BLOG

Monitor your influence & reputation with Sampler’s newest tool: consumer sentiment analysis

July 12, 2021
  ●  
Charlotte Crawford

The consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry has more access to consumer data right now than ever before. Between March and August of 2020, one in five consumers switched brands, and seven in ten tried new digital shopping channels. Google, at the end of 2020, also reported retail searches grew at a rate 3x higher than at the same time last year.

The hyper speed in which CPG and retail brands have had to adapt almost all their efforts to digital has resulted in a surge of consumer data and insights. In a world of data overload, brands collect mountains of valuable customer feedback every single day. 

But as Mckinsey & Co. discusses, this “has not provided marketers with substantially better understanding of their customers, because their companies’ outdated data modelling isn’t able to capture these shifts with the necessary granularity and speed.” 

Customer insights and data are good, but the ability to quickly and effectively act on them is even better. So, how do you sort through thousands of tweets, reviews, surveys to extract deep insights and truly understand how your customer is feeling?

Enter Sampler’s new consumer sentiment analysis tool

The Sampler team is very excited to announce our newest tool within our product sampling dashboard, consumer sentiment analysis. Sampler is the first product sampling solution to have such a tool.

It will allow our brand partners to quickly cut through the noise of our current state of data-overload to build brand loyalists and advocates.

What is consumer sentiment analysis?

Sentiment analysis is a natural language processing tool, powered by machine learning, that determines the emotional tone behind a series of words (negative, neutral or positive). Consumer sentiment analysis is also known as “opinion mining” as it allows users to gain a better understanding into the attitudes, opinions and emotions expressed within an online mention.

Key features include:

  • Summarized view of survey response rate, ratings, reviews, and overall sentiments for all reviews.
  • Compare what consumers feel about different product variants to get an understanding of their individual performance. 
  • Allows brands to search for reviews that include particular keywords 
  • Filter reviews by ratings and/or sentiments
  • Review and benchmark against your category’s and competitors' average

Consumer sentiment & digital product sampling

One of the primary use cases for digital product sampling is the ability to ask your consumers for their feedback. This is an essential activity in fueling the growth of any brand. 

When you give your consumers the opportunity to try your product in the comfort of their own home, you’re giving them a chance to intimately interact with your brand and inspiring a sense of reciprocity. Digital product sampling is then not only an immersive experience for consumers - it’s also an effective and direct way to collect powerful consumer feedback. 

There are so many valuable insights, trends, and patterns that get lost in that sea of raw and unprocessed reviews. Sampler’s solution allows you to capture the consumer feedback and sentiment collected during your program and our sampling experts guide you in utilizing those insights in future and existing product development, packaging, marketing and sales efforts. 

As Hubspot’s CEO, Brian Halligan, said “feedback is the breakfast of champions” and consumer sentiment analysis allows brands to become more and more in tune with consumer feedback at every stage of the product cycle. 

Consumer sentiment analysis paired with digital product sampling empowers brands to move beyond regarding customer review collection as a bucket filling exercise to a data-intelligent approach that actively (and automatically) engages with consumer feedback to provide actionable insights. 


Consumers also often express their thoughts and feelings more openly on open text reviews. Open text reviews are full of pivotal insights as it is important for marketing, sales and leadership professionals alike to not just understand if customers like their products but why. 

Digital product sampling powers a two-way conversation with consumers making this deep understanding easily accessible. Consumers submit their lifestyle preferences and demographic information and our technology matches them with samples that fit their lifestyle. Consumers are then able to hand-select which of those matched samples they’d like to receive, and get a box with those samples delivered right to their home. 

The digital product sampling journey doesn’t end there. Once a consumer receives a sample, they then receive further follow-up communications like coupons, as well as a post trial survey to help brands gather consumer feedback, and close the loop. 

With Sampler’s consumer sentiment analysis tool consumer insights, that otherwise would have gotten lost in a sea of reviews, are at your fingertips. Imagine, on your phone in minutes right before a meeting, you are able to quickly grasp consumer sentiment on your newest products from a specific audience in real time. Manually sifting through hundreds or thousands of ratings and reviews simply does not allow for this kind of understanding on scale. 1 in 4 consumers who get a free sample, leave a review of the product. 

By simply optimizing your channels to allow for a consumer to sample a product, easily leave a review, and share feedback with friends, you’ve now created a direct line of communication and established a solid stream of genuine consumer feedback.

During our current time of transition where many brands are beginning plans for traditional in-person sales activities, it is more important than ever to actively listen to the opinions and needs of your customer base. Without listening to consumers directly, brands cannot make informed strategic decisions to address the needs of existing and emerging audiences.

Consumer-focused product innovation and testing

Your Sampler program can be a consumer feedback goldmine for product improvement suggestions. Now that you’ve built this direct line of communication with consumers who are actively engaging with your product - you can better understand the “why” behind why certain audiences like your product and others do not.

This kind of consumer-focused approach to innovation and testing allows brands to continuously meet customers' needs, even post-purchase. This is pivotal as most customers drop off in engagement or don’t purchase again after the first purchase.

With a digital sampling program, brands can proactively collect consumer feedback to identify potential or existing issues with new or existing products. Brands can test product variants within their sampling program and then can make customer-focused business decisions around innovation with ease. 

Consumer sentiment analysis can support brands in speaking the same language that consumers are speaking. Brands can increase conversion and brand affinity by incorporating the key words and themes that consumers are using in their reviews in their e-commerce pages and marketing content. 

By testing with a smaller sampling audience - brand managers and marketing teams can both proactively ensure product’s resonate with target audiences.   

Takeaways

Sampler’s consumer sentiment analysis tool is another step in our ongoing goal to consistently provide our brand partners with a seamless approach to developing a personalized, meaningful and data-driven relationship with consumers. As we begin to look to the future, this tool enables brands to cut through the noise of data-overload to improve customer experience across the consumer journey. With Sampler’s consumer sentiment analysis tool consumer insights, that otherwise would have gotten lost in a sea of reviews, are at your fingertips.


With consumer sentiment analysis, you are enabled to actively and quickly listen to and understand your customers. All while developing product innovations target audiences will actually love. This new tool joins Sampler’s dashboard that is already full of exciting data analytics, consumer research and data modelling tools that puts consumer’s needs first. Our sampling experts could not be more excited to show you how this tool can drive your brand objectives.

SHARE THIS POST

Interested in learning more about Sampler?

Connect with one of our sampling experts today

Speak to a sampling expert