Identify the top unmet needs of patients and physicians

Patients and physicians discussing unmet needs

As patients and physicians use pharma drugs, they share their experiences and challenges in social media and discussion forums. For example, they share how well a drug is working for them, post questions on how to handle side effects, and seek answers on payer coverage. These discussions are a rich source to understand unmet needs of patients and physicians. 

However, the patient and physician posts are dispersed across a variety of discussion boards, Twitter and other social media sites. These posts need to be aggregated across all such sources. Posts containing unmet needs need to be segregated from the rest of the posts, and detailed discussion topics need to be mined from such posts.

Once unmet needs are identified, Pharma companies can act on them to improve the patient and physician experience. Below are 3 examples of how Pharma can act on the unmet needs mined from social conversations.

  1. Content strategy for drug websites

Pharma is a heavily regulated industry. Prior to publishing any new content on the drug websites, compliance, ethics and legal teams review it to ensure that the content adheres to what the drug is approved for. Such a review process elongates the timeline and the effort required to develop new content. As a result, pharma brands need to be selective about the content they are developing, and make sure that the content will be helpful to patients and physicians.  

Unmet needs and recurring questions discovered from physician and patient discussions can form a basis for creating relevant content on websites. As shown in the following example, a common question typically asked for most drugs is how CBD oil interacts with drugs.

Creating and adding relevant content to the drug’s website would help the patients and physicians get answers to their key questions.

  1. Work with payers to address coverage & pricing issues

Patient conversations often contain the issues they are facing in getting the drugs covered by payers. Mining the conversations for such insights can help identify the payers and geographies where patients are facing such issues. Following patient post is an example of how a patient could not be covered for getting treatment using Revlimid.

Using above mentioned posts, pharma companies identify the payer coverage gaps, and work with payers to cover their drugs. Additionally, Pharma companies can communicate how patients can get support related to payer coverage and post FAQs on the drug’s websites. This helps patients get access to the key drugs they need for their treatment.

  1. Field force training

Patient and physician discussions can uncover key questions asked by patients and physicians, and other challenges such as drug availability and pricing. Sizing these discussion topics help prioritize the key issues that field reps can be trained on. Such training on key issues empowers Reps to inform physicians on how to address key challenges.

The following example illustrates a common side effect that patients taking Imbruvica experience. 

Continuously finding updating the list of frequently asked questions and training Reps on them would better equip the field force when they face the same questions from physicians.

As illustrated in above examples, patients and physician conversations contain a rich trove of unmet needs. PharmaSignals platform uses AI to uncover such unmet needs.

 

Competitor Intelligence on Messaging Changes using Automated Website Monitoring

Pharma companies maintain patient and physician websites for each of their drugs to provide information such as efficacy and safety of their drugs. These web pages provide rich insight into how they are positioning and messaging their drugs, and how it is changing over time. Pharma companies can monitor websites of their competitors to glean competitive intelligence on key messaging changes.

However, a pharma drug typically has half a dozen key competitors to track and analyze. Each competitor drug has a patient and physician website, with each website containing 10 to 20 pages to monitor. This implies that a drug company needs to monitor 120 to 240 webpages on a daily basis. The changes identified from daily monitoring are not always relevant to messaging. Hence, valuable changes need to be separated from noisy changes. Performing these activities on a daily basis and identifying key messaging changes can be tedious, resource-consuming and prone to errors. This blog post discusses how automated website monitoring can overcome these challenges and produce valuable competitive intelligence.

Automating tracking of changes in competitor websites

Web crawlers can collect content from webpages on a daily basis. However, the crawlers need to be customized to overcome several nuances such as scraping dynamic content, images & data from pop-ups. Additionally, the scrapers need to overcome blockers and navigate through page hierarchy. Such customizations ensure reliable and comprehensive data collection. Once the data is collected on a daily basis, text mining & pixel mining programs can be configured to identify the daily changes and quantify the percentage of data that changed on the website.

Parsing out key messaging changes

Webpage changes can range from not-so-important changes such as footnotes to very valuable changes such as key messaging changes. A well trained Natural Language Processing (NLP) classifier can parse out the valuable changes from the noisy changes. Following graphic illustrates an output –

Distributing the detected changes to key stakeholders

Once the key changes are parsed, they can be sent to key stakeholders as daily alerts so that they take timely decisions related to their own brands. Following graphic illustrates an example email that can be sent to the key stakeholders.

.SetuServ’s AI-Powered PharmaSignals platform uses the above mentioned technologies to monitor competitive websites for valuable content changes. It monitors the competition through one central interface and notifies the concerned team about new insights, amendments, and additions via e-mail. 

