Sentiment Analysis Gives Companies Insight Into Consumer Opinion

Kia, Best Buy, and Viacom are using new tools to mine comments on the Web to see what consumers really think of their brands

By Rachael King

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Kia Motors (000270:KS) is eager to know what consumers think of its 2012 Rio, a five-door compact car to be unveiled at an auto show in April. The company, whose cars have traditionally been associated with fuel efficiency and good value, wants also to be known for "great design and cool technology," says Michael Sprague, Kia's vice-president of marketing and communications. "Our biggest challenge for the Kia brand is changing consumer perception," he says. Yet, the company has struggled to connect with consumers "on the emotional side," he says.

To change that, the Seoul-based automaker will use a tool that can swiftly analyze large numbers of opinions on the Web, including blogs, the microblogging site Twitter, and social networking service Facebook. It's called Mass Opinion Business Intelligence and it was developed by an Irvine (Calif.)-based company called WiseWindow. It coughs up a continuous, real-time feed of relevant consumer sentiment, gathered from millions of sites.

MOBI is part of an emerging technology that can tell a company almost instantaneously how people are feeling about a particular business, executive, product, stock, or advertising campaign. Conventional methods of gauging customer sentiment, such as surveys and focus groups, can be expensive, time-consuming, and difficult to measure in real time, says Seth Grimes, founder of Alta Plana, a consulting firm based in Takoma Park, Md. The better and more quickly a company can measure customer sentiment, the sooner it can tell how well a product is likely to sell.

Aside from Kia, companies such as Best Buy (BBY), Viacom's (VIA.B) Paramount Pictures, Cisco Systems (CSCO), and Intuit (INTU) are also using sentiment analysis to determine how customers, employees, and investors are feeling. Some companies even use software to check the tone of e-mail messages and other communications.

Text Analytics

Automated sentiment analysis is an emerging field that overlaps with many others such as business intelligence, customer service, and brand reputation management, and the market is hard to measure. Many types of sentiment software use a technology known as text analytics, which extracts insight from text, such as in social media, news articles, or internal documents and databases. The market for text analytics alone may rise to $978 million in 2014 from $499 million in 2011, according to an October 2009 report by Forrester Research (FORR).

The technology makes it possible for nearly anyone to analyze consumer feelings without having any inside knowledge of the company. For example, WiseWindow looks at certain industries such as the airline industry. The company has been able to determine that a new Southwest Airlines (LUV) ad campaign that touts a frequent-flier program isn't as popular as a previous one, says WiseWindow Chief Executive Officer Sid Mohasseb. The previous "Bags Fly Free" campaign emphasized that, unlike rivals, Southwest doesn't charge for checked baggage. "They're losing market share of opinion," he says. Mohasseb declined to say which airlines, if any, are his clients. Southwest declined to comment.