by Damian Grimling | Nov 6, 2021 | Categorising comments, SentiBrand
Shopping is a constant part of our lives. Every day, we come into contact with a huge number of more or less recognizable brands and companies. However, only some of them we choose more often and more willingly. Sometimes it happens completely automatically. Why does this happen and what determines our choice? It is probably emotions.
Brand loyalty vs. brand strength. What determines our choice?
There’s no denying and it’s been proven that our purchasing decisions are mostly influenced by emotions and the bond that a brand has developed with us. A recent study conducted by Deloitte entitled “From disparate signals to transformative action. The latest research by Deloitte “From disparate signals to transformative action” shows that emotional attachment to a brand is a decisive factor when making purchases for a group of 80% of consumers. In turn, 62% of them declared that they have some kind of relationship with a given brand.
– The brand-consumer relationship is a particularly important factor in sales strategy because it is directly related to customer satisfaction. We as manufacturers are constantly challenged to create better and better offers that meet consumer expectations,” – reads the report.
For what purpose do we shop? Consumers often shop primarily to improve their mood. Nowadays, the purchase of a particular good or service does not have to be dictated by discounts, promotions or low prices. The key here is the mentioned emotions. They are the reason why some of our purchasing decisions are not very rational, made on impulse and at the moment.
So, what can a brand do to generate emotions and become even more liked and recognized by consumers? What is the secret and power of the biggest brands and their messages? Apart from emotions, it is important to build positive associations in the recipients. It is worth remembering to adjust the communication strategy to the target group. An advertising campaign addressed to teenagers should look different from one addressed to people aged 40+.
Visual identity also plays a huge role in consumers’ perception of a brand. We live in a world of short information, slogans and signs. That is why logos, colors, symbols and general aesthetics of products are important. All this also creates the image of the company according to the buyer and has a bearing on building a relationship between him and the brand.
The basis is brand loyalty and trust
Today’s market abounds in various brands, and more and more are created all the time. We are almost flooded with various products and symbols, often not knowing what it all means. However, companies that enjoy the greatest recognition and consumer choice are not resting on their laurels and are constantly developing their offers. The key is to constantly work on the image because without this, it is impossible to maintain the leadership position.
In the aforementioned Deloitte report we read that if a brand wants not only to stay on the market, but above all to boast of constant trust, it needs constant work and listening to consumers. This means staying up to date with the ever-present changes and new trends. Without this, it will not be possible to maintain the highest standards and respond to the preferences of as many customers as possible.
The consumer who has established a bond with the brand is then not only a recurring generator of profit, but also an engaged recipient. Building long-term partnerships with consumers means, above all, responding responsibly and effectively to their needs. More and more companies emphasize personalization and considering individual preferences of consumers to provide them with the most suitable benefits.
Many factors contribute to the choice of a particular brand, but first there are positive emotions and associations. To build them, we need a dialogue with consumers, a trusting answer to their needs as well as building the opinion of a unique brand, positively distinguishing itself from the competition. We can easily learn about emotions by analyzing media, including blogs, news portals, internet forums and most of all social networking sites. That’s what Sentimenti tools are for.
by Sentimenti Team | Jun 5, 2019 | Conferences, SentiBrand
Emotions and marketing? Communication with clients and contractors, searching for new customers and markets for goods or services, public relations policy, social media activities, advertising and generally building the company’s image – these issues require business to collect data and make informed decisions based on them leading to the development of the organization. Today, thanks to Sentimenti’s emotion analysis tools all these activities can be conducted more effectively.
Emotions in brand communication
The capabilities of the tools for analysing emotions in text developed at Sentimenti are still being tested and extended by our research team. We decided to examine advertising content with them. This is a demanding area. The advertising message has to be short, catch the attention, be memorable. Above all, it has to be suggestive so as to induce a specific behavior of potential customers. To do this, it is best to hit their emotions. From the research conducted in this matter it is known that the marketing message with an emotional foundation is more effective, and from practice – that emotions, even the negative ones, sometimes can provide a brand with exposure in the media and social media for a long time.