Patient Discovery For Rare Diseases Using Social Listening

Sources mined for rare diseases

The critical challenges faced by the Pharma Companies in developing drugs for rare diseases are mainly inadequate clinical information and difficulty in locating patients. The key factors leading to this challenge is the number of patients affected by rare diseases is scarce and geographically dispersed. Furthermore, the lack of high-level awareness among the medical community and patients has often led to misdiagnoses. All the above factors make it difficult for the Pharma Companies to understand the natural history, epidemiology, and progression of rare diseases that affect small and often highly diverse patient populations, thus impacting drug development progress. Before diving deep into how text mining of patient discussions can help, let us understand what qualifies as rare diseases, let’s understand rare diseases and their criteria.

What is a Rare Disease and its criteria?

Countries have their own official definitions and criteria for a rare disease. In the US, the Orphan Drug Act of 1983 defines a rare disease as a condition that affects fewer than 200,000 people. Whereas, in the European Union, a disease is categorized as rare when it affects fewer than 1 in 2,000 people.

According to the National Institute of Health, there are around 6000 rare diseases. This includes certain types of cancers, autoimmune disorders, digestive disorders, infectious diseases, neurological disorders, and other illnesses. Currently, these rare diseases are found to affect around 3.5% – 5.9% of the worldwide population, which sums up to a conservative estimate of roughly 300 million people worldwide. The foremost cause for 72% of the rare diseases is genetic, whereas the others are caused due to infections (bacterial or viral), allergies, and environmental causes.

Drug Development Challenges

Developing drugs for rare diseases involves challenges beyond those typically observed in large trials for more prevalent conditions. One of the primary challenges is the diagnosis of rare diseases. Identifying the underlying cause and symptoms can be difficult, as it tends to differ for each patient. This challenge in diagnosis boils down to the difficulty in finding adequate patients who meet inclusion and exclusion criteria for a particular drug or therapy trial, as patient populations are often widely dispersed and heterogeneous in disease subtypes, symptoms, stages, and exposure to prior treatment. 

Traditional approaches in rare diseases patient discovery such as the patient survey and extracting data from Electronic Health Record (EHR) physician notes often tend to be ineffective due to a lack of appropriate medical codes and integrity of the data sources. These hurdles in patient discovery call for a novel solution.

Social Listening – A Potential Solution

Patients with rare conditions and their caregivers tend to scatter geographically due to the low prevalence of the diseases. This geographical dispersion makes it difficult for them to connect with other patients and specialists to seek advice.  Their need to connect and find support and growth in global internet penetration has led them to the social media platforms to connect, communicate and garner valuable insights on the diseases.

By leveraging Social Listening, the Pharma Companies shall mine patients/caregiver conversations from Social Media Platforms such as Twitter, Reddit, and rare diseases-related medical discussion forums such as NORD, Inspire & Genetic Alliance to identify them.

Sources mined for rare diseases

The following are some of the social media posts or forum discussions where the patients/caregivers are discussing about rare diseases such as Myasthenia Gravis, Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis, etc. Mining the text of patient discussions can uncover thousands of patients who are seeking treatments or educational content.

Myasthenia Gravis:

Myasthenia gravis (MG) is a long-term neuromuscular disease that leads to varying degrees of skeletal muscle weakness. The most commonly affected muscles are those of the eyes, face, and swallowing. It can result in double vision, drooping eyelids, trouble talking, and trouble walking.

Myasthenia Gravis Output

Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy:

Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is a severe type of muscular dystrophy that primarily affects boys. Muscle weakness usually begins around the age of four and worsens quickly. Muscle loss typically occurs first in the thighs and pelvis followed by the arms.

Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy Output

Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis:

Primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC) is a long-term progressive disease of the liver and gallbladder characterized by inflammation and scarring of the bile ducts which normally allow bile to drain from the gallbladder.

Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis Output

However, given the sheer scale of social media, precisely identifying relevant posts among the noisy posts is equivalent to finding a needle in the haystack and highly resource-consuming when done manually. To overcome this problem, Pharma Companies shall leverage AI/ML-powered text mining solutions that can monitor, crawl and scrape data from various sources, and convert those raw data into actionable insights. Pharma companies with drugs for rare diseases in production/pipeline can use these insights to identify patients with rare diseases and engage with them for drug trials or sale of the product.

SetuServ’s PharmaSignals helps Pharma Companies discover patients suffering from rare conditions by leveraging state-of-the-art text mining and social listening algorithms to extract sheer volume of posts or discussions from social media and relevant discussion forums, process the raw data, and extract the insights about patients/HCP related to the rare diseases.

