wrong mode of communication for your target demographics will have a net zero impact at best, as customers simply either ignore or do not see your advertisements, and a negative one and worst, as they see you as out of touch.

Gen Z, for instance, rarely pick up the phone if they don’t recognize the number calling them, nor do they answer the door if they’re not expecting someone, so cold calling and door-to-door sales will misfire as communication channels.

Instead, you’ll need to utilize digital and social media to reach this demographic in an effective manner.

Don’t forget the context, though. Knowing when and where to place your advertisements so that they grab attention but don’t distract from the current situation the customer finds themselves in is the key.

You’ve probably come across pop-up ads on smartphone apps or websites, those that cover the entire screen and completely derail any process or train of thought that was taking place beforehand. It’s extremely distracting and annoying.

This is an example of bad advertising, which will hurt your reputation if you allow yourself to be placed in those positions. Picking and choosing where you want your adverts to go is crucial to maintaining a good perception.

Passive advertisement, on the other hand, doesn’t affect the usage of the website or app in question. It’s a term that covers top banners, side adverts, and any other form of online advertisement that goes out of its way to avoid disrupting the user experience.

As you can see in the example above, the Forbes website uses banner adverts across the top of its page. While these adverts catch the eye, they can simply be scrolled or looked past to access the website’s content without interacting with the ad in any way. This makes the advert less intrusive, less annoying, and less likely to be met with a negative reaction.

Furthermore, the quantity of advertisements matters also. While it might seem intuitive that more advertisement equals more customers obtained, there comes the point where this is inverted. Too many advertisements can cause irritation, which is then associated with your brand and puts potential customers off interacting with you.

Customer reviews

Almost all customers who purchase online will take the time to read product reviews before purchasing.

The reviews that have been left, their content, quality, and even their number have a big impact on purchasing decisions. It’s been shown that consumers are weary of purchasing products with few reviews, even if the product in question is newly released.

While having good reviews is important, addressing negative reviews will have a positive impact overall on your customers’ views of you. It shows you are willing to listen and consider your customers’ problems.

Social media listening tools, dedicated CX teams, and sentiment analysis all play a part in keeping up to scratch with your customer reviews.

The key here is speed, with computers doing most of the work identifying and flagging especially positive or negative reviews in order for a human to see and respond in a short amount of time.

Recommendations and advocacy

People listen to the opinions of those they hold in high regard, whether that’s influencers, well-known names in a certain sphere, or friends and family. Your ability to improve customer perception in those people’s eyes can also have a knock-on effect that leads to improved customer perception overall.

By using influencers, promotional discounts for those who recommend your products to their friends & family, and making other forms of advocacy easier, you allow your customer base to do the hard work for you.

Unfortunately, besides paying influencers to advertise your products, the mechanics of recommendation isn’t exactly straightforward to influence, as they rely on nuances and factors beyond your control.

Ultimately, the best way to get customers to recommend your products or services is simply to give them a great experience – from the moment they search for you and buy your product, up until they need your help with it.

Location & shipping services

Convenience is a big factor in choosing a brand, with a location close to your target market’s preferred area of purchase being important. Your location will depend on your target audience, with younger, more tech-savvy customers being far more likely to purchase online, for example.

If you’re already an established business, it’ll be very expensive to move to another place to perform commerce there.

Luckily, shipping networks these days can stretch all across the globe. With the right setup, you’ll be able to reach those distant markets with ease.

So, what is the right setup?

Firstly, you need a good distribution system. By this, we mean that you need to have pre-existing plans for getting goods from one place to another across all options you plan to ship to.

This can be as invested as dedicated couriers, to as simple as knowing the local post routes. It’s up to you to decide what’s necessary, based on what is feasible from a financial standpoint and also what is expected of you.

Secondly, you need to factor in time. Certain borders take longer for goods to cross than others, and some shipping lanes can be disrupted by accidents or by human interference.

Distribution centers, places where you store your goods before the sale, can be dotted about in various places. You can refill stock there as necessary by keeping an eye on what is purchased in specific locations, either directly from the manufacturers or from a central distribution center.

In this way, while the overall distance the goods travel is the same, the distance between you and the customer is much smaller, making for shorter delivery times and increased customer perception.

Wrapping Up

The key to having good customer perception is understanding that customers’ reality is not necessarily yours and that what they see & do will vary from person to person.

There are plenty of factors that can affect how customers see you, from value alignment and trust, all the way to pricing and service.

Collect and analyzing this data is crucial to driving growth. With it, you’ll be able to pinpoint what consumers think of you and how they see you

In the end, though, the best way to gain good customer perception ultimately is to provide them with an excellent customer experience. Not sure how to do that? Check out our comprehensive blog on the topic.

Sentiment Analysis For Brand Building

Posted on Sep 9, 2022 by Emily Louise Spencer

They love me… they love me not.

It’s a question most people ask themselves about loved ones. But what about asking this question from the position of a CEO or a data analyst?

When you do that, you’re conducting sentiment analysis, albeit without stripping a flower of its petals.

When building your brand, one of the most important things you can do is read your audience.

How people feel about your product is imperative to its success. And understanding the nuances of these feelings will help you get a leg up over your competitors.

It’s not just about a general “they love my product; they love it don’t.” It extends to minor details that make up your products or services and how you present them.

If there are things that rub customers the wrong way, keeping on top of them is key to success.

What customers want isn’t always obvious and consistent. If something works in one place and time, there’s no guarantee it’ll work in another. This is certainly true in trendy industries like fashion, where there’s an emphasis on culture and everything changes quickly.

So how do you keep on top of consumer perception and your response to it? Especially in the internet age, where social media posts and website reviews are published every few minutes. There’s simply too much data to analyze manually.

That’s where sentiment analysis comes in.

What is sentiment analysis?

Sentiment analysis, also known as “opinion mining,” is the automated process of analyzing a text and interpreting the sentiments behind it.

Through machine learning and text analytics, algorithms can classify statements as positive, negative, and neutral.

Companies and brands often use this process as a strategy to manage large amounts of data coming from Yelp, Twitter, Amazon, you name it.

This data allows businesses to learn more about customers’ feelings for their products and competitors’ offerings.

How sentiment analysis works

Sentiment analysis relies on an AI engine powered by machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) to extract information.

Machine learning allows the software to learn independently and become more accurate at predicting the outcome of analysis without being programmed for that explicit scenario. Essentially, it allows the software to “learn” from past examples to improve itself over time.

NLP analyzes human language and the meaning behind it. This covers text segmentation, grammatical analysis, and terminology extraction.

Which algorithms are used for sentiment analysis?

