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How Do Brands Use Sentiment Analysis?

Brands use sentiment analysis to continually measure how target audiences feel about the brand, its products and services, its advertising and marketing campaigns, and its competitors. By monitoring changes in brand sentiment, brand management teams can take quick action to address public relations concerns, refine ineffective brand messaging, modify unsuccessful marketing campaigns, and develop product intelligence and brand intelligence that can inform product design and marketing.

What is brand sentiment?

Brand sentiment is a measure of a target audience’s opinion of a brand. Brand sentiment is measured on a continuum from very positive to very negative, giving businesses a broad measurement of how well the brand is performing in the marketplace.

What is sentiment analysis?

Brand sentiment analysis is a technique for determining whether target audiences feel positively or negatively about a brand. Brand sentiment analysis is typically conducted by capturing and analyzing audiences’ opinions through conversations on social media, websites, interactions with contact center agents, and other channels.

What are the benefits of brand sentiment analysis?

Analyzing brand sentiment provides several significant advantages for businesses.

  • Higher customer satisfaction. Sentiment analysis enables businesses to quickly uncover and address the causes of negative brand sentiment. As a result, businesses can improve the customer experience to drive higher satisfaction.
  • Enhance marketing efforts. Brand sentiment analysis can reveal how customers perceive a company’s latest marketing campaigns. These metrics enable brand marketing teams to quickly refine messaging and tactics for greater results.
  • Optimize crisis communications. When dealing with negative media coverage, product safety concerns, and public relations issues, businesses can rely on brand sentiment analysis to get early warning signs of a potential brand crisis and identify what type of action and messaging will best turn public sentiment around.
  • Improve competitive advantage. Conducting brand sentiment analysis of competitors’ products, services, and marketing campaigns can help businesses understand where competitors are succeeding and where there are opportunities to compete more effectively.

How can businesses improve brand sentiment?

Continuous measurement and analysis provides businesses with a clear picture of how customers perceive the brand, making it easier for brand management teams to chart a course for improvement. Sentiment analysis can reveal specifics about where the brand is falling short in meeting customer expectations, and what steps can be taken to improve brand perception. As businesses enact programs and changes, continuous brand sentiment analysis can help quickly determine what’s working and what’s not.

How does brand sentiment analysis work?

Businesses have traditionally used surveys to measure brand sentiment. However, surveys often suffer from dismal response rates that result in an incomplete picture of brand sentiment. Additionally, surveys are prone to bias, since respondents are often motivated by highly negative or positive opinions. Recently, brands have turned to social media listening tools to monitor comments on social sites and online reviews. While this approach offers a much larger sample size, results may still be skewed by the fact that most people posting comments are either very satisfied or dissatisfied with their brand interactions. Plus, relying solely on social media monitoring ignores all the other channels where customers reveal sentiment about a brand. For this reason, many companies have chosen conversation intelligence technology that can capture and analyze the unsolicited feedback from more customers, offered daily on a broad range of channels.