We analyzed the content of several advertisements in terms of their emotional overtones and the valence of 8 basic emotions from the Plutchik model. For the study we used advertising content related to AA Prestige (cosmetics line), Plus (telecommunications), Citi Handlowy (external factoring), Renault (Kangoo Express model) and Shell (Shell Helix oil).
The analysis confirmed the results of the research – advertising content characterized by positive emotions (joy, trust, expectation) is more likely to be remembered by recipients and to inspire trust in a given brand. But that’s not all – the in-depth analysis of emotions in advertising content has also shown that even a single word (also a function word!) can be associated with several emotions at the same time.
Consequently, it is not always possible to avoid negative sentiment in advertising content. You can always check this content with Sentimenti. In this way you can better match the content and form of your marketing message to your target group. Sentimenti will show you emotional connotations where the popular two-dimensional sentiment analysis does not show any. This is a big advantage when you have more cross-sectional data to analyze. Interestingly, however, some advertising campaigns (especially in political marketing) are based on negative or at least controversial emotions. Why?
The recipient processes them faster. They are more memorable and evoke a desire for action: most anger and the repulsion leading to it, fear and…. surprise. Research shows that the recipients will remember above all this negative emotional environment, not the brand and the advertised product. Unless, of course, we skillfully reverse the sign of emotions. But to do that you need to know what words evoke what emotions. We at Sentimenti have such knowledge, we also have algorithms to evaluate emotionality in content. We can share them with you.
Emotional targeting now works
Emotions transfer easily. And not just between people, but also, as research shows, between words. Based on this insight, the NYT, USA Today, The Daily Beast and other U.S. editors have begun emotionally positioning advertising content around articles with a given message. Algorithms built in collaboration with the editors analyze readers’ opinions of articles and try to answer the question of what their reactions will be in similar content so as to match them later with the best possible ad content placed in the vicinity.
This solution allows you to create and place content more contextually, which translates into greater brand marketing effectiveness. At Sentimenti we understand the needs of both publishers and advertisers in this field. That’s why we started working with Interia Group in the pioneering InteriaEmotions project on the Polish market. Together, we work on matching the emotional context of advertising content with the content of publications. All this so that companies and agencies can benefit from the advantages of this type of positioning. We presented the results of our work at the IAB Conference in Warsaw.
Why should you start working with Sentimenti? Algorithms, machine learning and other modern technologies are increasingly active in the public space. Business is increasingly willing to use these methods. A human being cannot analyse a huge amount of data quickly. He needs to use artificial intelligence to do it better and more efficiently. This is especially true for emotions, which are perceived individually and therefore difficult to objectify.
At Sentimenti we understand this direction. Therefore, while maintaining scientific standards, we develop algorithms to analyse emotions in content of various types. Our tools have proven effective at analyzing emotions in ad content, comparing them, showing correlations, trend direction, etc. This is a massive range of data. It usually takes months to acquire and analyse. It requires an objective indicator to measure emotions. After all, several people, independently of each other, may evaluate a text in a similar or different way. The goal of effective emotion analysis is to understand what the standard is for such evaluation.
If you are interested in improving the emotionality (and thus the effectiveness and increasing the reach) of your advertising messages, if you want to write more engaging posts in social media, if you need an analysis of your current activities or an indication of the direction of their development – we invite you to contact Sentimenti!
by Agnieszka Czoska | Mar 14, 2019 | Sentimenti research
Each data analysis is aimed at understanding what information it contains. Has something changed, or is there a difference between A and B? Do changes in A correlate with those in C or D? Only these steps allow us to draw conclusions about the results.
First stage: measurement. What is the text?
The above statement also applies to the analysis of emotions or sentiment. Its first stage is the MEASUREMENT, checking how many and what kind of emotions we find in a given text or set of them. The result of a simple emotion measurement shows the intensity of each of Plutchik’s 8 basic emotions supplemented by positive and negative sentiment and arousal (overall emotional temperature of the text). Sometimes we can afford to interpret it already at this stage. We did it in one of our first entries, where we analyzed short ads (what is important, we have already managed to improve the way the results are presented). By analyzing the ads we wanted to show something characteristic for the whole type of texts: the most important emotions are joy and trust, only at the very beginning of the story about the product the creators allow themselves to remember the negative ones – to show the hardships of life before the era of the best shampoo or grease in the world.
