We write about the power of text data for AiThority

Most market researchers would agree that text data holds vital qualitative data, playing a key role in helping understand the “why” surrounding consumer insights. One thing that seems to fly under the radar with text data is that, with enough volume, it can also hold important quantitative data too.

The historical challenge text data has faced is that it has been difficult to access and use. Our Group Services Director, Horst Feldhaeuser, writes more about this and how we can replace historical manual, labor-intensive or ineffective hybrid tech-human processes with a better way in his most recent piece for AiThority, "Accessing the Full Power of Text Data as Part of Your Insights Framework." AiThority.com covers AI technology news, editorial insights and digital marketing trends from around the globe. 

In the article, Horst gives a background on unstructured text data and some of the challenges the insights space has faced in accessing its power. He also summarizes a case study with Infotools’ client Coca-Cola, where Infotools teamed up with Thematic, an AI-driven thematic and sentiment analysis platform, to analyze product reviews. Along with the founder of Thematic, Alyona Medelyan, Horst had previously presented this information at the Research Association New Zealand 2022 Annual Conference and chatted with her on our podcast about the project. 

Coca-Cola knew it needed an efficient and effective way to deeply understand customer reviews, as secondary research has shown that a high percentage of shoppers say product reviews are their number one decision influencer. The world's leading soft drink manufacturer had become increasingly aware that manually coding and processing a limited number of data rows - not representative of the entire body of review data - wasn’t working. The company’s insights team used Thematic’s AI text analysis to feed thousands of rows of data, representing consumer comments about its products, into Harmoni for processing, analyzing, and reporting. Inside our market research platform, Coca-Cola could “immediately investigate the relationship between data points (i.e. both the respondent/review and comment/sentence level) avoiding traditional, manual, heavy data preparation steps.” 

Ultimately, Coca-Cola’s team was able to look at multiple themes and sentiments per person and bring much greater depth to the text data than could be accomplished through traditional methods. The findings were then combined with other data streams, and provided invaluable insights for business decision-making, communications, and even new product development.

Horst writes, “When businesses find a way to truly utilize text data and turn it into hard facts, plus make connections with other data sources like sales or survey data, they can start to access true audience understanding…Understanding the “why” behind the “what” will provide richer context and boost the overall value of your consumer insights program.”

For the complete article, visit here. Need help accessing the power of your text data? We can help.