The value of emotion-based consumer insight

There are plenty of other useful consumer research applications for sentiment analysis, and what they share is consumer insight grounded in emotional perspective. Because it allows you to take the consumer’s perspective, sentiment analysis removes the guesswork in trying to understand how your customers feel about your product.

This is crucial for crisis management. A spike in negative social media posts can be disastrous for a brand. Sentiment analysis allows companies to be proactive in identifying these trends and accurately locating the source of the negative sentiment, which means they can position their brand messaging to address the underlying issue before negative sentiment escalates.

Emotionally intelligent consumer research allows a brand to craft more emotionally intelligent messaging that connects with its target audience. Sentiment analysis allows companies to identify phrases and terms that consumers use to describe their feelings towards a brand or towards brand-relevant social issues. Understanding the emotion-based language their customers use allows companies to create messaging around this sort of language, or around themes that connect with its emotional tone. The tone of messaging may be compassionate, edgy, or humorous. Using sentiment analysis, brands can pursue the right tone based on a more developed understanding of their customers’ emotions.

These are just some of the many applications of sentiment analysis for consumer research. Understanding a brand means understanding how consumers feel about that brand, and companies will no doubt continue to use sentiment analysis to achieve this emotionally intelligent understanding.