How Customer Reviews Influence Purchasing Decisions in E-Commerce

Customer Reviews

The growth of e-commerce has been absolutely staggering over the last decade and has become an indispensable element of the global retail industry. E-commerce penetration has been growing steadily and now accounts for more than 21.3% of the total retail sales globally. As this growth in e-commerce penetration continues, NASDAQ predicts that by 2040 almost 95% of the total retail sales will be via the e-commerce channel. This astonishing growth has also created perpetual competition among e-commerce businesses in acquiring and retaining customers. In order to stay successful, it’s critical for e-commerce businesses to solve the never-ending mystery of understanding customer purchase behavior and identifying determinants.

E-commerce customers have become more comfortable in buying products preferred by like-minded consumers in the same demography. This tendency makes customers accustomed to reading online reviews before purchasing from an e-commerce website, this research in some cases extends beyond reviews on the e-commerce platforms to social media posts, blog posts, and news articles. After purchasing, customers also tend to post their own comments and reviews about the products/services online, helping other customers. This makes customer reviews one of the most critical influencing factors to consumer purchase behavior. In this blog post, we shall briefly discuss how customer reviews drive customer’s purchase decisions.

Exciting Customer Review Stats

  1. 91% of customers regularly or occasionally read online reviews.
  2. 84% of customers trust online reviews equivalent to a personal recommendation.
  3. 33% of e-commerce customers choose a product or service based on other customer’s reviews.
  4. Their friend’s social media posts have influenced 81% of customer’s purchase decisions.
  5. 72% of customers don’t take any step towards a purchase until they have read reviews.

How customer reviews matter to a business?

In the current digital world, it’s quintessential for businesses, especially e-commerce businesses, to empower and encourage their customers to write reviews, frequently monitor, review and respond to them. The following key points outline the benefits of online reviews on businesses.

Product Insights: The decision-making process of online shoppers has become extremely complicated. They spend more time evaluating and comparing products before making the final purchase decision. Customer reviews act as a catalyst to this process by helping customers get a better insight into the product and shop at ease.

Online Reputation: With numerous brands offering multiple products in the same category, it’s quite challenging for customers to trust and choose one. Reading positive reviews on the product/service and responses to the negative reviews create an online reputation that makes the customers trust the brand and the product.

Consumer Engagement: Reviews are not just a way for the customers to accumulate information on products or services but also a powerful consumer engagement tool. Customers love their views to be acknowledged and heard by the brands, including responses to their reviews. Apart from thanking customers for positive reviews, following up on the negative reviews and solving the customer’s problem would help the brand go a long way.

Product/Service Feedback: Customer reviews are a great source of product/service feedback. For brands, it helps in identifying customer pain-points and scope for improvements directly from the end-users. Not just the product/service, it also helps in other process-related pitfalls such as checkout, logistics, and delivery that would help in improving the overall customer experience.

SEO and Conversion: It’s quite evident that customer reviews help in improving conversion and customer experience. In addition, reviews have significant SEO benefits. Along with standard product descriptions and product specifications, customer reviews add new user-generated content that helps in improving keyword density and serve to differentiate the product page in the search results.

SetuServ’s Voice of Customer Insight and Signals (VOCIS) platform provides actionable insights on the customers and products derived automatically from customer reviews and social media mentions. VOCIS leverages state-of-the-art natural language processing, text mining, and sentiment analysis algorithms in generating insights that can help e-commerce businesses identify opportunities to drive product/service innovation and sales.

How Pharma Companies Can Benefit From Conference Analytics

Conference Analytics

HCPs desire to keep themselves updated about the latest happenings in their respective therapeutic areas by following KOLs on social media, various journals, blogs, newsletters, etc. One of the key channels which are considered critical by HCPs is attending medical conferences. Medical conferences are not merely a gathering for imparting education but a medium to interact with peers and KOLs, discussing about new drugs, evolving novel, and locally relevant ideas leading to improvement in health-care delivery, and patient outcomes.

According to a survey by Ogilvy Common Health World Wide, most HCPs attend conferences to learn about new clinical information (79%) and keep up with current trends (78%). Thus, reiterating the importance of medical conferences.

Conference Analysis

Most brands use these conferences to present their latest clinical trials and promote their products through promotional booths. Pharma marketing and sales professionals use these booths as a platform for interaction with HCPs and KOLs. They share relevant information in the form of brochures, handouts, and e-mail newsletters. 

Conference Analytics

Many HCPs and KOLs are very active on social media and tend to share their opinions on drugs presented at conferences through these mediums. The gained knowledge during a conference is shared across multiple media sites and journals where they contribute content in the form of subject matter experts. Such data across various channels when collated and analyzed can give amazing insights into what the HCPs and KOLs perceive about various clinical trials presented at the conference. 

