Merging Social Listening and Generative AI for consumer insight

It goes without saying that those who succeed in marketing are the ones who listen to consumers. Marketing and insights professionals have access to millions of online mentions, as consumers and citizens are more and more publicly talking about, or showing affinity with brands, products and categories through social networks, blogs, fora, reviews, search data….

Social listening, in this context, goes beyond mere tracking of likes, shares, and comments. It dives into the sentiment, the context, and the subtleties of consumer conversations that occur online. Ipsos Synthesio enables businesses to track, analyze, and understand social media conversations in real-time, providing valuable insights into consumer behavior, brand reputation, and market trends, thereby helping businesses make more informed decisions and develop effective strategies. This ability to tap into the unfiltered voice of the consumer, spot upcoming trends, and to draw insights that can nurture innovative marketing strategies is truly empowering and has been a gamechanger for many businesses.

However, the enormity of social media conversations can at the same time -to say the least- be overwhelming. Since the early days, this magnitude of data has been the biggest barrier to use social listening as a source of consumer insight. Indeed, a lot of companies use social listening tools merely to manage reputation (responding to negative feedback or prompts from customers), or at best to track volume of conversations based on advertising campaigns (to get some sort of idea about ‘buzz’ around the campaign).

Enter Generative Artificial Intelligence. Generative AI can sift through a sea of social media conversations and provide actionable insights from the angle that fits your specific research need at any given moment. At Ipsos too, we have fully embraced the potential of Generative AI. Through vigorous experimentation and research-on-research, we are continuously optimizing workstreams and developing tools for analysis based on our industry leading platform Synthesio and our 50 years of research expertise.

Thanks to Generative AI we now can truly say that using social & search data for consumer insight is finally easily and readily available to all users.

Ipsos Synthesio developed ‘Signals GenAI’, a state-of-the-art market research solution merging social listening technology with the full power of generative AI. Signals GenAI empowers marketeers and researchers to transform real-time consumer signals into actionable insights within just 60 seconds!

Signals GenAI is fueled by Ipsos’ proprietary frameworks, including the Censydiam (motivational) framework, Ipsos Global Trends framework, and other Ipsos global expertise on ESG, Behavioral Science and Cultural Intelligence.

An exhaustive library of guided insights prompts allows to generate a broad spectrum of insights on any business question you might have regarding your product, brand, or category. Furthermore, by linking these generated insights back to the original online consumer mentions, Signals GenAI ensures that the consumer's voice always stays at the core of your marketing strategies.

Now Signals GenAI is more than just putting a generative AI prompt shell around the social data. We go by the principles of ‘Truth, Beauty, and Justice’ to assess the validity of AI outputs. We ask ourselves: 1) if what we have produced is accurate (truth), 2) if we truly understand how the results have been generated (beauty), and 3) whether we are acting ethically when we produce our outputs (justice). These principles reveal two major potential pitfalls when it comes to using generative AI for consumer intelligence.  First, human judgment is still needed to query AI, train models and apply outputs. The quality of AI outputs relies heavily on the quality of the input prompts.  Second, GenAI tools often lack a mechanism to track the generated insights back to the original data, leading to a risk of disconnecting with the actual consumer. In the case of Synthesio Signals GenAI we have applied these principles to safeguard the output for our customers. And so should everybody using generative AI.  

If you want to discover how Signals GenAI can transform your strategies, or to receive a free demo, please reach out to Clement.Degrave@ipsos.com.

Follow Ipsos Belgium on LinkedIn to stay up to date about evolutions in market research and consumer intelligence.