Data analytics Driving in automatic Liam Kay H umans are experts at deciphering language and picking up the nuances in speech, and the meaning behind words. In the ever demanding world of brand tracking, can rigour and analysis be retained in research while increasing speed and reducing cost? A partnership between research agency MM Eye and Jaguar Land Rover aimed to explore whether an artificial intelligence (AI) system could help uncover customer sentiment in answers to open-ended questions and save the brand time and money. The project started in 2017 and was intended to help Jaguars brand health survey, examining customer views and feelings towards the company. Specifically, its goal was to explore whether longform, verbatim responses to questions posed by the survey could be analysed by AI instead of human coders without losing the necessary level of detail and quality. MM Eye has worked with Jaguar since 2010, and was involved with its brand health survey before the AI project. The survey has typically used stream-ofconsciousness interviewing techniques to analyse consumers emotional engagement with the brand. The questions are open-ended, so are more likely to elicit a better understanding of peoples emotional connection with particular car brands. Its like taking a look inside the consumers head and getting a much clearer picture of how they see the world, explains Claire Catmull, head of continuous research at MM Eye. This approach is simple to conduct, but rich in outcome. The brand health survey works by turning answers to the survey questions into data, using a forensic coding system that identifies and categorises words, descriptive attributes, and recounted experiences with the brand. A single paragraph can provide numerous pieces of data, which are then also analysed for their emotional sentiment whether they are said in a negative, positive or neutral way. This generates thousands of pieces of data, and the previous approach of using human coders to analyse the information collected took, on average, 53 weeks. In 2017, MM Eye proposed changing the 56 Impact ISSUE 33 2021_pp56-57 Data.indd 56 26/03/2021 10:17