Tom H. C. Anderson - More Than Market Research

For this month’s issue of Competitive Intelligence magazine, a SCIP (Society for Competitive Intelligence Professionals) publication I was asked to write an article on text analytics/text mining. You can access the article here. It’s general in nature but also touches on methodology.

Surprisingly to me, having applied text analytics (TA) techniques since early 2005, most market research and competitive intelligence professionals still know relatively little about TA.

In terms of my take on it, currently there seems to be two types of companies in this space. On the one hand you have software vendors which include companies like SPSS & SAS. These companies produce other analytic software and data mining tools as well. In terms of full disclosure here, I do like several of the SPSS products (Clementine & Stafs), and they are one of our partner companies. There are also other software companies that specialize in text analytics specifically, though more so on the enterprise level. These include companies like Attensity, Temis, etc. These companies are usually represented at the Text analytics Summit which Anderson Analytics began to taken part in last year.

The other group are comprised of market research companies such as, TNS-Cymfony (with the recent TNS Media intelligence purchase of Cymfony), and Nielsen Buzz metrics. These companies tend to focus solely on blogs and are used more for advertising/PR effectiveness tracking.

Other than Anderson Analytics I’m not aware of any other full service market research firm which has leveraged the new technology. While the above companies all do their thing, they tend to be more software oriented. Therefore they don’t come into contact with the variety of research issues full service researchers do, thus few solutions are available to clients wishing to leverage text analytics to solve all the other marketing research problems TA could be used for.

Because market researchers approach MR problems from an academic/analytical point of view, we are better as deciding which tool is most applicable and how to best use it. Therefore, arguably savvy market researchers are perhaps best suited to leverage these tools effectively.

Unfortunately, or fortunately for some of us, I think there is currently a missed opportunity for many market research departments. TA is still a great way to gain an information advantage. In a broader sense, if market researchers don’t start paying attention to this, BI/IT will become the defacto text miners at companies, and many insights and applications may be missed.

I’m curious to hear if there are other market researchers out there, other than our clients, who have also been utilizing text analytics?

I’m sure there must be…how could a fortune 1000 company afford not to at least try it!?!

So to you other early adaptors, what methodologies and best practices have you developed?

Would love to share ideas.

- Tom H. C. Anderson