For those in the industry, the Mobile World Conference is one of the most hotly anticipated events going into 2011. With much new innovation and some of the most recognised global brands operating in this space the event is likely to cause much debate and discussion.
Onalytica will be providing real-time market insight on the debate surrounding the Mobile World Conference 2011 in Barcelona in the run up to, and during the event which starts on Monday February 14th and ends on Thursday the 17th.
In particular we will be continually answering the following questions before, during and after the event:
- Who and what is grabbing the attention?
- What is driving the debate and how is it changing and developing?
- Who are influential in the discussion?
Our analysis will include the key companies, products, themes and issues discussed throughout the event.
So for all of you who have an interest in the event or in understanding how we help companies to understand the discussion around industries, brands, themes and issues then please contact Sophie Hill [sophie.hill@onalytica.com] who will provide the reports as they are released. You can also subscribe to this RSS feed where we will be posting some of the findings.
Onalytica’s InfluenceMonitor has for over three years been telling customers “what” is happening in the marketplace and what is likely to be happening in the near future. Using human analysis Onalytica has also helped customers understand “why” something happened. To complement this, Onalytica now takes an important step towards automatically and constantly answering the “why?” by introducing new functionality: Debate Drivers.
Debate Drivers answer six core questions:
- What is driving the total debate on an issue or brand?
- What is driving the
positive debate on an issue or brand?
- What is driving the
negative debate on an issue or brand?
- What is
increasingly driving the total debate on an issue or brand?
- What is
increasingly driving the
positive debate on an issue or brand?
- What is
increasingly driving the
negative debate on an issue or brand?
These are important answers because they in themselves go a long way in answering questions about why a brand is performing as it is. It not only surfaces what is drawing attention but also what is driving the sentiment. Debate Drivers automatically discover the answers to the above questions – the analyses do not have to be pre-seeded with any hints.
Brand owners will benefit from the addition of this new functionality in a number of important ways:
Participating in what is drawing attention:
Brands can now automatically and constantly understand what is driving the total and positive attention. This represents a fantastic opportunity to engage in the right debate at the right time.
Improving brand sentiment:
By helping to amplify what is driving the positive debate on your brand and potentially helping mitigate what is driving the negative debate, brands can more directly improve the net sentiment on their brand.
Root cause analysis
If brand owners observe a loss of (or increase in) market share – or a change in net sentiment – they can use Debate Drivers to understand why this happened. This is done through an understanding of what drove the attention from one brand to another and/or what increased the positive or negative attention to a brand.
Of course Debate Drivers cannot only be used to answer these questions for the brand owner. A lot can be learned from understanding what is (and what is not) working for competing brands.
In the December 2010 issue of the wonderful magazine Which? (p.15) an article features the results of a survey in which customers rate 75 big brands for customer service. The rating took into account 10,603 respondents.
I asked my colleague Sophie to see if, by using InfluenceMonitor, we could correlate the relative position of ten of the banks in the survey. The table below shows our results:
| Bank | Onalytica Rank | Which? Rank | Rank Difference |
| First Direct | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| Halifax | 2 | 7 | 5 |
| Nationwide | 3 | 2 | 1 |
| Natwest | 4 | 4 | 0 |
| HSBC | 5 | 3 | 2 |
| Lloyds | 6 | 5 | 1 |
| HBOS | 7 | 8 | 1 |
| Barclays | 8 | 7 | 1 |
| RBS | 9 | 6 | 3 |
| Santander | 10 | 9 | 1 |
This table shows the relative ranking position along with the absolute difference between the ranks from the two methodologies.
The main difference is that we see Halifax performing better than in the Which? survey. With Halifax included the average rank difference is 1.1 – without it, it is 0.6. Automatically analysing the online debate for sentiment gives a really good idea about how your brand is perceived compared to competing brands.
I couldn’t immediately see which period the Which? survey covered so this could explain the small difference between the two methodologies.
When factoring in influence, we see HSBC drops quite a few positions – it will therefore be interesting to see if Which? run a follow up survey.
The performance of the banks and their rankings explains the “what?” – answering the question: “what happened?”
Another element of our analyses answers the “why?” question - “Why did these banks perform the way they did?” Traditionally this has been answered by human analyses, but our new “Debate Driver Analysis” goes a long way in automatically surfacing the “why?”
This type of analysis is especially important for brands trying to improve brand sentiment, because it immediately identifies what is driving the positive debate as well as what is driving the negative debate on the brand. By actively helping to amplify the positive drivers and mitigating the negative drivers the brand can widen the net sentiment.
In this study, probably the most interesting observation we made was that of those brands that performed better, they didn’t do so because they had a lot more positive talk about them, but because they had a lot less negative talk about them and their customer service.
I will cover examples of how this analysis makes insight dramatically more actionable in a later post. In the meantime, if you work for one of the brands in this analysis and want to know why your brand received the results you see here, or what is driving the positive and negative debate on your brand, just drop me a line.
The banks covered in the survey are First Direct, Halifax, Nationwide, NatWest, HSBC, Lloyds TSB, HBOS, Barclays, RBS and Santander.