Automated text analysis: The next frontier of marketing innovation

Researchers from University of Pennsylvania, Northwestern University, University of Maryland, Columbia University, and Emory University published a new article in the Journal of Marketing that provides an overview of automated textual analysis and describes how it can be harnessed to generate marketing insights. The study, forthcoming in the January issue of the Journal of Marketing, is titled "Uniting the Tribes: Using Text for Marketing Insights" and authored by Jonah Berger, Ashlee Humphreys, Wendy Moe, Oded Netzer, and David Schweidel. Online reviews, customer service calls, press releases, news articles, marketing communications, and other interactions create a wealth of textual data companies can analyze to optimize services and develop new products. By some estimates, 80-95% of all business data is unstructured, with most of that being text. This text has the potential to provide critical insights about its producers, including individuals' identities, their relationships, their goals, and how they display key attitudes and behaviors.