ML and NLP are tools to help the sentiment analysis algorithm produce the final results. There are three types of algorithms that are usually deployed:

Rule-based – This is the basic and easy approach to implement. It’s based on manually pre-defined rules, helping the system analyze the text it reads. The drawbacks are clear, with having to rely on manual inputs that take plenty of resources and aren’t able to evolve automatically.
Automatic – This is the advanced approach, using both NPL and ML. The system is first fed with thousands of expressions that are pre-defined as either negative, neutral, or positive. This is the “training” stage. Then, with its newfound knowledge, it can venture into its “prediction” stage, understand new terms and classify them appropriately.
There is a downside here, though. The algorithm is bound to make some mistakes, and it’s often hard to pinpoint exactly why this happened.
Hybrid – It’s the best of both worlds and the most effective algorithm. This approach Enjoys the high accuracy of the rule-based algorithm while running through new terms and expressions in the blink of an eye.

With these sophisticated algorithms in place, the sentiment analysis tool can go over the endless text and score it based on negative, neutral, or positive sentiment.

Further, when dealing with customer experience, it can also break down the text to topics such as:

Product quality.
Speed of service.
Ease of communication.
And more.

Let’s look at a couple of examples to understand it better.

Due to the large variety of cordless vacuum cleaners and the breadth of functions, people will often turn to customer reviews and see something like this.

How does the sentiment analysis AI understand it? It breaks down this piece of text into smaller ones, such as:

“It’s lightweight, compact, and a brilliant all-round hoover.”

“I’d buy another in a heartbeat.”

“The tank is small.”

The AI then assigns a sentiment for each block of text. The first is very positive, and so is the second. The third is somewhat negative, though it can be considered neutral when taken into the larger context.

Decision makers can then understand what customers think about specific parts of the product or look at the overall – in this case, positive – picture.

Another industry where understanding customer sentiment is vital is the beauty industry.

This eyeliner review paints (no pun intended) a somewhat negative picture.

The review starts with “The pencil itself is great,” which the AI can mark as a positive sentiment. But then come blocks of text saying how it “breaks and is impossible to sharpen,” which are very negative. The review ends with a scathing “will not be buying another.”

Sentiment analysis will help the brand understand that the customers are disappointed with their product and why. In this case, they’ll know work is needed on the durability of the pencil rather than its quality.

As you can see, it’s something a human can do. But the key differentiator for sentiment analysis is the speed and accuracy it can analyze these reviews, something even a team of experienced analysts can’t achieve.

How Revuze performs sentiment analysis

The general themes of NPL, ML, and the various algorithms play a crucial part at Revuze. But to give our customers a competitive edge, we take a step further, using a personalized model for our automated sentiment analysis, helping to maximize accuracy and success rate.

We do it through “local models,” which allow us to adapt our technology to the specifics of each case study or client. We can generate local dictionaries and models within just a few days with 90% accuracy.

Here’s how it works: Revuze’s AI algorithms extract many unique topics, ranging from high-level ones (like user satisfaction and price) to granular topics (such as “softness” for toilet paper or “moisturizing strip” for disposable razors).

Instead of limiting ourselves to only 8-15 generic topics, we analyze 40-80 topics that are highly specific to each business or product we work with.

When you want to understand consumer sentiment around a certain product’s features, you cannot afford to use a sentiment analysis tool limited to generic topics. Personalization is key, and more on that later.

What are the challenges in sentiment analysis?

While algorithms can be very advanced, some text can be difficult for a machine to dissect and interpret.

Sarcasm

Users may write: “We had to wait 45 minutes to get a table. Great!” To a human being, it’s clear that the adjective “Great!” is used sarcastically.

How do we know it? Because of context.

We read the previous sentence, which talks about a long wait time, and we understand that the comment is not positive.

A good sentiment analysis tool has to be able to detect sarcasm from the broader context. Otherwise, you’ll get inaccurate data about your brand at the end of the analysis.

Nuance

Another issue has to do with nuance.

The comment “The movie was not bad” is saying that the movie was not bad, maybe even good. But it also implies that the expectations regarding this movie were so low that the movie is not as bad as one would have expected. This is called “negator.”

“Intensifiers” can also be challenging for sentiment analysis. A user who writes, “The company’s comment on this issue was pretty good,” creates a nuance that would not be there if we read the same sentence without the word “pretty.”

In conclusion, it’s important not to rely on basic sentiment analysis tools, which will not capture the complexity of human sentiments expressed through text.

Why is sentiment analysis important, and what can it do for you

Sentiment analysis gives you more information than simply whether an individual’s interaction was positive or negative.

Using advanced AI techniques, the specific emotion behind a person’s communication can be extracted, leaving you with a much better idea of how they felt when they wrote those words.

Ultimately, ecommerce customer experience is about emotions, and good customer experiences aren’t just about the end product.

A top-of-the-line service in which you were treated poorly will have a far more negative impression than a middling service in which you were treated well.

The specific emotion behind the text being analyzed indicates how you should proceed when continuing the interaction.

Is the customer angry at a perceived slight? Apologetics and problem-solving are the tones you want to set.
Is the issue that the customer dislikes a certain aspect of your product or service? You can point toward similar products that solve these issues.
Is someone excited about a new release and is sharing it all over the internet? Appreciation and thanks go a long way towards building a relationship.

As you can see, sentiment analysis isn’t just about correcting problems or gaining information on cropped-up issues.

You’re trying to build a brand – build a personality, as it were – which requires you to interact with those consumers who have positive words to say about you too.

Now that we have plenty of information let’s explore how you can actively use this data to improve everything surrounding your brand.

6 ways to boost your brand with sentiment analysis

In brand building, it’s important to focus on what information sentiment analysis can give you about your current positioning within the market – your reputation, product strengths, weaknesses, etc.

To that end, we compiled a list that will first help you understand your status, complemented with actionable strategies to improve it.

The various facets of customer experience

Real-time reactions

The key to dealing with customers is to factor in their emotional state and respond accordingly.

This is easy to do face to face but isn’t quite as simple when you’re performing these actions over a text-based medium such as email, social media, or other messaging services.

Sentiment analysis brings a vital aspect to customer service with its ability to flag negative comments or communications for quick responses, allowing you to respond promptly and hopefully end the problem before it spreads.

One disgruntled customer complaining can hugely damage your reputation as the story of their experiences spreads, especially when the reason for their bad experiences is one that other consumers will resonate with strongly.

In this case, sentiment analysis is paired with social media monitoring and other forms of software which will feed into it in real-time, letting you know as soon as a crisis of PR crops up and identifying the emotions behind it.

The approach to solving these crises will depend entirely on the emotion behind the negative PR, whether that’s an outrage, sadness, disappointment, etc.

Improving your product and service

The other way sentiment analysis can assist with CX is linked to product improvements and SWOT.

Identifying problems in your service or deficits with your products and improving them is a definite PR win. More importantly, it comes from listening to your customers and acting accordingly.

Consumers often rank wanting to feel heard and have their experiences taken into account as among the most important factors when choosing a brand or company to provide a service.

If you’re in the service field, paying close attention to what sentiment analysis can tell you about what your customers desire is crucial.

By monitoring the sentiment around your brand before, during, and after changes to your products or services, you can easily judge whether or not those changes were a success.

Because this is happening in real-time, it can all be measured to provide you with information on how you’re doing in the CX world and how to improve future relations with your customers.

Market research opportunities

Sentiment analysis isn’t just for customer experience. It can be used when you’re doing research too.

