From Research to ROI | New Method: Text Analysis | Your data may be telling only half of the story
- Maria Alice Maia
- Aug 4
- 2 min read
You look at the dashboard. Sales for your flagship product are flat, but stable. Customer surveys show a respectable 4.2 out of 5 satisfaction score. The conclusion in the boardroom? "The product is solid. Let's focus on marketing."
This is “Doing Data Wrong” by practicing Kindergarten Data. You're listening to the neat, tidy, and often misleading structured data while ignoring a goldmine of strategic intelligence: the messy, unfiltered, and brutally honest voice of your customers.
I saw this with a major consumer goods company. Their best-selling face cream had plateaued. Internally, everyone assumed it was market saturation. But they were ignoring thousands of product reviews, social media comments, and call center notes. This is unstructured data, and it contained the truth.
This is where we deploy the powerful tools of Text Analysis. As detailed in seminal research by experts like Athey and Imbens, methods like Topic Modeling and Word Embeddings allow us to systematically make sense of this chaos. Think of it as a super-powered market research analyst that reads everything and tells you what people really think.
By applying these methods, we discovered two things the surveys completely missed:
An Emerging Problem (Topic Modeling): A growing cluster of reviews contained the words "pilling," "flakes," and "under makeup." The cream was failing a specific, high-value use case.
A Missed Opportunity (Sentiment Analysis): While overall sentiment was positive, a supervised learning model trained to detect purchase intent showed a huge spike in competing product mentions alongside the keyword "niacinamide"—an ingredient their cream lacked.
The problem wasn't market saturation. It was a product flaw for a key customer segment and a failure to keep up with a trending ingredient. The unstructured data held the multi-million dollar answer.
The Manager's Playbook: What to Demand Stop relying solely on sales charts and survey scores. Start asking your data teams:
"What is our strategy for analyzing unstructured customer feedback at scale?"
"What are the top 3 emerging themes—positive and negative—from our product reviews this month?"
"How is customer sentiment for our brand evolving on social media, and what is driving it?" Demand to hear the real voice of your market, not just the sanitized version.
The Tech Pro's Playbook: How to Deliver Real Value
Your role is to translate chaos into clarity. Move beyond the comfort of clean, tabular data.
Master unsupervised methods like topic modeling to discover the "unknown unknowns" hidden in text.
Develop supervised classifiers to track specific, known issues, like sentiment or churn risk, in customer comments.
Explore advanced word embedding techniques to understand the context and semantic meaning behind the words, not just their frequency. This is where true insight lives.
My journey through academia and the business world, from Berkeley and Harvard to the front lines of building companies, has taught me one thing: the most valuable insights are rarely in the cleanest datasets. My purpose is to take these powerful academic methods and make them tools for real-world impact. This knowledge is not mine to hoard.
Let's start listening to what our customers are really telling us.
Ready to decode the unfiltered voice of your market? Join my private email list. We're a community of leaders committed to unlocking the real value in our data.
