SOURCE: Biz360
October 07, 2008 06:00 ET
Biz360 Launches New Opinion Insights Service
New Marketing and Product Planning Resource Aggregates & Analyzes Online Consumer Reviews; Delivers Ongoing Product Feature Insights, Turns Online Customer Opinion Into a Competitive Weapon
SAN MATEO, CA--(Marketwire - October 7, 2008) - Biz360®
Inc., the leading provider of media and market intelligence solutions,
launched Opinion
Insights, a breakthrough, technology-based monitoring and measurement
solution designed for product and marketing decision makers.
Opinion Insights captures and analyzes consumer opinion information from
thousands of shopping, consumer product and expert review websites, and
summarizes this information into ongoing intelligence at an individual
product level. By providing continuous, real-time understanding of how
consumers rate branded products and services -- down to model, SKU,
attribute and feature level -- Biz360's Opinion Insights service offers
marketers a cost-effective, census-based approach that complements (and, in
some cases, replaces), costly traditional market research techniques.
Now businesses can make smarter and faster decisions
Opinion Insights incorporates advanced business intelligence technology in
data aggregation and analytics to address the cost and limitations
associated with traditional market research techniques. Recognizing that
online reviews are a significant and growing influence on consumer purchase
decisions, Opinion Insights provides an automated way to mine this powerful
source of peer influence, and to deliver marketers an accurate, up-to-date
view of consumer ratings for their products and services, as well as those
of their competitors.
Biz360 collaborated with Christopher Manning, Stanford professor and
leading authority in the field of natural-language processing (NLP), to
create a first-of-its-kind system that automatically captures the sentiment
of individual consumer opinion comments. Opinion Insights delivers a wide
range of critical metrics, alerts and in-depth analyses including customer
advocacy trends, identification of key influencers, competitive gap
assessments, price/value analyses, as well as feature-level and
source-level analysis.
"Never before has such a powerful customer insight tool been placed at the
fingertips of marketers and market researchers," said Brad Brodigan, CEO of
Biz360. "Opinion Insights lets companies implement real-time opinion and
trend tracking rather than relying on costly and sporadic primary research
initiatives. This means marketers can spend less time and money figuring
out what their customers want, and more time designing, developing and
marketing products shaped by recent, on-the-record consumer feedback."
Harnesses growing and influential online consumer voice
Consumers are expanding their use of the Internet to help make their
purchase decisions. According to Pew Research, 78 percent of Americans have
used the Internet to research a product or service before buying.(1) Of
those, 8 out of 10 reports that online reviews directly influence their
product purchase decision.(2) In fact, the opinions of other consumers have
become the most popular source of online advice, exceeding expert advice by
21 percent.(3) A recent survey conducted by The Etailing
Group showed that 67 percent of shoppers invest 30+ percent of their total
shopping time researching what to buy, and yet most marketers have no
cost-effective way to identify and interpret the sources and information
their prospective customers are reading.
In a growing trend, consumers are being asked by retailers to share their
opinions with other shoppers. One in three Internet users, or more than 70
million people, have already posted an online opinion of a product or
service.(4) These opinions, provided by outspoken consumers, influence the
views of others, so it's crucial that marketers understand how their brands
and products are rated in these reviews.
Until now, there has been no practical way for companies to aggregate,
analyze and interpret this vast amount of online information about their
products and services. If they could understand this complex universe of
consumer-generated information, marketers would have valuable insight into
brand preferences: the product features and attributes that matter most to
consumers, emerging trends, price elasticity, and even competitive
vulnerabilities. Opinion Insights can be applied to assist marketers and
researchers in any industry where reviews influence purchase decisions.
Las Vegas Sands Corp. mines consumer opinions for competitive advantage
Las Vegas Sands Corp. needs to understand how its Venetian and Palazzo
resorts stack up against their top competitors, both overall and on an
individual 'property attribute' level. It uses Opinion Insights to extract
and analyze actual customer opinions from a broad universe of
travel-related review websites. The intelligence derived from Opinion
Insights is generating interest and action at the highest levels of the
organization.
Among the findings: an opportunity to increase guest satisfaction by adding
more areas of shade to the pool area at the Venetian. Another finding
indicated an opportunity to enhance the guests' arrival experience by
changing the check-in process to reduce lines and wait times. The report
also identified customer advocacy scores at all levels, highlighting
strengths as well as areas where improvements could be made to increase the
company's leadership in the Las Vegas luxury hotel, resort and casino
market.
"The degree of insight Biz360 delivered to us is truly amazing. We were
able to pinpoint which aspects of each property received significant
positive customer feedback as well as which needed improvement. We were
also able to compare our results against individual competitors and
determine the gaps between our scores and theirs," said Rom Hendler, vice
president of strategic marketing for the Venetian and Palazzo properties.
About Biz360
Biz360 delivers media and market intelligence solutions to Global 2000
business decision makers, providing them with a 360-degree view of their
marketplace. The company gathers and analyzes a vast amount of traditional
and social media about an organization, its brands, its competitors and its
products to deliver real-time insights that help its clients shape market
perception, respond to competitive threats, evaluate trends and issues and
improve the return on their marketing investments. Biz360's clients include
AAA, Aetna, AstraZeneca and Sun Microsystems. Biz360 can be reached at
866.424.9360 or www.biz360.com.
(1) Pew Internet and American Life Project March 2005 - 2007
(2) Pew Internet Usage Study April 2006
(3) Pew Internet and American Life Project March 2005
(4) Pew Internet and American Life Project March 2005 - 2007
Links:
Biz360 home page
Opinion
Insights home page