Kantar is one of the largest and most well-regarded global research firms today. They focus on finding data-driven insights and helping their clients around the world drive business impact from those insights. Recently, they have partnered with Visible to showcase trends that are unfolding in business, politics and even pop culture and dissect those trends in real time. The result is the Kantar US Pulse, powered by Visible, the first demonstration of Visible’s capabilities to be made public and leveraged as a newsmaking resource.
Kantar debuted the streaming data regarding the much-hyped launch of Moto X, the first smartphone launched by Motorola since the company was acquired by Google. The iPhone challenge had lots of buzz heading into launch, so what did Kantar’s US Pulse pick up on Moto X? Answer: Not much buzz. A general spike at the time of launch and then quick fadeaway. What Kantar picked up from the data that was more interesting was nearly equal buzz for Moto X in conjunction with motocross racing, which had a significant event the same week as the smartphone launch. And even in an uneventful week for Apple’s iPhone, there was more organic traffic and positive mentions about that product than Moto X at the time of its launch. Kantar picked up on these trends and quickly published out to the market.
Starting this week, Kantar switched gears to a hot political and policy issue: Obamacare. They want to understand how conversation sentiment and volume are trending before open enrollment in health insurance via the President’s healthcare law officially begins this fall. The findings? The White House has a lot of catching up to do now, with increasing volume of posts on this topic during the last month and an almost consistent 8:1 ratio of negative to positive posts. As Kantar US Insights editor Elizabeth Wilner notes, the most used terms in Obamacare-related tweets are critical or negative, including “repeal” and “defund” and associated hashtags such as #teaparty and #tcot (top conservatives on Twitter). For more insights >>
Kantar plans to frequently update topics and use social intelligence to dig deeper into existing chatter on today’s pressing political and business issues. We know that we at Visible will be following their insights and analysis of the market and suggest that you do so, as well!