When performing market research, sentiment analysis helps you dive deeply into your audience’s attitudes in ways that a human being could simply not do.

Most traditional forms of market research use controlled surveys, star ratings, and other similarly structured forms of data.

While it’s certainly useful to use traditional forms of market research like controlled surveys, they are prone to human biases such as leaving feedback only after a particularly good or bad experience. These biases can skew information, affecting your ability to make data-driven decisions.

True, sentiment analysis uses reviews to provide you with information. But to give a more rounded picture, it can search the internet and take information from areas that talk about your market specifically, such as forums, social media groups, and blogs.

Information about what customers desire and what they’re willing to pay can be extracted from these areas, giving you deep insights into your target audience and how you want your business strategy to appease them.

Customer segmentation

Not only can you analyze customer sentiment with sentiment analysis, but with the right tools, you can break it down into segments that show a very different pattern than the whole. After all, not all groups of people are the same.

For example, customers who interact with you via a mobile app or website will have a different experience. Slicing and dicing your data by demographic factors such as age or gender may yield interesting results.

Each group will likely have a different sentiment towards different aspects of your product, and this information will help you cater to them.

Idea generation

Using sentiment analysis, you can analyze people’s behavior when certain topics are brought to light and examine what potential leads you might be able to follow up on.

For instance, a tin of paint sold in a certain size that a significant portion of your customers has been vocal about being too small for their daily uses.

It would be worth investigating whether you can produce the product in a larger tin or multipacks so that these customers might be satisfied.

You can also take positive sentiment and turn it into ideas for future usage.

Did you know that bubble wrap was originally sold as textured wallpaper? As time went by, the creators took note of the positive sentiment surrounding its ability to protect fragile items in transit (and how fun it is to pop!), adjusting their marketing approach until it had radically changed from their original intentions.

Competitive Analysis

Sentiment analysis doesn’t just give you information on your standing within the market. It can give you insight into how your competitors are doing too.

Online reviews and social media buzz are open and visible to anyone. Using them as a source of competitive intelligence is perfectly acceptable in the business world.

Sentiment analysis can give you information on how the consumer base feels about your competitors, whether as a brand or on an individual product-by-product basis.

Revuze has taken the step to combine consumer sentiment with other forms of data in order to give powerful pieces of information and insights into the minds of your competitors. A few examples of such are:

Sentiment vs. star rating: The perceived expectation of quality that a brand or specific product has in the eyes of consumers.
Sentiment vs. total sales: The ability of a brand or specific product to maintain customer satisfaction across a broad spectrum of consumers.
Sentiment vs. total product variations: How easily a brand can maintain overall customer satisfaction while expanding into a diverse range of products.

Our AI insight engine, Sentimate, can help you perform these analyses in great detail, from examining a brand as a whole to an individual product out of thousands.

Using data extracted from online reviews and chatter, you can gain an incredible amount of useful information as long as you have the tools to analyze it.

Ratings and reviews across an industry

Ratings and reviews are part of the User Generated Content (UGC) realm. It is exploding and is expected to be over 90% of the world’s data soon.

UGC (ratings and reviews in our context) is important to millennials, with 86% saying it’s a good indicator of a brand’s quality.

Further research from Spiegel shows that reviews by verified purchasers vs. anonymous ones can bump purchase likelihood by 15%.

This is why brands encourage customers to leave reviews and provide feedback.

Now imagine being able to gather all these consumer opinions from online retailers and analyzing them for sentiment and topics.

What consumers like or not – why they buy, what they like or hate about a product, a service, or a shopping experience.

This is possible across an entire industry – all brands, all products, all reviews, and ratings, analyzed via sentiment.

The reason it’s so valuable and important is because of the breadth of the information and the depth. This is the high-quality raw material (ratings and reviews) and is highly focused on this medium of commerce, meaning:

Low ratio of noise-to-insights (Low “chatter”).
High level of granularity.
Store-specific feedback (Walmart has it in stock, Amazon doesn’t).

Getting started with sentiment analysis: the four main steps

As we dig further into understanding this powerful marketing and branding tool, let’s look at the pipeline of steps usually applied in sentiment analysis.

We’ll consider sentiment analysis for a company or brand in this pipeline sample.

Step 1: data gathering

First of all, we need the data that we will later analyze.

We can gather data from social media, namely Twitter, using scraping tools, APIs, customers’ data feed, and so on. We can also gather data from user reviews on services like Google and Yelp.

We’ll be looking for all mentions of the company or brand over a specific time.

This practice is very common in all forms of social media listening.

Step 2: text cleaning

Text cleaning tools will allow us to process the data and prepare it for analysis by:

Removing stopwords (a, and, or, but, how, what…).
Taking out punctuation (commas, periods…).
Reducing words to their stem.

These tools will allow us to “clean” or “strip” the texts from anything that might be irrelevant to the analysis.

Step 3: analyzing the data

At this point, we can use our sentiment analysis algorithms to analyze the data we have gathered.

As we saw earlier, the most common classification is the spectrum between “positive” and “negative.” However, more refined tools may also identify more complex sentiments such as anger, sadness, etc.

The algorithms will use a sentiment library to identify opinions and classify them.

Step 4: understanding the results

At the end of the process, we should be able to see the data grouped into major categories. We should be able to see if we have more positive, neutral, or negative reactions.

Having each sentiment tagged with its original date is particularly important, as a timeline will show us if we had “peaks” (surges of positive sentiments) or “valleys” (surges of negative sentiments) at specific moments in time.

We might therefore be able to find correlations between something that happened on a specific date and a surge of opinions regarding our brand.

While we might identify a peak or a valley while performing sentiment analysis, the opposite might happen—we might notice a surge in mentions on Twitter and use sentiment analysis to understand the reactions.

So far, we have talked extensively about ideas and strategies. While it’s all well and good talking hypotheticals, nothing beats seeing sentiment analysis in action to get a feel for how useful it is.

Sentiment analysis examples

We’ve handpicked some examples from our Revuze Explorer & Sentimate engines to give you an idea of what this sentiment analysis looks like and how it can be used.

Sentiment analysis using product review data

Sentiment analysis using product review data is perhaps one of the most important things every company (and consumer insights expert) looks after. After all, the best way to understand if your customers like your product or service are by understanding their sentiment towards it.

The easiest way to find out what your customers think about your product is by asking them to review it. The job doesn’t end here. Not all reviews are created equal!

You must collect all the relevant reviews for a specific product, arrange them into the relevant hierarchies, and compare them against the industry and your competitors.

A good example we can share would be the sentiment analysis using product review data we did on Lysol VS Clorox.

In the report, you can find exactly how Revuze deciphered the relevant product features by tapping into the consumer sentiment and understanding what’s working and what’s not.

Further, these millions of verified purchasers’ feedback on your competitors’ products and yours can each be cross-referenced against its product rating.

You can learn which topics are positive drivers for 5-star reviews and which are drivers of negative reviews.

This correlation can be quantified with sentiment analysis to let you know the exact percentage of driving terms towards product ratings.

