An interview with Brandwatch Chief Product Officer, Bex Carson, on the ways digital consumer intelligence can help businesses thrive.
Sabrina Dorronsoro Content Production Specialist Brandwatch
Over the past decade, data has been at the forefront of brands' efforts to differentiate themselves and win over consumers. But questions remain – how do we take control of it? How do we leverage it? How do we continue to innovate with it?
Digital Consumer Intelligence (DCI) will shape customer insight in 2020 – but how?
I sat down with Bex Carson, Chief Product Officer at Brandwatch, to talk through some of the key ways DCI can improve any business.
The central goal of any kind of research is to understand the complexities of the real world. We seek out patterns in order to paint an accurate (but digestible) picture of reality, so that we can predict what might happen next.
The real world is a complicated place, and humans are complex beings. A datapoint will give you one view on the world and the people in it. To give ourselves the best possible chance of understanding the world accurately, we need to gather data from a diverse range of sources, blending methodologies. Traditionally, this has been prohibitively expensive and time-consuming.
But not anymore.
The digital data explosion, combined with innovative new technologies, have given rise to what we call digital consumer intelligence. From unprompted social mentions to search behavior, sales trends, or weather patterns, we have access to a breadth of data that enables any research question to be tackled with rich contextual data in unprecedented ways
Meanwhile, the widespread adoption of mobile devices has made it easier than ever to access real consumers and ask them questions.
All this data can be triangulated at speed, uncovering unique insights.
“This is where, in a cluttered world, you find your edge,” explains Carson. “When we can be playful with data, we open up the door to unknown unknowns. It’s the birthplace of innovation.”
DCI tools can act as a faster means of insight than more traditional methods in some critical ways. Here are our top four:
1. Instant recruitment to survey: With a DCI survey tool (like Qriously) you can gain instant access to billions of people and prompt them to answer your questions. That means less time recruiting people to complete your survey in the first place and more time analyzing answers collected in real-time.
2. Real-time social insights: When thinking about consumer insights, social media is a key part of the conversation. Today, people don’t hesitate to turn to social media when they want to talk about how much they love or hate a given brand.
There is a big (and valuable) real-time element with social that other data sources simply can’t provide. Brandwatch’s DCI platform receives minute-by-minute social media insight faster than any other platform on the planet.
3. Immediate access to historic trends: Key questions researchers will come upon when analyzing a trend are: Is this something new? Has it happened in the past? Is this a cycle that is being repeated?
You can't go back in time and ask a question, but with social data you can look back at years of verbatim posts to see what people thought at different points in time. At Brandwatch, we have an archive of 1.3 trillion posts back to 2010. That means you can look back and say:
"Ok, well this actually peaked three years ago and then died away and seems to be back now. So, what happened? Is it going to die away again? Should I invest? Will it be bigger this time?”
Getting that kind of fast access to historic trends is invaluable for brands looking to contextualize their recent data.
4. Exploration and iteration in research: Traditional research methods only let you go so far. The process is rigid. You create research questions, gather your data, and then you have what you have. You can’t ask more questions or dive a bit deeper without considerable expense and delay.
With social or real-time surveys, going back into the research to dive deeper is easy. It brings in the possibility of exploration and iteration at the analysis stage, making the process much more flexible.
Finding something new, finding something first, or finding something surprising that your competitors haven’t capitalized on comes from exploration and flexibility with data rather than rigidity.
When it comes to anything technology-centric there are a lot of pervasive myths.
Social data and other sources relating to digital consumer intelligence often get flack regarding representativeness. The idea is that you can’t use online sources for robust research because not everyone is online.
The truth is, these methods are actually much more representative than most traditional approaches today.
For starters, the question of online adoption is void. Nearly everyone is online in some form today. With Qriously, we can distribute surveys to anyone with an app on their phone that shows adverts.
We know that there are plenty more people with phones and apps than there are people that sign up to be a part of an online survey panel (otherwise known as professional survey takers).
We’re also becoming much better at inferring demographic data which you can then weight against the population. Sure, the data in its raw form may not be representative, but that's where the methodology comes in.
“Just like with any consumer intelligence or market research methodology, you don't talk to every person that exists in a given demographic or location, you take a sample,” notes Carson.
“Once you’ve collected your data, you weight it against the population and then extrapolate as to how you can expect the rest of the population to behave based on this information.”
So, where does Brandwatch fit into this puzzle? In what ways are we planning to embrace and expand on the things we've been talking about here?
1. Investing in our data and intelligence platform: We have a pretty unique blend of products here at Brandwatch. Our platform can handle, process, and quickly retrieve huge volumes of unstructured text data across many languages.
We are leaders in multilingual unstructured text analytics, enabling us to analyse huge volumes of unprompted consumer opinion data.
Our recent acquisition of Qriously now gives us the ability to ask questions, and to combine prompted and unprompted data. We plan to keep going further with all of this through 2020 and beyond by pulling in contextual data and blending this with our own sources.
One of the great things about digital data is that it usually comes with a time and location stamp so we are able to triangulate time and location with a trend in conversation and find out what the patterns we are seeing are having an impact on.
This contextual data links the digital data we are collecting in the real world.
“Our unparalleled access to historic social data, real-time survey, A.I. powered data analysis and our speedy, proprietary data processing and retrieval platform make Brandwatch the only company to emerge from the social listening space that is fit for market research,” explains Carson.
2. Democratizing business intelligence through intuitive analysis products: The other way we are contributing is with our front end products – our actual user interfaces – putting a huge focus on design and baking good methodology into our user experience.
Making an easy user experience allows for more self-serve research, meaning marketers and other executives can ask questions directly of the data rather than always having to go through data analysts or market research agencies.
By closing the gap between insight and action we make it more possible to embed data-driven decisions into your daily experience.
“The risk of setting insights loose inside a large organization is that inconsistent data can proliferate throughout an organization,” notes Carson.
“To allow our customers to benefit from real-time insights but still keep one source of the truth, Consumer Research has uniquely powerful administrative and compliance tools, making it truly fit for enterprise intelligence.”
Our clients are using Consumer Research to automate everyday reporting tasks and spend the time they save asking more challenging questions of their data. The innovations in data analysis that our clients build within Consumer Research give them the competitive edge they need in today’s highly volatile and competitive market.
We believe that the successful companies of the not-too-distant future will be those who have mastered and operationalized digital consumer intelligence within their organizations. And we’re excited to be playing a pivotal role in this transformation.
Bring on the innovation.
