IIEX North America with Laura Kegley, Revuze CRO North America &
Ariann Langsam, Pilot Pen VP of Consumer Marketing

Host: Enhance the consumer world at the speed of online reviews, a technical deep dive in success stories with reviews and Pilot Pen.

Laura Kegley: Without further ado, I am Laura, the COO at North America for Revuze, we’re a reviews analytics platform. I’ll go into a little bit more depth on that. Very excited to have Ariann here with us. She’s one of our customers. If you want to quickly introduce yourself.

Ariann Langsam: Absolutely. Hi, I’m Ariann Langsam. I am actually now the VP of Marketing. Just got promoted, so didn’t have a chance to update my LinkedIn. Thank you so much. Really excited to be here. We’ve had a very fruitful partnership with reviews and have learned a lot. So I wanted to share that with you today.

Laura Kegley: Alright, so before we jump into the fireside chat, the first thing I want to do is there’s a few people here, so I just wanted to see people raise their hand if you read reviews before you buy a product.

Alright, so I usually ask this and look for feedback, but in the current metaverse that we’re doing this presentation, it doesn’t work as well. The percentage of people who read reviews before buying a product is actually 92%. So, 92% of people are going to read that review. A lot of times you’re going to filter it to the negative and look at what doesn’t work in that product, and that’s how you’re choosing it. This is a huge part of how you’re reaching your consumers, how you’re talking to your buyers.

The reason why Revuze is so interesting is that if you look at a review, you’re looking at at least three opinions within one review. For instance, in this example that I’m showing you, a lot of you likely have tools that are giving you the overall sentiment and the overall star rating. Here, we’re looking at a 95% positive sentiment, a five-star rating. But what you can see is all these sentences, people love to give multiple opinions when they’re writing about a product. It’s so important that when you’re looking at that, you can really break down every sentence because it’s that one piece of information that is changing that product review from being a four instead of a five. If you don’t have a tool that’s letting you know why that is, you don’t actually understand what’s driving your star ratings.

A lot of people who have a reviews platform, they’re usually thinking of review syndication, social listening, and all of those things are going to give you that overview. One of the things we’re trying to do is understand why someone is giving you that four-star rating. Even more importantly, these are verified buyers. These are people down to the SKU level that have bought this, purchased it, and it’s true customer feedback. It’s really important for us to say that when you’re thinking of how to improve your star rating, it’s not about incentivizing reviews. It’s about listening to your customers and then implementing the changes. That’s actually the best and most authentic way to improve your star rating.

I think one of the best ways to really give you guys the story about how that works is to bring on someone who’s using the tool. One of the things I think is so important to talk through is that a lot of you probably have a consumer analytics tech stack. You’re using social listening, reviews management, a lot of different emotional context. But we want to make sure that we talk through the full consumer analytics tech stack, including reviews data. It’s a little bit newer to the market, why you need a specific tool for that. It’s because the ability to follow SKUs, look at the category level, and understand that this review matches with this product, to be able to zoom in and zoom out and create that taxonomy is so important. It is in addition to the data that most people have today.

So, I’m going to ask the first question. I’m just curious to know in terms of your consumer analytics, how were you, before you were working with us, looking at consumer analytics and what were you using to get your team to understand the consumer voice and be a customer-led organization?

Ariann Langsam: Prior to working with Revuze, we did have some very strong POS data. So, we knew what was working based on which retailer and then the channels. We had social listening, but we really couldn’t get to the method of what was going on with a specific SKU at a specific retailer. This helped us figure out if there might be an issue, if there was an error, supply issue, product issue. If it was specific to one product, if it had been shipped a certain way, or if there were certain things that people were noticing at one retailer and we could spread that to other ones. It helped us understand where there might be an issue that we could address with something very tactical. It also gave us insights into things that were more strategic. People were saying, “Oh, I love this pen, I just wish I had one that was a little more dressed up, a little fancier.” We were able to deliver on that in the marketplace. So, it gave us a lot that we could act on from both that tactical and strategic standpoint.

Before we had Revuze, we were doing screenshots of our Amazon reviews and then manually putting them into an Excel spreadsheet and trying to track that over time. That was not the most efficient or effective way to garner information, draw conclusions, or take errors out of the system.

Laura Kegley: I think that’s something that we hear from a lot of customers is that they’re doing it manually. What you’re doing then is you’re just taking the most recent and it’s really biased information because you’re looking to prove your hypothesis, you’re looking for trials that make sense to you. You have a team where you needed that aggregation and the ability to scale it. Can you give everyone a little bit of background on your team and how they’re using the tech stack, including Revuze?

