OECD is now forecasting that the UK economy will enter a recession (story from Telegraph).
From a macro perspective I guess it is not counter-intuitive that growth comes to a halt when the world is engaged in a massive deleveraging operation; and at the same time impacted by the increasing uncertainty caused by the public finances in the Euro Zone.
But reading the forecast from the OECD I couldn’t help think back on the previous posts on this blog about how the change in online sentiment for some time as indicated that a recession was becoming more likely.
The 2nd of August I wrote a this post that showed that those with more influence in the debate on the UK economy was becoming more concerned about a possible recession than the public in general.
Since our influence-weighted analyses usually serves as leading indicators, this was a clear warning sign.
On the 1st of November I wrote this post in which I point out that the Onalytica Recession-Index for the UK economy had reached an all-time high (since April 2010).
In October 2011 the equal-weighted Recession-Index, which represents the sentiment of the board population, actually overtook the influence-weighted, which represents the sentiment of those with more influence in the debate on the UK Economy. The gap has widened in November.
This effectively means that the broad population as a whole are now more convinced that we are heading for a recession and are likely to reign in their spending further.
The latest release of InfluenceMonitor™ is now available, incorporating a number of new features and important enhancements. Not only does this new release increase the overall speed of the application, but it also provides valuable new types of analysis, including:
Root Cause Analysis
The all new Root Cause Analysis allows users to quickly identify what has caused or is causing a shift in attention and/or sentiment. Users can immediately see when people stop talking, or talk less about their brand or product as well as understanding why.
This functionality also automatically identifies changes in the debate between two brands, and also the topics that are being discussed in relation to different brands, and whether this is in a positive or negative light. In summary – with just the click of a mouse, the user is better informed about what is causing changes in discussions relating to them and their industry.
News Clusters
This feature automatically provides the user with the key stories relating to them or their industry with the stories listed in order of significance – those that are most influential and that are most talked about. The reader only needs to read the top stories to ensure they are kept informed and spend time reading only the pertinent stories to them.
Insight Box
The new insight box is an intelligent web-log providing commentary and insight that has been generated by designated users. This new insight panel can be shown or hidden according to user preference, and also incorporates a user profile icon to indicate who has made the comment. A selected comment will also highlight the analyses it relates to on the main dashboard ensuring easy interpretation.
The first of our reports on the Mobile World Congress is now available. Amongst other interesting discoveries the following insights have been uncovered:
- The Global English debate on MWC fluctuated between the w/c 27th Sep 2010 and w/c 3rd Jan 2011 with a significant build up between Dec 2010 and Jan 2011, boosted by the HTC ‘Scribe’ tablet, leaked photos of the Sony Ericsson X10 Mini successor and rumours of the debut of the Sony Ericsson PlayStation Phone.
- Influential Stakeholders were predominantly technology media.
- Washington Street Journal was the only News media site to make it into the top 10 influential Stakeholder list.
- Google was the most mentioned brand, whereas Sony Ericsson drew more interest among influential Stakeholders.
- Despite the Apple iPhone being the most discussed handset, the PlayStation Phone was one of the key drivers of the debate and sparked more discussion among influential Stakeholders.
- Although a key driver of debate, the PlayStation Phone grabbed the majority of its attention during the middle of Nov 2010, while Microsoft Windows Phone 7 (WP7) held a lesser but more steady stream of interest during the period analysed.
If you have a particular interest in the event or want to know 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.
*this report was produced using data analysed from the period 27th Sep 2010 – 7th Jan 2011.
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.
Reading the World Wide Web
With the internet now a mainstream media, and the majority of households in the UK having broadband accounts – it is understandable that the internet has now grown to such a size that it can be overwhelming, and sometimes confusing when searching for specific information. According to Google, the number of unique URLs online has surpassed 1 trillion and continues to grow rapidly. If this content could be sorted, categorised and filtered into relevant intelligence it could be hugely valuable for organisations and governments alike.
In our new White Paper released today Using the Internet as a Market Research Database, we have taken the UK Election as a case study and used InfluenceMonitor™ to do the leg work for us in trawling the internet for relevant content enabling us to draw some very interesting and insightful conclusions.
Download our White Paper here: Using the Internet as a Market Research Database to find out more about some of these findings such as: how changes in the daily election poll results could be estimated by measuring the changes in the relative amount of online discussion.
Click on the icon below to download a copy of the complete White Paper as a PDF:
Alternatively, view a slideshow that gives an overview of the White Paper:
The chart below shows the daily sentiment score associated to Gordon Brown between 6th April and 6th May. The daily sentiment score gives immediate insight about the overall positive or negative opinions about a product or brand, or in this case, Gordon Brown. A shift in sentiment can indicate a positive or negative shift in a brand’s value or perception. We can see from the below graph that:
- Over the study period Gordon Brown was associated with negative sentiment scores.
- From 6th April to 22nd April the daily sentiment score for Gordon Brown was decreasing. (This suggests that relative incidents of negative terms, on pages mentioning Gordon Brown, were increasing).
- On the 28th April there was a massive drop in Sentiment score. This date coincides with the ‘Bigot-gate’ event.
Change is an election buzzword, and ‘Vote for Change’ was part of a major advertising campaign. By monitoring how often this word is associated with each party or party leader we gain immediate insight regarding how much traction the relevant campaigns obtained.