With the current COVID-19 pandemic curtailing the ability to freely conduct large gatherings or events, many conferences have shifted to digital gatherings and events. This has significantly increased the online interactions between HCPs and KOLs. Subsequently, KOLs have started disseminating their learnings about clinical trials and new products on their respective social media profiles and other media sites. Aggregating these conversations and analyzing them can give actionable insights.

How does SetuServ’s Pharma Signals Platform help?

SetuServ’s Pharma Signals platform is specifically designed to analyze large amounts of data using contemporary technologies like AI and NLP thus achieving speed, accuracy, and scale. The platform has the ability to aggregate data from various social and media sources, separate noise from insightful signals, extract entities such as study name, disease area, drug and mechanism of action, and mine insights of interest.  The derived insights are used by various teams in different ways to provide insights on KOL, PCP, and patient conversations. 

Competitive intelligence teams can use these insights to understand various aspects, vis-à-vis competitors while the medical reps can use the platform to collate rich quality content which enables quality interaction with HCPs or KOLs.

To illustrate the richness of the opinions expressed at conferences, we extracted 5 insightful KOL tweets from the American Academy of Allergy Asthma and Immunology (AAAAI) conference. The output is shared below

HCP Tweets From Conference

The output represents the quality of KOL opinions. Identifying and mining such insights provide actionable intelligence to pharma companies, especially on competitors’ drug pipelines. 

SetuServ’s PharmaSignals platform helps pharma companies in extracting actionable insights by leveraging state-of-the-art text mining algorithms and industry-specific workflows, data pipelines, and AI modules linked to the specific organization’s KPIs and goals

 

Understanding Customer Perception on Vitamins, Minerals and Supplement Products – A Voice of Customer Study

Vitamins Competitor Insights

The constant shift in consumer needs is one of the pivotal factors that drive the Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) industry. Most notable are the constantly changing health trends and vastly available information on health and nutrition that are majorly influencing the types of products consumers are using to maintain their health. Additionally, the increase in health concerns due to changing lifestyles and dietary habits has led to the evolution of one of the fastest-growing CPG categories, VMS. Vitamins, Minerals, and Supplements (VMS) come in the form of tablets, powders, or liquids that deliver vital nutrients to the body and preserve or boost an individual’s health. The products under the VMS category are typically available Over the Counter (OTC), where one doesn’t need a prescription to buy them.

Vitamins, Minerals, and Supplements (VMS) – Market Overview

Growing inclination towards preventive healthcare remains the key driver for over-the-counter VMSs. In addition, the increasing aging population, sedentary lifestyle changes, and emerging trends of self-directed nutrition tend to be the additional factors driving the growth of global VMS. A recent report by Grand View Research highlights that the global VMS market size was approximately $123.28 billion in 2019 and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 8.2% between 2020 and 2027.

The use of VMS skyrocketed during the recent unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic as VMS emerged as a preventive measure and have been used by many to build immunity and to maintain health. To substantiate the same, a recent Civic Analytics Consumer Survey has shown that there is a 10% -15% surge in spends on VMS globally since the pandemic began. Another critical factor that is contributing to the increase in consumption of VMS is the growing e-commerce revolution. Even before the current COVID-19 situation, VMS sales through online channels had been growing at double-digit rates since 2015, which makes e-commerce portals one of the preferred modes of purchase.

Vitamins, minerals and supplements sales in US

Source: https://www.lek.com/sites/default/files/colorbox-images/US-VMS-sales-channel-v2.jpg

Consumer Reviews and VMS: Our Methodology

Understanding customer sentiments towards a product is of paramount importance in businesses today. As E-Commerce platforms are one of the most preferred ways to shop VMS, we recognize the importance of customer reviews in gaining insights on customers’ likes, dislikes, and needs on VMS products. In this study, we mined 105K+ reviews from Amazon.com. Further, the unstructured and textual review data was then processed by Text Mining and Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms in performing multi-dimensional sentiment analysis. This process uses AI models that are custom trained for the specific use cases with industry-specific taxonomies and hierarchies evolved from raw data. The AI models help in surfacing accurate insights from customer reviews at scale.

Data Mining Pipeline

Consumer Insights & Analysis

The following are the insights automatically derived by the Voice of Consumer Insights and Signals (VOCIS) platform by aggregating more than 105K customer reviews for the products under the “Vitamins and Dietary Supplements” category from Amazon.com.

Brand Insights

This analysis focuses on providing insights into the brand perception of the customers. With the use of sentiment analysis, we can compare the perception of a brand with that of the leading competitors and use the same to create a data-driven brand strategy.

Vitamin Brands Comparison

Though the customer ratings (4.77) are marginally lower compared to its close competitors such as Dacha and Wellabs, Sports Research emerged as the most popular and preferred brand with the highest Share of Voice (SoV) of 16%.