In this example, it’s clear here that the top drivers for 5-star reviews are:

Fit.
Comfort.
Shipping.

What is also pretty clear here is that this product could have gotten MANY more 5 stars if it was:

True to size.
Not suffering from fake sales.
More durable.

This is a measurable, quantifiable way to boost your product rating for consumer products and services in an industry that includes ratings and reviews:

SWOT analysis

Sentiment analysis can also provide SWOT analysis, which stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.

SWOT analysis is used in product design and marketing to great effect, as it shows not only the strengths and weaknesses of your product or service but also those subjects which may become strengths or weaknesses in time.

Using sentiment analysis, you can measure customer satisfaction rates of a specific aspect alongside its importance.

This example shows a SWOT analysis of a 24” laptop.

Looking at the chart above, we can see the following listed as strengths:

Display.
Color.
Compatibility.
Size.
Speed.

These are the areas of the product which customers are greatly satisfied with. More importantly, they’re areas where customers expect high quality. These can be assumed to be the main drivers of good reviews and high sales.

The weaknesses are as follows:

Battery & Charging.
Audio Devices.
Camera.

These areas are those in which the product is lacking and needs to be improved ASAP.

Product design teams should focus on improving these areas in the next model or making accessories that circumvent these weaknesses.

Further, you can see some opportunities in:

Performance.
Assembly.
Quality.
Mouse & Touchpad.
Upgrades.

These areas are where the product greatly satisfies customers but aren’t that important to overall satisfaction.

The laptop manufacturer has a couple of options. Emphasize these aspects to niche users, improve them further to give the product an edge over the competition, or simply leave them be.

Finally, the following threats were identified:

Keyboard.
Ports.

Threats are low-rated product features, but ones with a low importance rating to customers.

Threats aren’t currently problems that need solving immediately, but you need to keep an eye on them as times change, product uses shift, and what was once irrelevant becomes very important.

Let’s take a step back and look at the bigger picture, starting with the top two drivers of purchase are:

Color.
Display.

These two factors are rated the highest in customer expectations while also being highly rated. As color rates are higher in customer expectation than display, greater care should be taken to maintain quality in the next iteration.

However, this laptop could have gotten more sales and higher customer satisfaction for the least effort if the battery and Charging had been addressed.

Since battery & charging are rated the most important to consumers, they should be tackled first. Following that are two other weaknesses, slightly less important to consumers: camera and audio.

As the camera function is not only rated as more important but boasts a slightly lower customer satisfaction rate, it should be placed in priority before the function of the audio device.

Using sentiment analysis, we’ve identified the main features that drive purchases of this big-screen laptop. When tackled, we also identified which weaknesses would give the greatest theoretical return on investment.

Of course, this assumes that all weaknesses cost the same amount to overcome, which is incredibly unlikely. However, using SWOT analysis and cost estimates combined, you can judge which weaknesses will have the greatest benefit for the smallest cost.

Monitoring chatter to track overall sentiment

Customers’ importance on product features isn’t the only way to sort product features.

There’s also the volume of sentiment around said features, which lets you judge which topics will please the most customers rather than indirectly.

Let’s look at this 12-cup coffee maker and the chatter surrounding it.

As identified in the graph above, the product’s functionality is the most commonly discussed topic. This has an overall negative sentiment, which means it should be high on the list of adjustments.

Looking at the most negative topics, we can identify the water reservoir capacity, durability, and the lighting on the coffee machine as topics that create very negative chatter.

However, those topics all consist of a much smaller proportion of talk around the machine than that of functionality.

This means while fixing them will create the most positive sentiment in those who were unsatisfied, the overall numbers might not lead to as much of an overall increase in customer satisfaction.

Market comparisons

Another factor that you may want to consider in product design is the overall state of products in the market.

A quick look at the coffee maker mentioned above can make the following comparisons to the market averages.

The vertical lines above represent the market average sentiment for each feature, with the red and green dots representing the sentiment around those particular features.

Looking at the chart, we can see that while the functionality of the coffee maker is below the market average, it is only by a hair. Thus, improving the functionality of the coffee maker is something that would make it stand out.

Similarly, the machine’s durability is quite close to the market average, meaning that while the chatter around this topic is negative, it’s a market-wide issue and not a specific weakness.

Switching to the water reservoir feature, we can see that the sentiment is far below the market average for a machine of this type. Not only is this a problem, but it’s likely one that causes a lot of negative reviews. Similarly, product defects seem quite severe, causing a lot of negative sentiment.

In conclusion, comparisons to the market averages tell us our coffee maker should prioritize its water reservoir in the design stage.

Additionally, the manufacturer should take a look at their production to limit the number of defective products that seem to be received by customers. This can be achieved in various ways like stricter quality control.

Wrapping up

Product ratings and chatter are the gold standards that drive online sales and higher conversion rates. Finding a quantifiable, measurable way to analyze and impact them is imperative.

Sentiment analysis is an incredibly useful tool for extracting information, but when you pair it with other forms of software, the true strengths start to shine through.

With AI-powered engines capable of using machine learning to grow and expand when new factors are introduced, sentiment analysis software will continue to grow and adapt to the language, slang, and syntax changes.

This constant evolution will help sentiment analysis keep up with the growth of ecommerce ratings and reviews, offering a way to align with the top of mind of customers in your industry and what they like and dislike.

This is done by leveraging sentiment analysis across retailers, brands, and products. With this, you can drive conclusions as to what drives product rating success (or failure):

For your product portfolio.
Learning from your competitor’s portfolio.
Comparing across retailers/audiences.

Then, you can analyze, change and impact any product rating by:

Optimizing what consumers are happy about on a Product Description Page (PDP).
Fixing product issues that consumers care about and drive low product ratings.
Addressing product rating differences between retailers.
Understanding shopping experience and customer service impact on the product rating.

All of this is possible when you select the right sentiment analysis tool. We recommend that you prioritize solutions that are:

Holistic: Providing the data, data cleansing, and analysis all in one spot.
Cross-level: Provide sentiment analysis by product and feature, not just brand.
Self-serve: Do not require experts in the loop but allow direct use by business users.
Ecommerce focused: Focus on eCommerce retailers as a data source (Verified buyer’s feedback)

If you want to give Revuze a go, we’d be happy to show you around the platform.

How To Improve Your Product

Posted on Jun 27, 2022 by Emily Louise Spencer

How To Improve Your Product

Product improvement is a data-driven process that should not be taken lightly. With the digital revolution well underway and companies seeming to come up with new product modifications on a regular basis, you need to keep on top of features and design preferences if you want to stay competitive.

That being said, there’s such a thing as overdoing it or missing the point. A good example of this is the recent release of Windows 11, which brought many new features, but prevented users from moving the taskbar. This led to a whole host of complaints and caused Microsoft to have to revert the change in late 2021.

Microsoft’s main mistake was to think about features, not usability. It doesn’t matter how brilliant or innovative your designs are if they’re laid out in a way that the users don’t like. People don’t like large amounts of change, and product improvement is no exception to that rule.

