Using Opinion Mining to Understand Declining Sales

Remember the product you launched a year ago? The one you put a lot of marketing resources behind…the one that performed amazingly well initially, only to see sales start to decline a few months later, leaving you scratching your head and wondering what went wrong?

Now let’s fast forward to that management meeting, where you need to report to your manager and team what actually happened and why the poor results occurred – so what do you do?

Send out the same old survey? Cold…it will probably take a long time and cost a lot to find the verified users of this product.

Put a focus group together? Colder…this will take even longer, and your sample size will be even smaller.

Use social listening? Now you’re getting warmer…but this is only if you’d like to read reviews from a bunch of influencers who are getting paid to say the right things about your product, not to mention the fact that you can’t be sure whether they are referring to the product in question.

Use consumer reviews? Hot! But who has time to read them all, across all sites, and extrapolate the insights? You need to get those insights fast, accurately, and ideally benchmarked against the right competitive set.

Meet Revuze – the only tool that collects the entire range of products in the category from all sites, cleans them of incentivized opinions, and gives you an accurate snapshot of a product’s performance throughout its entire life cycle. It’s opinion monitoring, at the SKU level, from product launch to present time, with the click of a button. No survey to send, no focus groups to conduct. No hassle.

Brand Monitoring

Brand building is what marketers do to help their products stand out from the alternatives, especially the very cheap ones. Say you are in the all-purpose cleaning business and identified a market gap for the environmentally conscious user. Your company proceeds to spend a lot of money developing a product that has clean ingredients, recyclable packaging, and a sustainable-forward brand name and messaging. You hire influencers to say great things about your new brand and spend more money promoting it through the appropriate channels.

Now what? You can pray that your marketing efforts worked and continue working tirelessly, or you can start monitoring how your brand is positioned relative to the competitive set. If you want to be a market leader, you will probably do the latter.

Marketers spend millions monitoring their brands, with cadences varying between monthly, quarterly, or annually. Usually, this is done through surveys or focus groups and is extremely costly.

Furthermore, brand monitoring is usually performed on a predetermined set of brands consisting of the obvious market leaders, leaving little room for ‘discovery’ or ‘surprises.’ So basically, they are not only costly in terms of price, but they are also costly in terms of their ability to lead marketers to make faulty decisions.

Truly understanding a brand’s positioning in the marketplace can only be done with confidence when performed against the entire competitive set. The only way to do this is with big data and machine learning, by scoping the entire ecosystem for the available competitive set, day in and day out – giving marketers a true pulse on how their brands are growing over time.

Conclusion

Relying on traditional methods like surveys and focus groups to understand product performance and brand positioning is no longer sufficient. These approaches are not only time-consuming and costly but also often fail to provide the comprehensive and timely insights needed to make informed decisions.

Opinion mining, on the other hand, offers a powerful alternative. By leveraging big data and advanced machine learning algorithms, tools like Revuze can provide accurate, real-time insights into consumer sentiment and product performance. This enables businesses to monitor their brands and products continuously, identify potential issues early, and adapt their strategies swiftly to maintain a competitive edge.

Whether you’re dealing with a product that has seen declining sales or trying to establish your brand in a crowded market, opinion mining can be the key to unlocking deeper understanding and driving success. By embracing this innovative approach, you can move beyond guesswork and gain a clear, actionable perspective on your brand’s position and trajectory. With tools like Revuze, you can confidently navigate the complexities of the market, ensuring your products not only meet but exceed consumer expectations.

In conclusion, the future of brand and product monitoring lies in harnessing the power of opinion mining. It’s time to leave behind outdated methods and embrace a more efficient, accurate, and insightful approach to understanding your market. Make the shift today and see the difference it can make for your business.

Noa Shachaff