Brand Decisions are Grand Decisions

Brand Decisions are Grand Decisions

So, I often ask folks in the text mining industry, particularly the linguists and
applied mathematicians that specialize in language detection, "have you ever read
100,000 customer service records, complaints, etc.?". I have.

Of course not. These folks, who are toiling in their applied sciences, must attack
the challenges of computational linguistics with an expansive and intentionally
non-specialized approach to text harvesting. Likewise, the well developed BI
community has a certain orientation towards data visualization and raw statistics.
Neither of these camps has the requisite immersion in customer relations and the
language of 'consumer perceptions' that occurs after a product is released into
the hands of the public.

Don't get me started on the ersatz 'brand speak' of the current early market
entrants specializing in brand monitoring via sentiment analysis - I have made my
opinions known, and those with far more august credentials have slapped me down
good'o. This is all as it should be in the open media.

The brand intermediaries (multi-line dealers and retailers) that are the victims
of branding decisions and the blunders of the brand owners are the fat part of a
potentially untapped market being completely ignored by the brand monitoring
leaders, both old school, as well as new age text harvesters. This is predictable,
as the technology adoption curve has shown this myopia will occur across numerous
innovation categories - the telephone (never envisioned to become a residential
device), the computer ("might be useful for up to five of our largest
corporations", Thomas J. Watson., the PC, (what do people want a computer in their
home for?).

Whereas the old school brand equity and monitoring agencies have made a conscious
and informed choice for the moment, not to take the mid-market into their plans
for brand monitoring, the new entrants are just skating by the opportunity due to
arrogance, hubris, and let's say, a lack of vision. Plus, it's harder to serve the
mid-market with an affordable decision support service, than it is to deliver the
current sentiment scoring clap-trap.

Enough already, my position is known! What am I going to do about it as an

independent analyst? Why, Dear Watson, I'm going to analyze, and then find a
friendly technology leader to hire me as a consultant to implement these systems.
Let us now break down the dynamics of Customer Perceptions and Interaction
Outcomes in a semi-formal manner that is somewhat long for the blog format,
however, I will condense the specifics to a few pages, and add a link at the
bottom to a full white paper. Read On Babes:

Customers have a priori perceptions of brand that are more crucial to

intermediaries than to brand owners, but these perceptions are of import to the
entire commerce value chain.

Brand owners have to make decisions that impact their semi-durable destiny,
whereas the retailers and distributors of high end durable goods are recipients of
the fruits of these decisions, but in a less permanent way. The decisions to imbue
a brand, a product, with a message is a decision impacting billions or at least
hundreds of millions in the long term for the brand owner; brand intermediaries,
spanning a much wider size distribution, are impacted severely in the mid-term
economic horizon.

Product Perceptions (caps intentional) are an intangible capital asset. This is

probably one of the reasons we are witness to such a fascinating bifurcation in
the consumer electronics business of the later 20th century and the contemporary
period. One the one hand, Sony can stumble multiple times and badly at that, while
remaining a viable brand in the consumer's collective perceptions, while one of
the many new age electronics purveyors, such as Creative, Apple, or Dell, can make
a bad product call and, theoretically, capsize a company in one season. Ah, you
disagree? I posit that there was rampant speculation within Apple that, should the
iPhone fail in any number of spectacular or not so spectacular ways, it could, nay
would, have serious long term repercussions for the viability of the brand (and
future efforts at competing in the mobile space).Yet it does seem that the likes
of Nokia, Motorola, Sony, Ericsson, etc., have and will continue to make mobile
devices with horrible usability and severely compromised product perceptions, that
go on their merry way with a whistle and nod.

That is to say that Nokia and Motorola go on with a whistle and a nod; their poor
distributors and the multi-line retailers take the brunt of the horrible decisions
these brand owners perpetrate. And the persistent impression of these accumulated
blunders, despite the ostensible success of the brand, create these a priori
product perceptions that affect future buying behavior. Thus the need to steer
brand monitoring away from brand owners and toward brand intermediaries. It's
gonna happen anyway.

Brand Decisions are Grand Decisions. Tools are needed to collect the resulting
impact of these results on the perceptions of the consumers. This will not be done
with the the horribly flawed sentiment metrics currently in vogue.

Interaction Outcomes are the total impressions formed by a consumer's intercourse

with the pre-sales, post sales, customer service, and warranty / technical
services touch point continuum. If you are breathing, I don't have to explain to
you that a perfectly good brand or product can be mortally wounded by bad
interaction outcomes.