What should you do when envisioning new features and upgrades? Think about your customer base and what they use your products for. If you’re dealing with the general population, your products need to be easy to use and understand, at least on the surface level. If you’re looking at a more specialized or niche target audience, you might get away with a less straightforward product that has more available features.

With all this in mind, let’s dive into what happens when you improve your product, and how to go about doing it.

How to get started on improving your product

When you’re starting out, the task of product improvement can seem like a daunting one. Fortunately, there are a few categories of product modifications that you might find yourself looking into, and there are some general rules for each that can be followed in order to get the most out of your alterations.

Exploring new opportunities and avenues
If you want to expand, you’ve got to grow. One of the best ways to do this is by tapping into markets that you haven’t explored before. This kind of product improvement can come in two ways, adding new features to attract new customers, or expanding existing ones so that they reach a wider audience.

New opportunities (the “O” in a SWOT analysis) can be assessed by looking into usage cases of your product that you might have underestimated in the past. That is why completing a thorough SWOT analysis is key when starting to look into product improvement. Let’s say you discover that a consumer-base that does not belong to your go-to audience has been using your product—you would definitely want to tap into it.

It’s also possible to expand into new markets by creating new products specialized for them, but since that isn’t classed as product improvement we won’t talk about it here.

Addressing customer concerns

As evidenced by the Windows 11 example above, upgrades to features aren’t always what your customers want. You need to keep their needs and desires in mind when you implement changes, especially with more specialized products.

This is where listening to the Voice of the Customer comes into play. Only if you monitor your customers’ opinions in online reviews and social media you’ll be able to know their concerns and address them in your product updates.

Changes that address customer concerns are by their nature reactive rather than proactive, happening after you’ve received feedback on your product modifications. For this reason it can be helpful to keep receiving consumer feedback in the testing stages, rather than coming up with a finished design and hoping it goes down well. The term “beta testing” covers this idea, and while it’s mostly synonymous with the software industry it has applications elsewhere too.

Keeping up with the times
All products, but technology especially, can become stale and behind the times. Upgrading your products to match current expectations will keep your customer base interested, as well as have the potential to produce new features.

Or course this doesn’t just apply to technology. Environmental impact and ease of disposal or replacement is a great customer concern in current times, and older, less green products are being rejected over time by more and more of the population.

Keeping up with the times is about knowing what’s expected by consumers, which is distinct from what’s desired. If something is taken as an absolute necessity and you fail to provide it, you’re in for a bad time and bad publicity.

Depending on which of these categories your planned improvements fall into, you can adjust your approach to best suit it.

What can be improved in a product

Once you’ve figured out how you want to improve your product, you need to examine it and figure out what can be improved. You need to keep things practical after all, and whether it’s technological limits or manufacturing constraints there will always be something limiting your ability to improve your product to the “ideal” level.

Cost is another crucial factor in product improvements, as improving revenue and profits are almost always the ultimate aim of any business. There is no clear line that can be drawn at what would be considered worth the cost or not, it’s up to you to decide.

As success of new features won’t be visible in advance some organizations have adopted what’s called the “minimum viable product” approach, creating the most basic form of a product or feature for release in order to get feedback before committing their full budget to any one idea.

You should also prioritize features based on customer use, as these ones will see the most return on investment. Customer feedback will tell you which features are the most used, which are problem points and could do with some tweaks, etc.

What works and what doesn’t

You’re never going to be able to do everything exactly right. There’s always going to be things that have been missed in the ideas stage, unforeseen factors that cause complications and so on. That’s okay, everyone is only human and some mistakes are bound to crop up somewhere along the line. There are several key indicators that your modifications will prove successful, and some that indicate the opposite.

Signs of a great product modification plan:

You’re solving a problem or adding something that consumers desire.
Your plan is customer-centric.
You’ve made your plan flexible enough to get around obstacles.
You’ve defined your manufacturing limits and budget properly.
You’ve factored the product life cycle into your plan.

The last item is especially important when it comes to product improvement as you need to assess how long this product will last on the market before a new one is required, and thus define what the limit of your improvements will be. Those products with relatively short life cycles such as mobile phones or software will receive far less in terms of upgrades with each iteration than products such as car models which require far more in order to be perceived by consumers as worth buying.

Aside from the opposite of the above, there are a few signs that your product plan needs rethinking:

The modifications that you’re making would make your product too similar to another.
There are hidden costs that you didn’t account for.
The work is taking longer than expected.

None of these by themselves are reasons to drop your plans, merely signs that you need to re-assess them. The last point is especially important, as no matter how good your product is, people aren’t willing to wait forever and will lose interest over time. That being said, you shouldn’t rush the work either or you may end up with faulty products that fail to live up to expectations.

If you’re unsure on any of these points, you need to test, test, test! Alpha versions of products can be checked by your in-house team, with beta versions being made available to a small range of volunteer consumers in return for detailed feedback. Your plan should never be static, since new data means new information and new insights into what your customers want and how you might provide this.

How to analyze product data

Data is complicated, and you’re not going to be able to fully analyze it without software since the sheer volume would overwhelm any human who attempts it. Below you’ll find some of the commonly used analysis tools and a brief description of what they do:

Text mining
Text mining is the process of reading through unsorted text and extracting information that might be useful to you. Generally any software that collects information from raw text will also transform it into an easy to read form, simplifying it by factoring in synonyms and other linguistic quirks.
Sentiment analysis
Sentiment analysis is similar to text mining, except instead of simply pulling words out it looks at the meaning behind the words, or the sentiment that the text is meant to convey. This type of analysis is particularly useful for analyzing internet reviews or other short-form pieces of text that may contain slang or metaphors that simple text mining wouldn’t be able to pick up on
Customer sentiment
Customer sentiment is a general measure of how customers feel about interactions with you. It’s gathered in a similar way to sentiment analysis, but goes a step further to sum up all the interactions or feedback you receive into a sliding scale of positive to negative. While simplistic, it’s a great way of checking how your products are doing in the early stages of testing or release.

Sentimate offers customer sentiment on all products within its database, so if you need to find out what is and isn’t being received well, you can simply sign up and access our huge database of product insights.

How to implement your changes

When it comes to making product improvements, you can’t simply put them in and call it a day. If you don’t advertise your new products or features then consumers won’t be aware of them, and if consumers aren’t aware of them they won’t buy them. Marketing is key here, and you need to keep on your toes and keep your marketing department informed of the changes you’re implementing and what you intend to improve on in the future.

Key to this, especially if you’re looking at a long process that might take several revisions, is a vision of what you want to produce in the end and how it will be seen by your customer base. If your vision is aligned with that of customer desires, you’ll be able to use marketing to drum up a buzz and get people excited about it. A consumer base who want to buy your products before they’ve even hit the shelves is a valuable asset indeed.

What examples of product improvements can we see today?

There are all sorts of product modifications going on on a daily basis, some successful and some not. Let’s take a moment to look at some of the more successful examples that you might be able to learn from.