Product Level Insights

With sentiment analysis, it is possible to compare key product characteristics to find features that resonate positively with the audience and the ones that don’t. These insights help brands in understanding key need gaps and allow for product optimization in appealing to a broader consumer segment.

Vitamins Areas Of Concern

Out of the customer reviews analyzed, the above topics evolved as the key areas the customers expect all the brands to improve on. For example, taste emerged as the key influencer on overall ratings with a 0.12 impact in rating, the general performance of the VMS turns out to be the most discussed factor at 16% mentions.

Competitor Insights

Competitor Benchmarking is quintessential as it helps in developing a deep understanding of the market ecosystem and builds a picture of gaps to be fixed and opportunities to leverage. It also helps in streamlining the product and marketing efforts by emulating your competitor’s success elements such as price and key product features.

Vitamins Competitor Insights

The above graph highlights areas of strength and areas for improvement for the brand Sports Research and the competition. Topics such as taste, packaging, and addressing them through targeted marketing communications will help in improving the impact on customer preference towards the brand. Likewise, when it comes to VMS, side-effects such as headaches, allergic reactions, and itching can have a negative impact on product sales.

SetuServ’s Voice of Consumer Insights and Signals (VOCIS) helps businesses in extracting valuable insights from customer reviews and conversations online, such as E-Commerce platforms. VOCIS is highly capable of rapidly building custom models specific to the use cases to render highly accurate and relevant insights linked to the organization’s KPI and goals.

How Financial Services Companies Can Improve Their App Performance by Mining App Reviews – A Voice of Customer Study

Amex app competitive benchmarking

The Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI) industry across the world has made significant efforts in navigating digital disruption and increasing mobility in the past decade. From being a cost center, digital banking channels have now evolved as revenue generators and cost savers by reducing the enormous operational costs of running brick and mortar branches. With the increase in smartphone and mobile internet penetration, technology has enabled customers to transact on the go. The convenience of swiftly making financial transactions anytime and anywhere with a few clicks has made mobile banking the most preferred banking channel among retail banking customers. Additionally, the power of mobile banking has paved the way for the digital-only challenger and neo banks, and the features offered on mobile banking apps have become key decision factors for customers selecting a bank.

 

Mobile Money – Market Overview

Mobile banking is already a pervasive trend. According to a recent study by Juniper Research, the total value of financial transactions via mobile devices would exceed $1 trillion by 2024 from $580 billion in 2019. It also predicts that nearly 3 billion people, roughly half the world population, would be transacting via mobile by 2021. This massive growth is fuelled predominantly by the increase in mobile and data penetration in the emerging markets, tech-savvy millennials, and digitally native Gen-Z.

Mobile Banking Competitive Intelligence

Speeding up this growth of mobile banking is the recent COVID-19 situation. The lockdown measures have encouraged consumers to bank from home and have contributed to significant growth in mobile banking adoption globally. Recent research by PYMNTS has highlighted that 8.7% of customers are more likely to use mobile banking apps than they were before the pandemic outbreak.

Our Methodology

Financial Institutions hold petabytes of structured and unstructured data that can be leveraged to anticipate customer behaviors and create strategies. However, the regulatory bodies are becoming particularly strict about how the data gets managed and shared. These restrictions make it difficult for the efficient 3rd party analytics team to access the data to generate key decision-making insights, and they have to rely on publicly available data.

User reviews in open app distribution services such as Google Play Store and Apple App Store are critical in understanding the elements of customer experience. These app markets allow users to submit feedback for downloaded apps in the form of star ratings and text reviews. Mining and processing these text reviews will help in getting deep insights into elements of customer experience on the app.

In our VOCIS solution, thousands of reviews are mined based on the app category from the Play Store and App Store as the primary data source. Additionally, textual data from secondary sources such as blogs and review forums were also extracted for better insights. Further, the unstructured and textual review data is processed by Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms in performing multi-dimensional sentiment analysis to understand the user perception towards the app against a variety of critical factors. The insights from sentiment analysis guide the product team in optimizing the app.

Data Mining Pipeline

Analysis Insights

The following are three key areas the insights derive via the Voice of Consumer Insights and Signals (VOCIS) module through aggregating thousands of customer reviews for the apps under the “Finance” category in Google Play Store and Apple App Store.

Brand Insights

This analysis focuses on providing insights into the brand perception of the customers. With the use of sentiment analysis, it is possible to identify the most preferred brand and compare the perception of the brand with that of the leading competitors and use the same to create a data-driven brand strategy.

