What Are People Saying about Your Company, Your Products, or Your Brand?
Kathy Lange, Saratendu Sethi · 2011
A growing area of interest for many firms is understanding what the market (customers, analysts, or key opinion leaders) is saying about their products and services. Many refer to this area of analysis as sentiment analysis. They want to understand more about people’s opinions, attitudes, and emotions when discussing their products, services, or overall brand. From the company perspective, listening and analyzing what people are saying about products and services is the first step in creating a dialogue with that audience by listening, learning, and then engaging with them. This dialogue can better inform targeted marketing initiatives to customers and prospects, enabling the organization to communicate at a significantly lower cost than traditional marketing with increased speed and effectiveness. It can also enable a more rapid response to perceived customer issues and competitive threats. This paper discusses the use of SAS ® Sentiment Analysis and SAS ® Text Miner to uncover good and bad feedback. It discusses lessons learned from real projects. WHY DO ORGANIZATIONS CARE? All types of businesses and government agencies are starting to take advantage of information buried in previously untapped text documents (surveys, product reviews, online forums, e-mails, instant messages, articles, etc.). They are interested in protecting their brand equity, increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty, and reducing risks by carefully guarding their reputation. Initiatives like these are often driven through the sales and marketing departments, but are monitored by top executives including the CFO, COO, and CEO, as they have far-reaching financial impact. Top executives attempt to manage all types of risk within their organizations. Many of these risks are financial (credit risk, market risk, liquidity risk, insurance risk), but others are nonfinancial. Reputational risk is one of the highest nonfinancial risks identified in the “Global Risk Management Survey: Sixth Edition” executed by Deloitte in 2009 [1]. That survey identified that 81% of the respondents were attempting to manage reputational risk. Firms need to understand what the market (customers, analysts, or key opinion leaders) is saying about them, their products, and their services, and prepare for any unforeseen issues. The following are some examples of companies (or people), where public incidents have caused an impact on their reputation. The actions that are taken after an incident occurs are often the key to whether they recover from damage incurred to their reputation. Tylenol (product tampering) Domino’s Pizza (employee video) Wendy’s (finger in the chili hoax) Toyota (sudden acceleration reports)