Don’t Kill the Analyst Just Yet

Text Analytics clocks in as the #4 “emerging methods” priority for market researchers in the 2015 GRIT (Greenbook Research Industry Trends) report.

Only mobile surveys, online communities and social media analytics poll higher... although of course text analytics is key to social media analytics done right, and it’s also central to #5 priority “Big Data analytics.” GRIT reports text analytics as tied with Big Data analytics for the #1 method “under consideration.” On the customer-insights side, Temkin Group last year reported, “When we examined the behaviours of the few companies with mature Voice of the Customer ( VoC) programmes, we found that they are considerably more likely to use text analytics to tap into unstructured data sources... Temkin Group expects an increase in text analytics usage once companies recognise that these tools enable important capabilities for extracting insights.” Clearly, the market opportunity is huge, as is the market education need. Who better to learn from than active practitioners, from experts such as Jean-François Damais, who is Deputy Managing Director, Global Client Solutions at Ipsos Loyalty. Jean-François is co-author, with his colleague Fiona Moss, of a recently released Ipsos Guide to Text Analytics, which seeks to explain the options, benefits, and pitfalls of setting up text analytics, with case studies. And Jean-François was a speaker at the 2015 LT-Accelerate conference, which looks at text, sentiment, and social analytics for consumer, market research, and media insights, which took place 23-24

November in Brussels. As part of the conference he gave us this interview.