Biz360 Launches New Opinion Insights Service that Aggregates & Analyzes Online Consumer Reviews

Bulldog Reporter, October 08, 2008

Biz360 (www.biz360.com), a provider of media and market intelligence solutions, has launched Opinion Insights, a technology-based monitoring and measurement solution designed for product and marketing decision makers. Opinion Insights captures and analyzes consumer opinion information from thousands of shopping, consumer product and expert review websites, and summarizes this information into ongoing intelligence at an individual product level.

By providing continuous, real-time understanding of how consumers rate branded products and services — down to model, SKU, attribute and feature level — Biz360's Opinion Insights service offers marketers a cost-effective, census-based approach that complements (and, in some cases, replaces), costly traditional market research techniques, the company says.

According to the company, Opinion Insights incorporates advanced business intelligence technology in data aggregation and analytics to address the cost and limitations associated with traditional market research techniques. Recognizing that online reviews are a significant and growing influence on consumer purchase decisions, Opinion Insights provides an automated way to mine this powerful source of peer influence, and to deliver marketers an accurate, up-to-date view of consumer ratings for their products and services, as well as those of their competitors.

Biz360 collaborated with Christopher Manning, Stanford professor and leading authority in the field of natural-language processing (NLP), to create a first-of-its-kind system that automatically captures the sentiment of individual consumer opinion comments. Opinion Insights delivers a wide range of critical metrics, alerts and in-depth analyses including customer advocacy trends, identification of key influencers, competitive gap assessments, price/value analyses, as well as feature-level and source-level analysis.

"Never before has such a powerful customer insight tool been placed at the fingertips of marketers and market researchers," said Brad Brodigan, CEO of Biz360. "Opinion Insights lets companies implement real-time opinion and trend tracking rather than relying on costly and sporadic primary research initiatives. This means marketers can spend less time and money figuring out what their customers want, and more time designing, developing and marketing products shaped by recent, on-the-record consumer feedback."

Consumers are expanding their use of the Internet to help make their purchase decisions. According to Pew Research, 78 percent of Americans have used the Internet to research a product or service before buying. Until now, there has been no practical way for companies to aggregate, analyze and interpret this vast amount of online information about their products and services. If they could understand this complex universe of consumer-generated information, marketers would have valuable insight into brand preferences: the product features and attributes that matter most to consumers, emerging trends, price elasticity, and even competitive vulnerabilities. Opinion Insights can be applied to assist marketers and researchers in any industry where reviews influence purchase decisions.