The correct results of the Emotional Measurement are those that are consistent with people’s feelings, after all, each of us is an expert on feelings. Our tool owes its correctness to the participants of research on emotions in Polish, which we conducted according to the best scientific standards.
Measurement is only the first step towards understanding the message and the emotions it contains. When we deal with many similar texts or collections of texts, we have to do something else. We want to find out which shop has the best opinions? Which version of our marketing content expresses the most enthusiasm or best shows interest in the subject? Which of the texts in the “Beauty” section will delight, move or warn the reader? We are talking about COMPARISON.
The second stage: comparison. Does this text differ from the average?
Comparison is perhaps the most important stage in the analysis of emotions – thanks to it we not only find out what the text is like, but also how it compares with others. We can compare directly – as we did when writing about lipsticks and lipsticks. Then we were interested in which of the topics has an advantage in terms of positive emotions and whether this difference is statistically significant. However, comparing several or a dozen or so different cosmetic brands cannot be done in this way, it would not be the correct approach. That is why in the text about beauty companies we used a comparison to the average – we needed some kind of background measurement, so-called baseline. This approach will be useful, for example, when comparing shops and brands. We then answer the question which brand has better or worse results than most of the industry.
The most general type of baseline would be the sum of emotions that characterize not only the domain, portal or texts of a given author, but simply language. In linguistics, the so-called Polyanna effect is known, which is that there are more positive than negative expressions in every language. Not only in the dictionary, but also in what we say – this effect expresses quite a general tendency of our minds to spend time and energy rather on pleasant things. In our research we very often see this tendency – joys and trust are emotions that appear in the greatest intensity not only in advertising. The fact that language has its emotional mean all the more reason to draw conclusions only based on comparison and not on the measurement itself.
Third stage: trends. What do emotions do?
The analysis of emotions is also about tracking changes in time, i.e. monitoring emotions. We can check whether sadness or revulsion show a growing trend, i.e. there are more and more of them in statements on a given topic or in the opinions of customers. If we notice a trend, which is statistically significant, we can predict what will happen in the future and if by chance it does not mean an impending crisis (depending on the slope of the trend line).
At this stage it is also possible to go beyond the data from the Sentimenti tools. We started with something simple, accessible and yet untouched by others – we compared the emotional temperatures of mentions of listed companies with the prices of their shares, published publicly. Sentistock is great, it allows you to determine what the investor mood really is and how it translates into stock market fluctuations.
This part of the analysis of emotions depends entirely on who and for what purpose wanted to examine the overtones of the text, the notes, the conversation. We have also managed to show which emotions correlate positively with reactions on Facebook and Twitter – that is, how to write, so that the observers would like to like or comment on the post. However, we might as well ask how emotions correlate with remembering information from the text. Studies on the psychology of emotions, including those conducted by our colleagues from LOBI, indicate that the overtones of the text have an impact on what and how well we remember. Correlation between customer feedback and online store sales? Our tools are designed for this type of research.
Why so many stages?
Emotions were not created for themselves. This is our advisory mechanism: they tell us what action to take. Tversky and Kahneman did not receive the Nobel Prize for their research, but for showing that the consumer, including the stock market, is not rational. This statement tells us two things:
- emotions shape the market,
- we need good tools and methods to study this impact.
Trying to understand the emotions “on the eye” we won’t know more than the average customer wanting to buy a new computer, reading all the available reviews and then deciding on the brand for which he or she has (and had) the warmest feelings. Maintaining scientific standards, checking whether differences and trends are statistically significant and even better correlate with other, harder indicators is the best way to find out. After all, we live in the era of big data and data analysis.
by Agnieszka Czoska | Feb 7, 2019 | SentiBrand
Not only our analyses show from time to time that the more emotions we show, the more we receive from our interlocutors. What’s more, I think everyone knows the basic principle of advertising and marketing: emotions pay off because they generate reactions. On the wave of these beliefs, we decided to check whether actually popular Facebook and Twitter posts are more emotional than those that evoke less liking or commentary.