Amex app comparision

While Chase emerged as the most preferred banking app with a higher rating (4.8) and Share of Voice (33.5%). American Express can now drill down to assess areas for improvement and specifically target these areas as part of their overall strategy.

Product Level Insights

With sentiment analysis, it is possible to compare key product characteristics of similar apps to find features that resonate positively with the audience and the ones that identify areas for improvement. These feature insights guide banks in understanding the key gaps and how to modify the apps to appeal better to their customers.

Analysis of AMEX Ratings

Based on the reviews analyzed, it is evident that the features that Amex should focus on to improve the rating and customer experience are “ improvement in payments and notification”.

Competitor Insights

Competitor Benchmarking is quintessential as it helps in developing a deep understanding of the competitor apps and builds a picture of gaps to be addressed and opportunities to leverage. It also helps in streamlining and prioritizing the product development efforts by emulating your competitor’s winning app features.

Amex app competitive benchmarking

While Amex is leading in the logon by fingerprint sensor theme with .22 vs. competition at -0.4, many people value this feature (ie. big bubble), and improving on this feature would significantly increase AMEX position overall.

SetuServ’s VOCIS platform augments consumer insights by extracting valuable insights from customer reviews in the app distribution platforms, such as Google Play Store and Apple App Store. VOCIS is highly capable of rapidly building custom models specific to use cases to generate highly accurate and relevant product insights for a better customer experience.

What’s Missing in Your Toothpaste – A Voice Of Customer Study

Toothpaste areas of concern

Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) or Consumer Packed Goods (CPG) is one of the largest and fast-growing industries in the world, with projected market size of $15,361.8 billion by 2025 and growing at a CAGR of 5.4%. FMCG products usually have a shorter shelf life, almost consumed on a daily basis, and sold in a huge volume at a low cost with a smaller profit margin, and these factors make it one of the most competitive industries in the world. In the FMCG value chain, marketing/sales analyses usually focused on improving the commercial performance of the products and fail to be customer-centric, i.e., ignoring customer preference and feedback. In this Voice Of Customer study, we shall discuss in deep the factors influencing customer decision while buying toothpaste, one of the essential FMCG goods.

Toothpaste – Market Overview

The unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic has doubled the emphasis on oral hygiene. With dental clinics around the world closed for routine consultations, the significance of regular oral self-care has increased among people and has driven toothpaste consumption globally. The toothpaste market is estimated to reach USD 34.6 Billion by 2024 at a CAGR of 5.8% between 2020 and 2026. Though the global toothpaste market continues to be highly fragmented with local players, the leading players such as Colgate-Palmolive, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, and GlaxoSmithKline PLC tend to dominate the markets with a majority share.

Our Methodology

Unlike traditional market research methods that predominantly rely on manual surveys that are highly prone to errors and bias, our unique methodology leverages online customer-generated content. We employ AI-powered text mining algorithms that extract related and unstructured data from the internet from several different sources such as social media, blogs, news feeds, etc. Then the raw data is fed into our Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Sentiment Analysis Engines, which uses AI models that are custom trained for the specific use cases with industry-specific taxonomies and hierarchy evolved from raw data. This sentiment analysis process helps to derive customer and market insights accurately and link them to business areas and goals.

Data Mining Pipeline

Analysis Insights

The following are the insights automatically derived by the Voice of Consumer Insights and Signals (VOCIS) module by aggregating customer conversations from diverse sources such as Social Media, E-Commerce reviews, Discussion Boards, and Blog Posts.

Brand Insights

This analysis focuses on providing insights into the brand perception of the customers. With the use of sentiment analysis, we shall compare the perception of a brand with that of the leading competitors and use the same to create a data-driven brand strategy.

Toothpaste comparision

Our analysis shows that Crest is the brand with a maximum Shar of Voice (SoV) of 19% and a positive sentiment rating of 4.26/5, followed by Tom’s and Colgate.

Product Level Insights

The buyer’s decision to purchase a product tends to be strongly influenced by a few key factors, features, and attributes. This analysis would help the brands in understanding these factors and optimize the product to appeal better to the target segment.

Toothpaste areas of concern

From more than 7.5K reviews mined from the E-Commerce site, the above were the top 5 features that need a fix and got the potential to improve the rating, thus influence the customers positively in buying the product. Taste emerged as the topmost influential factor with a significant impact on the ratings, followed by Packing Design/Quality and Affordability.

Competitor Insights

Competitor Benchmarking is quintessential as it helps in developing a deep understanding of the market ecosystem and builds a picture of gaps to be fixed and opportunities to leverage. It also helps in streamlining the product and marketing efforts by emulating your competitor’s success elements such as price and key product features.

