Corporate brand andreputation analysis forconsumer products andretailMonitor buzz, manage your brand

IBM Sales and DistributionSolution Brief

Highlights● Monitor in near real time what con-

sumers using social media are sayingabout your company—and your competitors

● Gain actionable insights into consumerpreferences and buying habits from the1.5 million postings per week acrossthe social media spectrum

● Obtain early warning of impendingthreats to your company

● Use automated analysis of massive,unstructured data for daily updatesbased on your needs, at low cost

Consumer Products

All consumer-oriented companies know the importance of brand stewardship—and how easily brands can be tarnished. Historically,companies tracked brand mentions and awareness with news wire serv-ices. But consumer-generated media—blogs, message boards, Twitterand news groups—now sway public opinion at the speed of thought.Monitoring them is difficult, but critical to product development andprotecting your brand.

That’s why we offer a proven, automated way to monitor the electronic grapevine daily: the corporate brand and reputation analysis(COBRA) solution for consumer products and retail from IBM. Thissolution uses advanced text and data analytics to mine and interpret themassive, diverse content of social media, as well as internal corporateinformation. We can help you derive actionable customer, market andenterprise insights that support product development, marketing, com-munications and your response to risk and compliance issues.

To hear and learn from the consumer’s voice requires the ability toanalyze robust content sources. It also requires powerful filtering to eliminate unwanted “noise”—some 70 percent of blog and boardpostings are spam—and sophisticated tools to analyze structured andunstructured information, even with incorrect spelling and grammar.The COBRA solution provides all of this, plus interactive dashboardsto help you interpret metrics such as buzz and sentiment and controlall analytical aspects.

IBM Sales and DistributionSolution Brief

Consumer Products

Our customizable format is designed for your specific needs.You can choose the topics your business needs to monitor,the type of alerts you require and an approach to trends andpatterns that can identify competitive opportunities. We canhelp you analyze:

● Institutional knowledge—about brands, issues and competi-tors, by tracking words or phrases you worry about whenthey appear on blogs, boards or news postings. This helpsus develop models to identify posts about your brand, issuesand competitors.

● System knowledge—about emerging words that identifysignificant events, based on frequency of occurrence. Thiscan help you see and predict key developments.

The COBRA solution’s unique aspects for consumer productcompanies and retailers include:

● End-to-end integration, from the source of content to theWeb interface, which can incorporate your current systems.

● A single view of “buzz incidents” that integrates informa-tion from diverse sources: blogs, boards, newsgroups, newsgroups, customer communication, internal complaints content, etc.

● Near-real-time data gathering, metrics monitoring and dis-play of buzz through dashboards for various companystakeholders—virtually 24/7.

● Customized models by brand, issue, topic, industry andperson, which can filter massive information daily fromthousands of documents to produce dozens of highly relevant alerts.

● Sentiment analysis to detect opinions related to reputa-tional risks.

● Dashboard reporting that can help stakeholders configuretheir own visualization of events and developments.

● Discovery analytics using historical content:– Root-cause analysis to understand why events and alerts

occurred.– Relationship analysis to find relationships among reputa-

tion dimensions.– Historical trends and patterns.

The COBRA solution has a unique analytical modelingapproach providing unparalleled precision and sensitivity.This approach minimizes false alarms and also means thatweak signals can be detected faster.

ConclusionArm your company with one of the most powerful analyticalsuites on the market. The COBRA solution offers near-real-time dashboard-based analysis, flexible user configuration,extensive coverage of social media, business intelligence andtext mining combined in one solution, and much more. LetIBM help you listen to what your customers, potential cus-tomers, competitors and competitors’ customers are saying—to proactively protect your brand and your company’sreputation.

Notes

Please Recycle

For more informationTo learn more about corporate brand and reputation analysisfor consumer products and retail, please contact yourIBM representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit:ibm.com/consumerproducts or ibm.com/retail

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1 Survey of Consumer Attitudes to Blogs, Hostway, September 2005.

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