Koumeican Flat Extension Cords
Extension cords are a familiar sight to anyone who’s ever worked around any electronics. They do, unfortunately come with a bit of a drawback. Most extension cords simply use regular circular wires, which can lead to you tripping over them and issues pushing anything on wheels past without ripping the cord from its socket.

Koumeican came up with a brilliant solution to this – a cord that can even go underneath the carpet if necessary, and is flat so as to not be a trip hazard if simply placed on the floor. They looked at an issue that customers were having and solved it in a simple manner, a definite upgrade.

The iPhone
This one is a bit old, but you can’t deny it was innovative. While touchscreen phones, portable music players and devices with mobile internet access had existed before, the original 2007 iPhone was the first to place them all within one device, saving space in consumers pockets and simplifying their device needs.

What the iPhone did was completely transform the way phone technology was used, as well as expanding Apple’s market reach beyond computers and portable music players to reach a whole new range of consumers. Everywhere you look today you’ll see smartphones and similar devices with multifunctional capacities like tablets and smart watches, all offshoots of the original iPhone’s vision.

Using Sentimate to improve your product

Sentimate offers a wide range of features that can be used to gleam insight into your products. There’s a lot of information you can gather from customer feedback, though it usually comes at great effort. Fortunately, we’ve done it all for you and can give you all the insight you need at the touch of a button.

SWOT Analysis
Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats, together called SWOT, are some of the most valuable pieces of information. Sentimate’s analysis is derived from consumer sentiment in order to divide your product’s aspects into one of the four categories.
Not every facet of your product needs changing, in fact it’s best to leave the Strengths of your product alone. Opportunities indicate you’re on the right track, whereas Threats mean that you’re barking up the wrong tree when it comes to what your customer base wants. As for Weaknesses, nobody likes those but they do exist and you need to take those into account when deciding how to alter your product next.

Competitive Landscape
With just one click you can compare your products with those of your rivals and see where you lie in the realm of both customer sentiment and review volume.
You’ll be surprised at the amount of information you can extract from these two figures alone, with high-sentiment low-review count stats being an indicator that your product needs more promotion, whereas the inverse tells you that you need to upgrade the product itself a bit. There’s only one idea place to be on this chart and that’s slap bang in the top right corner, and by analyzing where you stand you can see what you might do to reach that goal.

Comparison Tool
A side-by-side comparison of two products is the best way to assess where you stand in relation to the market leaders (or your closest rival), and Sentimate’s Comparison Tool does just that.
The data we’ve gathered allows you to view different products and see where they stand, but more importantly why they stand there. When combined with the aforementioned Competitive Landscape tool you’ve got an incredible amount of detail into your products’ standing and how you might improve it.
From the advantages and disadvantages that consumers see in each product to key metric comparisons that tell you how customers feel, you’ll be sure to know more than you set out to by the time you’re done.

Hot Or Not
Trends can come and go in the blink of an eye, especially in some of the more volatile industries such as fashion or beauty. By using our Hot Or Not tool you can track customer sentiment at the present moment, see what’s rising in popularity within each category and see what’s dropping out of favor.
By keeping track of rising stars and falling rocks, you’ll be able to tweak your products according to shifting consumer opinions in real-time, even make predictions based on the projected landscape to bring out the next hit product yourself.

How To Improve Your Star Rating On Amazon

Posted on Jun 6, 2022 by Emily Louise Spencer

Amazon Seller Reputation: Why It Matters

Increasing your seller reputation is never a bad thing. It lets you increase your sales, boosts your reach and lets you track how you’re doing in terms of marketing. Amazon’s star format is one of the simpler ones for customers and those who view you to understand, but it’s slightly more complex when it comes to figuring out how to increase it.

The first thing we’ll get out of the way is this – your seller rating is not the same as your seller feedback. One is determined by the other, but feedback is discarded by the algorithm and doesn’t have an impact after 365 days. Thus, it’s not only important to get lots of good reviews but get them often if you want to keep your star rate high.

The Difference Between Product Reviews And Seller Reviews

Product reviews aren’t the same as seller reviews. One is directly related to the product in question, while one to the seller. One is about the quality of the product, the other the service and experience that the customer had with you. You’ll find both options on your

This might seem unnecessarily complex, but you need to remember that plenty of Amazon stores sell things that they don’t manufacture. It wouldn’t exactly be fair to put the burden of manufacturing errors on those who are just suppliers. It’s important to note that only those who’ve purchased from you can leave seller ratings, and only up to 90 days after purchase.

Seller reviews usually focus on packaging quality, shipping speed and communication by the seller. Anything that involves product description would also count. You might see feedback about incorrectly sized items, misleading photos etc. – these are also seller reviews.

Your seller reputation, in other words your star rating, is concerned only with seller reviews. Given said rating helps determine where you rank in the Amazon search function, it’s important to keep it high.

The Definition – What Are Amazon Product Reviews?

Product reviews are the other end of the stick. They’re reviews that are specific to certain items or groups of items that you and others might sell. They’re written with the intention of helping future customers decide what to buy based on quality, durability etc.

You can leave a product review from the Orders tab just as you can leave a seller review, but it’s important to note that people who haven’t purchased from you can leave product reviews too – they just need to have purchased something from Amazon in the past twelve months. While this is designed to let people who obtained the product elsewhere leave feedback, there’s definitely potential for abuse so keep an eye out for ratings that seem suspicious.

Given Amazon’s feedback system is in the form of comments left on items, you’ll often find product reviews and seller reviews lumped into one string of text. Customers don’t want to write things out twice when once is easier, so you’ll often find product reviews left in the seller review section and vice versa.

Why Are Amazon Product Reviews Important?

So, if product reviews don’t directly impact your seller rating why should you care about them?

Product reviews affect Amazon’s SEO, that is to say that if you have good ratings you’ll appear higher up in the recommended section of searches. They’ll also give you information about your products – quality, potential defects etc. This can be used by you directly if you manufacture your own products, or if you’re simply a supplier, used to decide what products you should continue to purchase from their manufacturers.

Product reviews also help in another fashion, and that’s to do with the psychology of purchasing things online. Consumers are suspicious of products with few reviews, thinking that they might be faked or inaccurate because of their small sample size. In fact, it’s been shown that how recent your reviews are also matters, with ratings from more than six months ago being virtually ignored by consumers browsing your products.

Techniques To Get Reviews On Amazon

So if reviews are that important, you’ve got to use techniques to get them. Most people won’t leave a review out of their own initiative unless they’ve had a particularly noteworthy experience, so a little bit of incentivisation doesn’t actually affect the accuracy of your reviews.

Ask For Feedback

If you want feedback, you can just ask for it! Sending emails to customers asking for a quick review is a good way to get responses, as it’s quick and easy to do.

Consumers are aware of the need for reviews to get good Amazon ratings, and a quick reminder is often enough to motivate them if they’ve had a particularly good experience with you, which will give you the bonus of good feedback.

Include Links To Feedback Pages

If you’re emailing customers, you should include links to feedback pages for the specific items they purchased. Nobody likes having to put effort into something that they’re doing as a favor for someone else, so making the process as easy as possible is advised.