Toothpaste sentiment analysis

The sentiment analysis for Crest, the top brand based on the customer rating against its competitors, highlighted the product features that are favorable and the features that have scope for improvement. The features such as the presence of natural ingredients and smell contributed to the positive sentiment scores. Whereas, features such as the addition of additives & preservatives and lack of pain relief components appear to contribute to the negative sentiment scores.

SetuServ’s Voice of Consumer Insights and Signals (VOCIS) platform employs custom models that can be built rapidly specifically for use cases with proven workflows, data pipelines & AI modules. These custom models help in rendering highly accurate and relevant insights linked to the organization’s KPI and goals

 

 

Discovering Key Differences in Consumer Preferences in The Countries Where CBD Products are Legal.

CBD Benefits Across Geographies

Cannabis was once considered to be an illicit substance of abuse predominantly due to its psychoactive effect and potential of leading to physical, social, and emotional harm. It was also regarded to be the most widely cultivated, trafficked, and abused illicit drug in the world. But, recent developments in research related to cannabis has completely changed its perception as an abusive drug globally.

Though it’s possible to isolate more than 113 different Cannabinoids from cannabis plants, the most notable one is the phytocannabinoid TetraHydroCannabinol (THC), followed by Cannabidiol (CBD), yet another significant constituent of the plant. THC is the primary psychoactive compound in cannabis and banned globally across many countries as it impinges parts of the brain responsible for thinking, memory, pleasure, coordination, and movement. However, CBD, with countless medical benefits, doesn’t have any psychoactive properties and has recently changed the perception of cannabis globally.

The legality of CBD Products

While the legal status of cannabis for recreational purposes in most nations is illegal, the legal status for use of CBD has been made permissible in certain countries because CBD is an extract from the cannabis plant, the same plant that produces the psychoactive THC, its usage is highly restricted by regulation and legislation.

Legality of cannabis by country

SOURCE: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/Legality_of_cannabis_by_country.PNG

The map above shows the current status of cannabis legality around the world. However, even some countries where cannabis is illegal might still allow CBD to be sold for medical purposes.

The United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) recently voted to remove cannabis and cannabis resins from their “Most Dangerous Drug” category based on the 2019 recommendation of the World Health Organization (WHO). Subsequently, the shift in global attitudes towards cannabis has softened and many jurisdictions are permitting cannabis use for recreation, medication, or both.

Most of the European countries have legalized CBD products in some way. While countries like France and Norway only allow CBD isolates (100% CBD with no THC), the rest allow extraction of CBD from industrial Hemp that contains less than 0.2% of THC.

In the US, the 2018 Farm Bill legalized the cultivation, processing, and sale of Hemp that contains less than 0.3% THC. However, the individual states have their own status of the legality of CBD within their borders. And, in countries like India, the use of cannabis in any form is strictly illegal.

Understanding CBD Customer Preference & Product Gaps – An Analysis

As per the latest report by MarketStudyReport LLC, the global CBD market size would reach USD 24.08 billion by 2027. Apart from its medical benefits, the availability in various forms such as oil, capsules, tincture, oils, concentrates, lip balms, and lotions, as well as edibles such as ice creams, candies, coffees, and gums, are also driving the market for CBD. In a dynamic and fast-growing market landscape such as the CBD, it’s quintessential for the brands to understand the benefits the customers are seeking and product gaps of their target audience to serve them better and drive the business.

For this analysis, using our proprietary text mining algorithm, we extracted reviews from relevant customer conversations and reviews from online sources such as social media, e-commerce websites, blogs, and discussion forums. In order to understand the reason why customers use CBD products and their issues with their current products, we deployed AI-Powered Natural Language Processing (NLP) Engine and Sentiment Analysis Algorithms to derive the following insights for the top 3 CBD using countries.

Product Benefits

CBD’s psychiatric benefits and its ability to treat some neuropsychiatric disorders are clearly evident in the analysis, as stress and anxiety relief emerged as the #1 benefit of CBD usage, followed by using it as a sleeping aid, especially in the USA and Germany. Also, due to CBD’s anti-inflammatory properties, it’s widely used for general pain relief in the UK and USA. Our analysis also highlights that CBD is widely used as an energy booster and in treating arthritis and knee pain.

CBD Benefits Across Geographies

Product Issues

The Sentiment Analysis highlighted the product gaps. The product smell and product worthiness (value for money) are the attributes that predominantly displeases the US and UK customers. The analysis also highlights that German customers are widely discontent with product packaging and product ingredients.

CBD Product Issues Across Geographies

SetuServ’s VOCIS platform provides customer insights and market intelligence for the CBD and cannabis industry. Combining our automated insights generated by our AI-powered systems along with human SME intelligence, CBD insights guides brands in deeply understanding the market landscape and device strategies to navigate the market challenges.