The below graph shows the association analysis of David Cameron and Nick Clegg matched to the word ‘change’ in the UK election debate. If one of the party leaders was mentioned with the word ‘change’ more often than the other, their relative Share-of-Influence in relation to that word would increase. Our UK Election debate sample includes data from 77,000 sites between 29th March and 6th May. This association analysis shows:
- Nick Clegg had relatively low Share-of-Influence in the week of 29th March; this means that relatively little discussion included his name with the words ‘election’ and ‘change’ at that time compared to David Cameron.
- In the week of 5th April Nick Clegg made a gain, from 5% to 25%. This gain was disproportionate: his Share-of-Influence when ‘change’ was mentioned was twice that of his overall Share-of-Influence for that time: only 12 % (see dashed line below).
- In the weeks of 29th March and 19th April, Nick Clegg continued to make gains in his Share-of-Influence, overtaking David Cameron. This evidence supports the hypothesis that among the party leaders it was Nick Clegg who was gaining attention relative to the other leaders and the one who was most associated with change at that time.
- The growth trend in Nick Clegg’s Share-of-Influence did not continue past the week of April 19th; following that week, David Cameron regained his lead in Share-of-Influence from Nick Clegg and became the candidate most associated with the word change in the last few days preceding the election.
We have previous (
1,
2) written about how Nintendo’s Wii has outperformed Sony’s PS3 and indeed all other comparable games consoles.
Until now the focus has mostly been on the battle between Wii and PS3, but in recent months Microsoft’s Xbox has been making waves.
The figure below shows the relative share of buzz about the 6 major games console brands from June 1st to 23rd of September 2007.
Notice how the buzz levels of PS3 and Wii have been relatively steady while that of PS2 and GameCube has been declining.
Microsoft’s Xbox seems to be the only one with steady growth although it seems to be relatively small.
Tracking share-of-buzz is interesting because we know from research that share-of-buzz and share-of-market converges, so if the present trend continues, Xbox is on route to a small but steady increase in market share.
However, we also know that share-of-influence and market share normally converges faster so it is normally our preferred (main) variable when trying to predict future market share.
(The difference between share-of-buzz and share-of-influence is essentially that the latter includes a weighting of each mention according to the mentioning media’s measured topical influence. When calculating share-of-buzz, all mentions essentially counts the same.)
The figure below shows the development in each brands share-of-influence for the same period.
Notice how much more dramatic the picture looks: PS3 and Xbox are losing and gaining (respectively) share-of-influence much faster than the previous graph would indicate.
This would indicate at least two things: First of all, that the coverage of Xbox more often takes place in media with above average influence on the topic of “games consoles” and similar that the coverage of PS3 is usually in media with below average influence on this topic.
Second, we can predict that the increase in Xbox market share and the decrease of PS3’s similar will be more dramatic, both in terms of magnitude and speed, than the first graph would indicate.
A third observation might be that since Xbox’s increase seems to come at the expense of PS3’s, this might indicate that PS3 and Xbox are fighting for the same audience and are considered substitutes. Those who are considering buying a Wii are more likely to be choosing between buying a Wii and not buying a console at all. If this is true then part of Wii’s success is that it is enlarging the market for games consoles with new customer segments.
Now, we also know from research that if a brand has high share-of-positive-influence its market share and share-of-influence tend to converge even faster.
However, this just makes things even worse for PS3.
The graph below shows the development in sentiment or tone-of-voice of the articles/blogs/forums where each brand appeared in the relevant period.
We can see that Wii and Xbox are at a positive sloped angle indicating that the positive mentions (dramatically) outweigh the rest. PS3, on the other hand, is represented by a flatter curve indicating that the posts on this brand are more balanced (or neutral) and thus on average less positive than the two other main brands.
So this all leads to the question of why Xbox sale is performing so well.
The answer is likely to have several reasons, but look at the figure below that plots the change in debate on Halo 3 and the change in the debate on Xbox for the analysed period.
More specifically the figure shows the change in accumulated influence on a month-by-month basis for Halo 3 and Xbox.
Notice how the lines follow the same trend. In August there was an extraordinary large change in influence for Halo 3 but while it does pull up the debate on Xbox it doesn’t do so with the full force of the change.
The figure below gives a more precise picture of exactly how closely correlated the debates on the two brands (Halo 3 and Xbox) are.
The figure plots the % change in accumulated influence for Halo 3 along the x-axis and the similar change for Xbox along the y-axis. The line is a linear trend line showing the correlation coefficient to be 0.788 which indicates a strong correlation.
Whilst we haven’t proven a causal effect here I think it is at least intuitive to assume that it is Halo 3 that mainly causes the debate on Xbox and not the other way around (although some argument can be made for that).
But if we for a second assume that the causal effect is from Halo 3 to Xbox then we can take our analysis one step further.
We can see from the graph that the elasticity of the relationship is about 0.2 (0.171) indicating that if Microsoft is successful in generating a 1% change in the debate on Halo 3 they are likely to increase the accumulated influence of Xbox by 0.2%.
Because of the strong relationship between share-of-influence and share-of-market the above could be translated into monetary value if we had estimated the relationship between share-of-influence and share-of-market for these brands. However, I don’t currently have access to good market share data for games consoles, so it will have to wait for another day.