We used Facebook Insights and Tweet Activity analytics statistics. We focused only on those that tell us about the actual interest in a given post: the number of reactions (likes and comments). We ignored the number of page views and similar “big numbers”. – Emotions do not necessarily affect the algorithms of social media, but they should be the reaction of those who observe a particular channel. Where did we get the data from? Not from the Sentimenti website, we have too few fans so far. But we happen to be familiar with a certain pop-culture portal – the statistics are for posts from Nie Tylko Gry.
Emotions on Facebook
We have collected data from January 2019. The portal has more than 1700 viewers on Facebook, at that time it published about 3 posts a day, including multimedia (e.g. containing film posters), links to its pages, several links to films (mainly trailers). We did not analyze these types of posts separately, we would need much more material to do so. We focused only on the text. The posts evoked 20 likes or 23 reactions on average (3 comments on average). We filtered out the 20 most popular posts and the 20 with the least reactions.
In both types of posts we found less than 20% of emotional words, 15% in the most popular ones and 18% in the second group. This difference is not statistically significant, so the “amount” of emotions alone is not responsible for the popularity of the post.
If we look at the distribution of individual emotions, we can see that these two groups of posts differ most in the presence of sadness and trust. If we analyze 8 emotions together, the difference is not statistically significant, but already the set of trust, sadness and anger gives a result that shows the difference between the groups (Chi=13,945; p=0,002). Interestingly, in the most popular posts there are more negative emotions and less trust. Does writing about pop culture feed on criticism? Or maybe doubts about the quality of the promoted works?
Emotion on Twitter
We also analyzed the twitts of the portal, this time in December 2018 and January 2019. The portal has less than 200 observers on Twitter, published, as on Fecebook, about 3 posts a day: photos and links (mainly to its website). On average, they generated 4 reactions to the post (including: likes, comments and sharing). We filtered 60 of the most and least popular posts.
The percentage of words carrying emotion was slightly smaller for twitts, about 13%, and did not differ between the two groups of entries. Interestingly, longer twitts seem to be more popular than shorter ones. However, none of these differences are statistically significant.
Joy and trust seem to differentiate twitty most strongly. In fact, if we consider these two emotions and fear, we get statistically significant differences between the groups (Chi=8,569; p=0,014), while for 8 emotions the result is not significant and we can only talk about the tendency. In popular twitts trust is more often expressed, and less often – fear and joy.
Emotions in social media
As you can see, Twitter and Facebook posts from the Not Only Games portal we are analyzing show the opposite relationship between emotions and popularity, although on both platforms trust seems to be an important emotion for the audience. It is more important than the ratio of words that carry emotion to neutral. In the case of social media, therefore, the portal cannot simply talk about the influence of emotions on the popularity of an entry, no differences remain relevant if we compare all popular and less popular posts. We have to treat both portals as separate collections of texts to say something about evoking readers’ reactions.
What does this difference mean? Perhaps the author-reader relationship on Twitter and Facebook is different, but the administrator may also be key here – and for “Nie Tylko Gry”, someone completely different deals with each of these channels of communication with the recipients.
In this analysis we have shown that emotions, especially trust, influence the popularity of a post on a social network. At the same time, there is no uniform, valid for all media – on Twitter, positive emotions “won”, and on Facebook, negative emotions. It is also not enough to simply show any feelings – the proportion of emotional to neutral words was not important.
Getting to know your audience is crucial for promotion in social media. In order to encourage interaction with our post, we should find out what our readers, potential clients and supporters actually react to. Do they prefer a photo or text? Probably the first. But do they prefer joy, anger or trust? That’s what we won’t find out from the Facebook algorithms yet. As we have shown, these preferences depend on the communication channel and without reliable data analysis we will not be able to evaluate them.