Consumer Preference for Household Cleaning Products – A Voice of Customer Study

Sentiment Analysis of Household Cleaning

Household cleaning products hold a key position in the Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) market due to their invaluable role in maintaining personal and public health. They are quite an essential product group as it helps in removing germs, soils, dust, and other contamination from hard or soft surfaces, thus reducing the presence of germs that cause infectious diseases and make the place more healthy and pleasant. The most common components in household cleaning products include alkalis, acids, detergents, abrasives, sanitizers, and spirit solvents. Also, some of the products contain hazardous ingredients such as flammable liquids, acids, and strong alkalis that require proper precautions while using. In this Voice Of Customer study, we shall discuss briefly the factors influencing customer decisions while buying household cleaning products.

Household Cleaning Products – Market Overview

Rapid urbanization, growing tendency towards maintaining personal as well as public hygiene are the key factors driving household cleaning products sales globally. According to recent research by Fortune Business Insights, the global household cleaning market size was $163.98 billion in 2019 and projected to reach $312.49 billion by 2027, with a CAGR of 4.97 % between 2020 to 2027. Also, it’s highly fragmented with key players such as Church & Dwight Co. Inc. (U.S.), Colgate-Palmolive Co. (U.S.), Godrej Consumer Products Ltd. (India), Henkel AG & Co. KGaA (Germany), Kao Group (Japan), The Procter & Gamble Co. (U.S.), Reckitt Benckiser Group Plc (U.K.), S. C. Johnson & Son Inc. (U.S.), Goodmaid Chemicals Corporation (Malaysia), and Unilever NV (U.K.).

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has created more consciousness on hygienic living and household cleaning among people across the world. This circumstance created a very high demand for household cleaning products that led to a global shortage that made manufacturers increase their production capacity and positively impacted global sales.

Our Methodology

Traditional market research methods in the FMCG industry predominantly rely on manual surveys and store observations. These methods are inaccurate and highly prone to bias and human errors. To overcome this, we leveraged content generated by the customers online to ensure a large sample size that’s spread across geographies. We used web crawlers to text mine customer conversations from various online sources such as social media, discussion forums, e-commerce reviews, and blogs. Then the raw unstructured text data is further processed by Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Sentiment Analysis Engines, which uses AI models that are custom trained for the specific use cases with industry-specific taxonomies to generate insights. These valuable insights can be used by the companies to take strategic decisions and course corrections to stay ahead in the market.

Data Mining Pipeline

Analysis Insights

The following are the insights automatically derived by the Voice of Consumer Insights and Signals (VOCIS) module by aggregating customer conversations from diverse sources such as social media, e-commerce reviews, discussion boards, and blog posts mined for FMCG related taxonomies.

 

Brand Insights

 

The value of a brand solely depends on the reputation of the brand, and it is achieved by consistently delivering value throughout the customer journey. This analysis focuses on providing insights into the brand perception of the customers throughout their journey. With the use of sentiment analysis, we shall compare the perception of a brand with that of the leading competitors and use the same to create a data-driven brand strategy.

Household Cleaning

Green Gobbler emerged as the most preferred brand in the analysis with a better rating and highest Share of Voice (SoV). These insights show the customer’s inclination towards natural and nature-identical cleaning products.

Product Level Insights

The buyer’s decision to purchase a product tends to be strongly influenced by a few key factors, features, and attributes. This analysis would help the brands in understanding these factors and optimize the product to appeal better to the target segment.

Sentiment Analysis of Household Cleaning

From more than 71K reviews mined from various online sources, the above were the top 5 features that got the potential to improve the rating, thus influence the customer’s buying decision positively. When it comes to Household Cleaning Products, the cleaning performance seems to be the decisive factor influencing customers, followed by the smell and affordability of the product.

Competitor Insights

Competitor Benchmarking is quintessential as it helps in developing a deep understanding of the market ecosystem and builds a picture of gaps to be fixed and opportunities to leverage. It also helps in streamlining the product and marketing efforts by emulating your competitor’s success elements such as price and key product features.

Competitive Analysis of Household Cleaning

The competitor benchmarking on product features for Green Gobbler, the top brand (based on the customer rating and SoV) against its competitors, highlighted the features that are favorable and the features that have scope for improvement. The attributes with a positive sentiment such as Package Design and Description Accuracy indicates the importance of packaging and optimal communication on the product package. Also, as the natural and nature-identical cleaners prized in premium, affordability emerged as a trailing factor.

SetuServ’s VOCIS platform can help FMCG companies in extracting valuable insights from customer reviews mined from various online sources. VOCIS is highly capable of rapidly building custom models specific to the use cases and generate highly accurate and relevant product insights for better business development and customer experience.