Ariann Langsam: Absolutely. So, the role of the marketing team at Pilot is structured into two groups. One is marketing research and insights, and the other is marketing communications. What these two groups do is cross-pollinate. The insights come from marketing research, then marketing communications does something with it, and then marketing research measures how that’s going in the market. We keep that loop going on a constant basis. We do this for our products in the same manner and also for each of our sales partners. There’s a lot going on and we need to be very efficient with how we do things. We are a very, I like to call it, small but mighty team. So, we do a lot with a limited number of people. We have to have really powerful tools that help us get things done, help us dig into the data, not just look at the most recent fact or aggregation of information, but look at things over time.

One example recently, we had a batch of not-so-great reviews and our sales team was saying we have a significant product issue. We looked and saw that the product had a high overall rating. It was specific to a certain kind of notebook, which led to communication about what’s best for that type of notebook, rather than a systemic product issue.

Laura Kegley: What I understand about the product is that you’re getting into the emotional decision of the customer and getting that kind of data. We’re talking about pens, right? There’s a lot of passion behind even choosing that. We know in the industries of beauty and fashion that there’s so much emotion behind it, but pens are a very personal decision.

Ariann Langsam: Absolutely. People often have a favorite pen, and I see lots of nodding. People are very passionate about their writing instruments. If you think about it, your handwriting is as unique as your fingerprints, and you have a very intimate relationship with your pen. It’s something you hold in your hand, it expresses your thoughts. It’s something people think about, they might put it on their shopping list. This is a really intimate part of how we express ourselves. It’s funny, when I joined Pilot, I worked for Johnson & Johnson before, and people were kind of like, “Have you lost your mind? You are going to work on pens and pens are dying in this digital age.” But the pen category has grown every single year as people continue to write and be passionate about what they write with. So, understanding what they want, what they care about, what they’re looking for now and in the future is critically important. We want to make sure that we’re addressing their needs.

Laura Kegley: Some of the topics that you are looking at, one of the things we do at Revuze is we don’t ask our customers to bring us topics. We don’t necessarily go to you and say what topics are important to your industry because that leads to biased information. If you’re thinking of the typical iceberg, above is what you know, below is what you don’t know. It’s really important for us to bring it at the category level. When we’re looking at writing instruments overall, we’re telling you what topics are important by scraping those reviews. Are there any of those topics that you find are the most important to be looking at?

Ariann Langsam: I think the most important ones are where people feel very strongly about them. People talk about smoothness, color intensity, and sometimes even say that it’s life-changing. You get some really strong words, and that kind of passion usually mirrors social media sentiment. So, if people are just like, “These are great, these are my go-to,” we start getting into those emotional linkages to those positive words, and we really see what people are most excited about. It’s for both our products and for competition, so we can see what opportunities might be.

Laura Kegley: How are you taking that in terms of it being such an ultimate solution? How are you taking those products? Are you combining it with something like a social listening tool?

Ariann Langsam: We run a good correlation coefficient. We have a social listening tool that we’ve had for a while, and we use that across all of our brands. We index that and correlate it with what we’re seeing through reviews and our actual sales data. In social media, we’re seeing a broader audience. We look at the two, any differences that can help us, and look at where we’re seeing the similarities. That’s where we get the mirror into that passion index and language. We use those words that we’re seeing across both into our social media content and especially into our paid content.

Laura Kegley: It really starts to resonate. We look at social listening as giving you that cultural love, what’s happening, how are people talking about your brand. Reviews data is your tried and true buyer, that feedback and

How are you taking that in terms of it being such an ultimate solution? How are you taking those products? Are you combining it with something like a social listening tool?

Ariann Langsam: It’s the proven buyers. We know that is absolutely happening. We can also know if somebody bought it from one P or three P. If we have something going on at three P, we can try and address that because, at the end of the day, it’s about the consumer experience. We want to make sure that we are giving them the best experience. So, we leverage this data in a lot of different ways.

Laura Kegley: One of the things we do in the reviews platform is the ability to look at your SKUs and information by source. If you’re selling on Amazon, Office Depot, Staples, you can see how customers are reacting and responding on one retailer versus another. Why is their sentiment higher on one? What’s the incentivization on one? You can look at your competitors to see if they seem to be incentivizing their reviews at Target and maybe you should be looking into that more. We do open that up to get that overview and understand the customer experience that you may not be as close to because you’re working with that retailer, but you can’t always control their experience at that retailer. So, it gives you that insight as well.

Ariann Langsam: Absolutely.

Laura Kegley: We went through a couple of stories, but I know you had talked about the customer wishlist. Is there anything else that you felt like was, um, like with the color of the pens or changing the topics, or anything recently you did where you knew this is something that we have to change in our product that matched what you learned in the tool?