Automate The Process

Of course, sending all these emails by hand is going to be a nightmare. The best way to get around that is to use automated email writing software, which has the added bonus of reducing mistakes made when transcribing links or product titles. The words Bread and Breed might look similar to a human, but to a computer it’s all 1s and 0s.

Amazon’s Vine Program

It wouldn’t be capitalism without a pay to promote option. Amazon’s Vine Program is a paid program that lets you confirm that your reviews are genuine, and provides the option to get your products reviewed by e-commerce experts.

Social Media Campaigns

Social media advertisements are another pay to promote section, but in this case you’re paying to have popups reminding your customers that they’ve purchased from you and a review would be nice. This can border on the level of “knowing too much”, but most consumers these days know all about big data and won’t be fazed by it.

How Big Data Is Changing Retail Marketing Analytics

Posted on Dec 8, 2021 by Simone Somekh

When it comes to marketing, you can’t talk about it at any length without inevitably involving data. Data is the scientific key to marketing, allowing for verifiable and testable ways of creating great branding and marketing strategies. You can do market research to try and understand the retail consumer all you like, but without involving data you’ll only have a rudimentary, qualitative view of the picture — not the best when you want to take things more in-depth.

Now you might be wondering, what are retail marketing analytics and what does big data have to do with it? Well, if you’re reading this you probably know what retail marketing is – analytics is the method by which you gain insight on your consumer base and what they’ll best respond to marketing wise. Big data has changed analytics into a more precise field, gathering data on individuals rather than groups and using said data on an individual level – something only made possible by the advent of the digital age.

Big data isn’t just about having lots of data — that’s a common mistake that some businesses can make. It’s about being able to use that data, employing methods such as text mining or AI analysis to leverage the data effectively on both the large and small scales. You can get big profits from big data, but only if you know how to use it effectively.

Changes to Analytics: Big Data Means Smaller Results

With the use of big data and the computing power to process it the focus of analytics has more and more become on the smaller details, things which matter to individuals and specific products you might sell, rather than trying to look at the whole picture. You’ll find several ways big data has changed analytics below, though this isn’t the whole story:

Use Big Data for Personalization

With traditional means of gathering data before the internet age, in addition to merely having offline means of reaching out to your target audience, analytics in the past were often vague and overgeneralised. After all, if you only have a single slot to market with you’ll want to make sure that your advertisement is as relevant as possible to as many people as possible. While a great idea for physical forms of marketing such as billboards and posters, the use of digital platforms where personalization of advertisements is possible means that you need a far more targeted form if you want to achieve the best results.

With analytics in place, you can use big data to target customers on the individual level, eliminating the need for broad, general advertisement and giving rise to far more specific and in-depth forms that are more likely to be of interest and therefore more likely to bring a return on investment.

Use Big Data for Market Basket Analytics

Getting to know what your customers tend to buy is useful. Knowing what they buy together is just as important, as it points to the consumer mindset and can give away links between products or services that would otherwise not be as noticeable. By using retail consumer data on what products are bought alongside what, you’ll be able to advertise products that would ordinarily fall into very different categories together. It can also be used to create bundles and/or offers for purchasing multiple items, a well established way to bring in more revenue. Getting an insight into the mind of your customer base is one of the best ways to understand them and what they want, with market basket analysis helping a great deal in that regard.

Use Big Data for Market Trend Prediction

Keeping up with the latest trends can be challenging for even the most skilled of personnel. Predicting the upcoming trends that might occur in the near future is something that might seem impossible – for a human, perhaps, but not for AI. Several marketing sectors have embraced sentiment analysis, a technique whereby algorithms can determine emotional context in text and extract information. Given this, market trends can be predicted from messages, news headlines or feedback, as the emotional responses these pieces provoke give an insight into a consumer’s next steps. It’s a technique already being used in the stock exchange, so you know it’s got to be promising.

Use Big Data for Customer Experience Personalization

In the same vein that analytics can determine what ads an individual might respond best to, so too can it predict what interactions with your brand will be favourable with the aforementioned individual. This is less precise than personalization of ads, as the technology to build multi-path platforms isn’t quite as well developed, but given a flexible platform such as an app or a website where multiple methods of completing the customer journey can be implemented it becomes possible to send a customer down a specific path in order to give them the best experience possible. This will not only boost revenue, but increase customer satisfaction and therefore customer loyalty.

Use Big Data for Behind-the-Scenes Operations

Big data doesn’t just help with the customer-facing part of business, in fact by taking into account predictions, trends and other information you can reliably predict what stock you’ll need in order to keep up with demand. No-one likes it when your intended purchase is out of stock, so by keeping up with the latest purchase trends and adjusting your supply chain accordingly you can ensure you almost never run out of critical stock. Other ways data can help is by using product logs or reviews to test product quality and ensure any defects or problems are compensated for in the future, to provide customers with the best product possible.

Conclusion

To sum things up, big data has changed the way organisations think about retail marketing strategies, shifting their focus from broader terms to more individualized approaches – something only made possible by the advent of high-power computing and AI. It’s also allowed for real-time analytics, letting algorithms change facets of web pages or apps at the click of a button as more data becomes available on the targeted consumer.

7 Retail Marketing Strategies for Product Growth

Posted on Oct 11, 2021 by Simone Somekh

The world’s population is still reeling from the effects of the COVID-10 pandemic, and so many businesses have had to quickly transition online because of store closures and lockdowns. Given the circumstances, this is the right time to discuss what you can do to make sure your business can thrive, even at this challenging time.

Whether you are planning to launch a new product or you just want to expand your customer base, you are going to need a solid marketing plan to acquire new customers and keep your existing ones. In this article, we’ll explore the different things you can do when it comes to retail marketing. Let’s dive right in!

What is Retail Marketing?

Retail marketing is a broad term, referring to various strategies that retailers implement to attract new customers and improve their revenue. At the foundation of retail marketing, there are four elements that need to be taken into consideration; these are often called the four P’s:

Product (or Service): The item that is being sold, or service if you’re not providing physical goods.

Price: The pricing that you use, and strategies that revolve around it.

Place: The location (or, in the digital age, the platform) where your product is located and available for purchase.

Promotion: What you do to get word out and attract potential customers.

These categories don’t cover all of the tactics you can use to improve sales, but cover those directly related to the product itself and the ease of purchase. While a lot of techniques outlined here can’t really be used in full lockdown, they’re ideal to spread the word and get more business as the world opens up and gets back on its feet.

1) Targeted Social Media

Ads are all well and good, but you can utilize social media platforms to a much greater extent if you plan things out. The best news about this strategy is that it’s all online, so there’s no worrying about how to fit it into local restrictions, as you can just sit down and get on with it.

While covering all your bases is good, it’s often a better strategy to begin with focusing on a few social media sites and then expand once your presence has increased. If you keep your eye on the platforms that your target demographics are likely to be using, it enables your ads to be more targeted without doing any filtering at all.

