Shopper marketing blog

In this article, you will discover how we use AI text analysis to unlock valuable shopper insights and change the way our clients understand customer preferences and behaviours. By the end, you will understand how we go from thousands of text-based product reviews to something as simple and useful as this:

Creating actionable shopper insights has always been crucial for businesses looking to get an advantage in consumer goods. By analysing the text content of shopper reviews using AI technology, consumer goods businesses can gain valuable insights into customer preferences and behaviours. AI (Large Language Model) text analysis allows businesses to go beyond simple quantitative data and understand the emotions, opinions, and sentiments expressed by shoppers in their reviews.

One of the biggest changes for Shopper Marketing teams in the last 18 months has been the meteoric rise in Online grocery shopping driven by the shopper's needs arising out of the Pandemic. In turn, this has brought focus from brands on their reputation on the digital shelf in the form of product reviews, but many brands are disappointed by what they have seen. To help, we launched our SmartReputation solution which works with ordinary grocery shoppers to ensure they are fairly represented.

SmartReputation not only allows your products and brands to get the reviews and shopper feedback they deserve but also monitor the content of the reviews looking for trends. We can also ensure they stay fresh over time (i.e. the oldest is less than 6 months old) as we know this is the second most important factor in driving choice amongst grocery shoppers after having at least 30 reviews. For more, read our comprehensive survey of what drives online grocery shopper choice with reference to ratings & reviews.

To see the trends in supermarket product ratings and reviews we have looked back a year to compare the reviews visible on the Top 6 retailer sites in September 2020 to those in September 2021. Intuitively, you would think that the number of reviews has gone up in that time pretty much universally, well you'd be wrong. In some categories, in some retailers, total reviews by category have dropped dramatically whilst in other categories with good numbers of SKUs they are still well behind the curve in terms of getting fair representation on shelf i.e. the average reviews per SKU which really needs to be 30 or more. 

It's obvious when you think about it, that for online grocery shoppers selecting products to put in their basket, product Rating out of 5 is always more important than the number of Reviews, right?

Well, wrong actually and not just wrong occasionally, wrong most of the time. From our research of 3,710 online supermarket shoppers we know that when the average Ratings for two similar products are different by as much as 0.3 eg 4.2 vs 4.5, then the number of Reviews is much more important in product choice. Let me give you an example: