4 Steps to Product Innovation through Social Market Research

“The process of product innovation involves the introduction of a good or service that is new or substantially improved. This includes, but is not limited to, improvements in functional characteristics, technical abilities, or ease of use.” – Wikipedia

Product innovation is a driving force behind business today. From automotive to pharma and food to finance, leading companies are looking to capture the available white space in the market by filling a consumer need with product.  A company’s future is often its ability to quickly innovate, identify consumer needs and develop new products and improve on existing products to fill those needs.

The world’s largest focus group

Social media has quickly become the hub of unbiased and unsolicited consumer opinions allowing brands to gain deep insight into market needs.  Social media has given consumers a strong audible voice and product innovation teams can now leverage these consumer conversations and opinions.

There are 4 easy steps to inform product innovation through social market research:

Step 1: Listen Widely

Listening is undoubtedly the most important part of the social market research process. It’s important to cast a wide enough net in order to gauge industry conversations while also listening to consumer conversations about products at the same time.

Step 2: Segment the data

Once the data is collected there’s a ton of great anecdotal mentions, but that’s about it.  Without knowing “Who is talking?”, “What are they saying?”, and “Where are they saying it?”, it’s difficult to act on the data.  Segmenting is an important step and provides key information such as: Age, gender, ethnicity, location, education level, and even hobbies/interests and the ability to identify the needs of a target audience.

Step 3: Dig for trends and key insights

Understand the involved consumers’ attitudes towards products in the marketplace, what they want and what they need.  Social market research provides an innovation playground where brands can track consumer unmet needs over time and dig deeper to answer the two important questions: 1) What does my consumer want? and 2) Why do they want it?

Step 4: Validate the findings

Apply the findings from Social Market Research to more traditional forms of market research to test ideas.  Smaller focus groups and online panels are great ways to test against target demographics.

For innovation it’s important to have a deeper understanding of consumer attitudes, wants and needs in the consumer’s natural habitat, the Internet.   Social market research can help you achieve that understanding quickly and economically.

Social Media Intelligence Case Study – Consumer Packaged Goods

Situation:

A large consumer packaged goods company wasn’t getting the sales expected on a new product line.  The client is in a highly competitive industry and wanted to understand the consumer attitudes toward the product and identify the reasons for/against purchasing.

Solution:

We used our proprietary social media intelligence methodology and analyzed all public online mentions about the product line.  Four (4) relevant themes were identified within the consumer conversations: brand reputation, cost and value, product quality, and product packaging.  We further analyzed the demographic and geographic information within the discussions to further segment and uncover rich consumer insights.

Results:

Within two (2) days, ListenLogic collected and analyzed 17,000 comments over a 30 day period.  We determined the following:

• Consumer attitudes toward the brand, reputation and value were relatively positive for all age and gender segments, no issues there
• Quality was seen as a slight issue, but not enough to explain the lack of adoption
• For female consumers, specifically 18-34 which was one of the product’s primary targets, packaging was the issue

Through social media analysis, we were able to determine that females, specifically 18-34 located in the Northeastern United States, had real issues with the packaging design and were choosing a competitor’s product.  The packaging size was too big, and during the cold stormy winter in the Northeast women didn’t want to carry the large package out to their cars from the retailer.  The competitor’s packaging was 25% smaller.

Armed with this qualitative and quantitative data, the client made a well-informed decision to quickly alter the packaging size to make it more universally acceptable, as well as create a new campaign targeting female consumers.

For more information and to see how we can help you leverage social media for consumer intelligence, please contact ListenLogic at 1-888-ROI-ON-SM or info@listenlogic.com.

6 Reasons why a social media monitoring ‘tool’ is not enough

The list of social media monitoring tools gets longer everyday. Each tool offers something different. There are lots of bells and whistles that separate the free from premium, things like sentiment and influence analysis, workflow and demographics. But regardless of the tool, tools provide data – not answers.  A tool alone is not enough.

1. Technology is only part of the equation
   A monitoring tool requires human interpretation. No matter how cool the technology, a tool provides data (for you to dig into), not insight into what the data means or what to do with it.
2. Social Media Monitoring probably isn’t your core competency
   Social media monitoring is both art and science.  Experience is everything.  Much like SEM and SEO, listening requires skill and in-depth knowledge of technology and linguistics.  For this reason you’re probably not executing SEM & SEO campaigns in-house, you’ve outsourced them to the experts.  Social media monitoring is no different, it’s complicated and it’s time-consuming.
3. Social media monitoring is cool, but first establish why you want to listen
   Sure people are talking about your product or service, but what are you ‘listening’ for?  Is it to track a campaign? Learn more about a competitor? Measure a new product launch?  Data in of itself doesn’t deliver better business decisions.
4. Tools offer promises, not deliverables
   Insights, intelligence, action and ROI are the promises of tools, not the deliverables.  Expert people are needed to turn these promises into deliverables.
5. Real-time insights drive the ROI
   More timely, insightful information makes for better decision making.  Better decision making is what drives ROI.
6. Answers are everything
   Ask a social media monitoring tool to answer a question…

Social media intelligence is the combination of social media monitoring technology and expert insight delivery.  It includes dashboards, reports to answer tough questions, and expert services to better understand what the data means and (most importantly) what to do with the data.   You’re able to answer questions like: Is our ad campaign working? What do people think of our new spokesperson? Why do teens choose our competitor? How do we increase enrollment?

If you’ve already tried a DIY monitoring tool and want to take the next step in gathering intelligence, we can help.  Contact us and we’ll show you how social media intelligence transforms business.