Of course, there’s more to social media than simply posting information. Using platforms such as Instagram you can make use of their tools such as the Story feature and video uploads to create a much more appealing aesthetic, something brands such as Frank Body have used to the tune of millions of dollars of revenue per year by growing their Instagram following to almost 700,000 people by focusing on an all-natural movement that their customers can connect with. Traditional advertising is nothing in the face of genuine connection and feeling of social acceptance.

In fact, several brands have shifted their focus to social media entirely with Instagram helping out by altering their format into an e-commerce platform in addition to their already established social media services.

2) Video Platforming

Tying in nicely with your social media, video advertising is nothing new but is still very relevant in the digital age. Whether it’s adverts that play before videos or simply play in a sidebar, most tech-savvy consumers have grown desensitized to adverts and simply skip them or ignore them as happened with television adverts before them. You’ll need to grab the viewers’ attention by creating a masterful video that not only shows off your product, but provides entertainment value making your brand memorable and interesting to potential customers.

Making yourself relatable and entertaining is the key here, with a great example being BauBax’s video that lambasts airline travel in a way that people can resonate with, as almost anyone who has travelled by airplane has something to complain about!

However you don’t necessarily have to make your products/services the main focus so long as they are visible. A great example of this is the Compare the Market advertisements that circulate to this day, after all who could forget the utterly ridiculous premise of talking meerkats complaining about a website? Even if 90% of watchers never even think about purchase, going viral is a great way to obtain publicity with the meerkats proving their worth by doubling sales in under a year.

3) Referral Programs

Referral campaigns are a more indirect form of advertising, in that you don’t target potential customers, but rather grant benefits to existing customers if they refer new ones to you. Since a high proportion of consumers trust peer recommendation over advertisements it can be an excellent trust-based tactic to attract customers. It’s especially effective if both referrer and referee are granted incentives, such as Koodo Mobile’s $25 cut to both the customers’ bills, and Airbnb’s account credit program. The investment app RobinHood also grants free stock to both the referred and the referee if a successful referral is made.

While the latter two’s methods of seeming to put money back in their customers’ pockets may seem identical to bill cuts, it also encourages future purchases in a two-for-one strategy to boost business.

4) Remarketing

The Airbnb strategy mentioned above is also a great example of remarketing, whereby retailers seek to improve revenue by reaching out to existing or previous customers. This can be done in the form of emails, offers and more, with the focus being on enticing those consumers back into your stores. Since a customer who has already purchased from you is familiar with your brand, you can keep things short and to the point when communicating with them. You can also use technology such as AI in order to target web ads at suitable consumers; after all, one who is more receptive to your brand is far more likely to interact and not simply ignore it. Pinkberry have used this to great effect with their emails that contained both a limited-time free item reward and a message of “We miss you!”, combining both remarketing and urgency in one stroke.

5) Flash Pricing and Urgency

Of course not all retail marketing takes place online, and sometimes you need to get customers who are inside a store to buy your products. That’s where flash pricing, also known as urgency tactics, comes into play. It’s where you advertise for quick, sharp price drops that will last for maybe a few days or even a single day in order to encourage consumers to physically come to your location and increase footfall. You can also do this online, however it’s much more effective at creating a sense of urgency in your customers if you’re advertising with regards to a physical location, or advertise directly at the location. In-store ads have also proven to be highly effective, with 69% of customers who were privy to an in-store advertisement going out of their way to look for the product in question, and 61% of those questioned intending to purchase it.

Urgency is key here, as customers see the price drops and will have to make snap decisions, which more often than not leads to sales if the customer was on the fence about purchase anyway. You need to be careful that you don’t price yourself out of the market, however, keep a good profit margin in order to keep your revenue streams positive!

6) Tracking Seasonal Peaks

A good tactic to pair with the above is seasonal sales, as well as other strategies to take advantage of peak time frames of buying. Holidays such as Christmas and Easter are notable ones with almost every store you can think of having some kind of sale around those dates, but it’s good to look at other key points that are more niche too. Depending on your product, you might want to focus on the beginning of summer, the back-to-school rush, and other times of the year.

Seasonal sales can produce high levels of profit, with Black Friday sales raking in billions each year. However, you need to be aware of the pitfalls that can befall you. Things need to be prepared in advance, and extra support is needed during those peak times to allow for continually high customer experience ratings so you don’t get a bad reputation. This translates into more staff in physical locations and a more robust server for online-hosted retailers.

7) Partnerships

Establishing meaningful partnerships with other brands can be a great way to reach new customers and advertise your product.

Links to other brands online could exist merely in the form of cross-store advertisements, or be as in-depth as co-operative marketing campaigns. Due to the nature of online media it’s easy to reach out to the most compatible partners you can find; those who share a target audience and philosophy are ideal.

In the physical world however, things are a bit tricker. Depending on your market you can make partnerships with local brands/stores, for instance a food supplier might partner with a culinary school in order to promote both businesses in an arrangement that increases reach for both.

Great examples of this in the digital realm include Red Bull and GoPro who both targeted athletes and action-loving individuals with a co-branding campaign, and BMW and Louis Vitton who similarly shared a consumer base but chose to take a more direct partnership with products designed to work together perfectly in order to attract lovers of both brands to the other.

What does convergence marketing mean?

Convergence marketing vs. integrated marketing

What are the advantages of convergence marketing?

Customer empowerment

Improved customer experience

Integrated communication between departments

Instant access to information

Where and how can you apply convergence marketing in your business?

Marketing department

Internal convergence

Communications

Management

What tools can help enhance convergence marketing?

Social media

Mailshots

Apps

Cloud software databases

Scalability

Cost-effectiveness

Easier collaboration

Enhanced data security

Wrapping up

What is customer perception?

What is the customer perception process?

Why is customer perception important?

Value alignment

Trust

Past experiences

How to determine & measure customer perception

Collecting feedback via surveys

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Customer Effort Score (CES)

Analyzing review data

Social media listening

What factors influence customer perception, and how do you improve them?

Pricing/Quality

Customer service

Branding

Usability

Advertisement

Customer reviews

Recommendations and advocacy

Location & shipping services

Wrapping Up

What is sentiment analysis?

How sentiment analysis works

Which algorithms are used for sentiment analysis?

How Revuze performs sentiment analysis

What are the challenges in sentiment analysis?

Sarcasm

Nuance

Why is sentiment analysis important, and what can it do for you

6 ways to boost your brand with sentiment analysis

The various facets of customer experience

Real-time reactions

Improving your product and service

Customer segmentation

Idea generation

Competitive Analysis

Ratings and reviews across an industry

Getting started with sentiment analysis: the four main steps

Step 1: data gathering

Step 2: text cleaning

Step 3: analyzing the data

Step 4: understanding the results

Sentiment analysis examples

Sentiment analysis using product review data

SWOT analysis

Monitoring chatter to track overall sentiment

Market comparisons

Wrapping up

How To Improve Your Product

How to get started on improving your product

What can be improved in a product

What works and what doesn’t

How to analyze product data

How to implement your changes

What examples of product improvements can we see today?

Using Sentimate to improve your product

Amazon Seller Reputation: Why It Matters