A new machine learning tool has uncovered the most talked about supermarket products and found the vegan and vegetarian category creates the biggest stir.
The research undertaken by Solutions for Retail Brands (S4RB) and Warwick Analytics also found leaky nappies, jam-less doughnuts and excess plastic packaging irked consumers.
Customer tweets were analysed using a natural language processing tool called PrediCX over the period of December to March, with the volume of twitter messages remaining fairly constant at around 10,000 records per week.
Providing feedback to retailers about products made up around 50% of all tweets with a specific product or range being referenced in around a quarter of those.
Vegetarian and vegan was the most prevalent category, where products were mentioned, and are in the top five reported products for all six of the retailers analysed – Asda, Morrisons, Co-op, Sainsbury’s, Tesco, and Waitrose.
Another underlying theme is the excessive use of plastics in packaging and there were also significant flare-ups around in-store and delivery customer experience, palm oil policy and animal welfare.
James Butcher, S4RB’s CEO commented: “This report showcases the depth of insight now available. We were able to find out that many Asda customers want more choice, Waitrose perform well when it comes to taste and Morrisons customers want more jam in their doughnuts.
“It’s widely acknowledged that social media is used as a customer feedback channel which should not be ignored by retailers. However, the unsolicited and unstructured format means it has yet to be utilised to its full potential.
“It’s exciting for us to prove that product management by Twitter is indeed possible. It’s not just limited to Twitter analysis either as brand developers and brand managers can use AI to analyse any form of text, from Trustpilot and online customer feedback, to call centre notes.
“Most text analytic tools are limited to sentiment and keyword analytics whereas we partnered with Warwick Analytics to provide a model specific to supermarket retail which can focus on concepts, intent and detailed feedback analysis.”