Ariann Langsam: We noticed the most with the color. There’s a pen we launched where we were trying to figure out what to call the ink color, and we ended up calling it black because it was black ink. But we actually went through, should we call it soft black? Should we call it charcoal gray? Because it really was not that ebony black. We went through a number of iterations and a little bit of research, and people felt confused because they wanted to have an actual black pen. So, we launched it with black, and based on the reviews, we saw people were saying it’s really not that dark of a black, it’s more like a soft color. We’re going to go back and rename it what we originally thought we should have named it before we talked ourselves out of it. We’re actually not living up to the expectation the consumer has in their mind based on calling it black ink. We developed it to be a softer color, and it delivers fully on that. So, it gave us some great information, and now we’re going to go forward with that change and hopefully see more positive sentiment in the color intensity.

Laura Kegley: It goes back to improving your rating and sentiment by listening to the customers and taking their feedback and implementing it. Changing the name of the color is a lot easier than completely changing the product. It’s a way to take that feedback and quickly turn it around.

Ariann Langsam: Absolutely. The product was developed, it was purposeful, and we developed it that way for a reason. We just needed to make sure that the actual reason for the product is reflective of the attributes we’re sharing with the consumer.

Laura Kegley: Nice. Alright, one more question. Does anyone know what percentage of people use reviews to make a decision? Anyone want to hold up a number? 70 or 80? Anyone think it’s 75%? Above 80? It’s 88%.

So, when you’re thinking of reviews data, this isn’t about the top level, getting more reviews, or incentivizing. This is about the fact that we are essentially your digital word of mouth. People are trusting reviews the same way they trust their parents, their best friends. They’re really reading this and listening to it, and they’re making a decision on whether or not they will actually buy the products. If you have negative reviews, like I said, if you shop like me and go to the one-star ratings, it will keep people from adding it to the cart. It actually is a direct impact on your ROI if you’re not paying attention to the fact that you have low reviews data. That’s why we like to say there is a more authentic and genuine way to improve your star ratings. It’s by listening to your customers and implementing changes, not just syndicating the positive reviews.

One last question, and then we will take questions from the audience. With pen sales, what is the next step for you guys? How do you lead rather than just be reactive to feedback when we’re at a conference where people are wearing headphones listening to us, on their phones typing, or on their laptops? What do you do in order to look at the category level of reviews data so that you can lead the customer and be the innovative company that you are?

Ariann Langsam: We were talking about this earlier, it goes back to that Henry Ford quote. If you ask people what they’re looking for, they’ll say they want a better buggy, a better horse-drawn carriage. They never knew they wanted a car. We use reviews to make sure we’re making our existing products better every step of the way. But as we’re looking forward and trying to figure out what the next innovation is, we’re looking across categories, consumer trends, and things that are trending across a broad range of businesses. We’re trying to see how that relates to pens and the writing instrument category. Writing is here to stay; it’s a fundamental part of who we are. So, we want to make sure that as we move forward, we keep coming up with products that are relevant.

Laura Kegley: You mentioned earlier with your team, it’s still that magic of art and science. That’s really part of the innovation too.

Ariann Langsam: Absolutely. We have wonderful data, but there’s that human element of taking it, brainstorming, figuring out what it means, looking across categories, and seeing how it all comes together. There’s such rich neuroscience to the benefits of writing. These are the things that will take us into the future.

Laura Kegley: Do we have any questions?

Host: We do. We have time for one.

Laura Kegley: I encourage everyone to go visit booth 41 and we’ll do a demo. Anyone is interested.

Host: You mentioned correlating reviews and social listening. Are you conducting that through N 97 dash three?

I don’t know what that means. Sorry.

When mining reviews, how do you parse what’s just stable stakes for the category versus salient as innovation?

Ariann Langsam: That’s a great question. We index versus the category, which is a great mirror of what the stakes are. We look at writing instruments, pens, and our stars, and make sure we’re always striving to be above that. We look at the newest, hottest trends and make sure we’re staying ahead of that. If the average rating on smoothness is 70, we want to be above that. If we’re not, we want to understand why and address it.

Laura Kegley: You can also see if a topic seems to be driving one and two-star ratings across the category. If it is, maybe it’s not where you spend your time, or maybe it’s where you differentiate yourself. In the reviews platform, you can benchmark at every filter. You always know where you’re at, indexing above or below the benchmark, depending on how you’re filtering the data.

Can we do a quick speed round to end it?

Host: We are out of time. Thank you so much, Lauren and Anne. Make sure you visit their booth at the blue stage for any more questions. I’m sure they would love to hear from you.

Thanks, everyone. Thank you.