It useful to, unfortunately, again make an example of the mobile telecom services
monopolies, as they continue to amaze me, that as a group, they somehow manage to
provide uniformly bad customer service, thus providing uniformly awful interaction
outcomes. The upshot of this truly fascinating study of incompetence by an entire
industry was essential to my research, for now I had access to perceptions and
impressions of interactions outcomes shaded by incremental negatives. Can you beat
that? An entirely bad industry - monopolistic, disparaging, punitive (cancellation
fees rather than competing on merits), anti-competitive (refuse to allow VOIP
transit). Ye Gads....

Where else can you get such purely wonderful, negative perceptions of crappy
mobile devices that are poorly supported, years behind EU and Asian markets in
terms of features and capabilities, and yet still maintain a semi-permanent,
angry, and disillusioned clientèle? Ladies and gentlemen, I ask you?

Therefore, Hats off to AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, whoever - for the Golem continues to
live.

Now then, where was I: We have here in the wireless trade a uniformly negative
community impression from which to gather interaction outcomes, specifically. The
product perception picture arising from the mobile device industry is somewhat
tainted, as the pricing for most mobile devices is skewed by a witches brew of
specialized incentives. The public does, however, retains a remarkable gullibility
and immaturity over breakout products, as the iPhone has demonstrated a uniquely
American trait, that childlike quality that seems to say, 'if i can only have that
doll, car, toy, all will be right by me'. The model of 'living in a dream ', is at
the bedrock layer of the science of product perceptions and interaction outcomes.

Science....! Please, the ego here.

The detection of these perception and outcomes comes from recognizing families of
phrases that are commonly found in customer service complaints that are gathered
from warranty reports and inbound contact call center and support logs. It's a lot
of reading and doing so may damage one's ability to read for pleasure for many
months after. We shall extend this phrasal mining and detection to the public
corpus, as is being done now with sentiment analysis.

I have found the following linguistic phrasal patterns that lend themselves to
symbolic substitution (more on creating symbol tables for sentence dynamics
detection in a later article):

1) Generic Outcomes, free from declaratory clauses

"It didn't work out"

""She was not able to help me"
"It was still non-functional"

We see many generic outcomes in call center data mining in the consumer and
professional electronics industry. Outcomes of a generic nature can be good or bad
(from the consumer's perspective) or expected / unexpected (from the servicing
dealer's perspective).

2) Declarations

Declarations are non-generic statements about an interaction within the customer

service continuum. They are often about what someone observed or has experienced:

"My wife felt belittled by the staff"

"I saw the technician hammering on the alternator"

"I arrived at the appointed time, but they would not take the car"

"I saw my car, it was a mess"

"When I took the computer home, it had the same problem"

Declarations are, therefore, non generic statements of observations and

experiences.

3) Desires

Desires are the pure statements about what was hoped for, not what is sought,
which would be redress.

"I wanted it to be ready by x time"

"I had hoped that installation would have gone better"

"I really wanted a solution to this ongoing problem".

Desires are one class of expressions we find that often border on redress without
the specificity and stridency of "outcome seeking language".

4) Redress is the "big daddy" when it comes to targeting change within a services
continuum, but is just really another non-generic declaratory phrase. When
scoring, calculating stochastic values to the dataset, or extracting reports,
Redress detection can be one of the routing parameters for action. For our
purposes of mining multiple corpora for such perceptions and interaction
phraseology, redress gets no special attention, other than it's calculated values
over time, and its integration with other phrasal tokens for the purpose of
assigning value to the overall interactions.

"I want my money back"

"I demand satisfaction"

"We demand that this be addressed"

"shall seek"

"will report..."

One of the problems with detecting redress is the labyrinthine way it can
sometimes be expressed by those who are trying to be polite. Still, the engines
made to cut and detect these phrases will get better, as will the cottage industry
of modular ontologies for phrasal dynamics. Once we see an earlier dynamic, it is
fairly easy to mark the tree for token inclusions that will, ultimately, be
statistically sound enough for providing the kind of output we need.

5) Pronouncements

Pronouncements are composed of decisions and advisories. They are the sign-off
statements of a disgusted customer; we have all been there. As you can see by now,
all of these phrasal markers express certain classes of perceptions and the
results of interactions.

"I will never go there again"

"take m advice, ...."
"I thought x, now I believe Y"
"as a result of x, I am now Y"

A Good Start

There is actually very little new in this type of text classification, except
perhaps the notion of re-targeting the marketing and product definition away from
brand owners and sentiment, and towards brand intermediaries and the significantly
more complex task of creating a hosted decision support tools for these mid-market
companies. Such a tool will use the above mentioned classification to score the
corpus on a brand and product basis, taking into account the program incentives
that are always being offered to these multi-line dealers.

The resulting integration will aid these retailers and distributors by providing
visualizations of the stochastic values of the scored corpus, and relating program
incentive offers to this scored value.