5. Social Mining and Text Analytics

Can quickly understand what do our customers value most

6 min readFeb 23, 2021

From lesson 4, we understand how to employ market researches to assess brand presence. By utilising market segmentation to build up a strategic communication method, which could also consider as a part of the internal business development process. From lesson 5, we realised the priceless value of raw data in social minding. It could help a brand to save operational costs, uncover the real products/services feedback from the actual market, and most importantly, to gain insights into future trends.

Below case study is one of my favourite brands — IKEA. Combining my understandings of lessons 4 & 5 and my observation to analyse how they employ their marketing segmentation, utilize their communities to collect feedback, and ultimately create a “win-win-win” outcome for their target audience, their potential customers and themselves.

Case Study — IKEA

IKEA Group owned by Stichting INGKA Foundation is the largest furniture and home appliances manufacturer and retailer in the world. IKEA’s vision is “to create a better everyday life for the many people”.

IKEA offers unique and practical in house designs that attract a broad range of customers. Their primary product is furniture but they also offer storage solutions, kitchen accessories, food products and pet products etc. All with low prices and good quality.

The Brand Personally & Segmentation Group

IKEA keep prices low by recycling, waste reduction, minimal packaging, and in house design. They also encourage innovation and sustainability. IKEA focuses on the demographic of age, income level, and family life cycle. Both college students and young adults who just left their parents and moved out and with limited budget should be their target audience and they are the group of “STRIVERS”.

IKEA store design layout is welcoming and fun. They always change the layout & renovation design from time to time for keeping updated with new products. Their brand imagery is practical but also innovative, as they always invite different fields of famous designers/organizations to crossover and produce new trendy and fun products, such as Lego storage box (2020) and IKEA receipt rug (2019). Also, their brand name is designed with their signature yellow theme colour, which in the colour psychology, yellow is representing youthful, fun, energy etc. Therefore, “EXCITEMENT” would be one of the brand personalities.

Moreover, “COMPETENCE” would be IKEA another personality as considering they are intelligent and successful, due to the fact that IKEA was the 4th most valuable retailer in the world, making it the most valuable furniture retail brand, valued at almost 48.1 billion U.S. dollars in 2020.

Virgil Abloh x IKEA MARKERAD “RECEIPT” Rug ( 2019)

Social Communication, Social Mining & Text Analytics

IKEA Facebook: 30,298,095 Fans Likes
IKEA Twitter : 30,000 followers
IKEA Pinterest 6,099,000 followers

Like all global business groups, IKEA also applies the most common social media platforms, like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest to keep up their news and interact with their customers, to communicate and maintain the public relationship.

Besides the abovementioned, IKEA also has developed their own product ratings and review page for collecting the users’ direct comments and feedback. And it would be the most powerful internal database for IKEA. Since those who “waste their time” to register IKEA account, and rate for their purchased products / give feedback, shall be considered as IKEA’s loyal customers who really care abt IKEA and are willing to share their actual thoughts.

A positive review is a form of social proof.

Although amazon.com is only an online shopping platform, it’s a great channel for IKEA’s researchers to understand the responses of the actual market and find out which products are their best sellers and which are not welcoming. They can review and consider applying these data sources, to decide whether that product should keep manufactured or not through measuring the voice from the actual market.

Conclusion

After studying the pattern of IKEA, I notice that IKEA has covered a wide range of online networks, to build different communities for better 2-ways communication with the outside world in both of the positions as sender and receiver. And if IKEA keeps maintaining these communities in a good sense, could help them engage a deeper relationship and build an even larger group of loyal followers through “listening” and “responding” to either the positive or negative comments.

So in short, there is indeed a lot of reasons behind the success. IKEA has taken its customers pain & gains seriously, as well as a clear and specific market segmentation, which has leaded IKEA to become a top 4th retailer in the world with a strong value proposition for their target audiences.

My Reflection for Lesson 4 & 5

From what I had mentioned in my lesson 4 essay, “Survey should considerate as the pawns from the chess, as the very first step”, and now I believe, analyzing text mining through your “communities” in every way would be another step for us. If we are under a situation that does not allow us to design a survey, or we have to get a quick and reliable response from our target audience before starting a long battle of the research process. Text Mining can help us to have prelim results from the market.

In fact, before this module, the functions of brand communities are more likely for product promotion or public relations from my perspective. I would not have the idea of, social mining and text analytics could actually help the business reduce costs and manage the brand’s resources effectively. Due to my working field, I may only be familiar with/ focus more on collecting raw data from interviews or surveys to design persona. This is a new method to me, to collect the voices from the actual market by studying the comments from amazon.com and looking for further insights,

But now, I understand to apply design thinking, the first thing to do is, I should not narrow down the methods of collection. Instead, I should be an open-up spider web, explore different ways (or communities) to help myself complete the project. The process would be just like “before starting a mission” in James Bond Movie, the MI6 (represents the social communication / Brand community) would gather a list of secret information, report and work with 007. Through collecting and analysing these important data, allow them to dedicate their resources against the big bad boss(specific target group) rather than spread over and waste on other enemies (the whole market).