An Advanced Analytics Guide to Halloween 2020

Among the analytic apps featured in the Skai platform are the Market Overviews, which provide a holistic ecosystem view of trends, category interactions, macro drivers and brand positioning. The models found within are important as the lines blur between different categories and consumers look for products across the board that align with their lifestyles and needs. The analytics reveal new opportunities for brands, offering inspiration from across the ecosystem and create unique and disruptive innovations that are well-positioned for success.

The Food Market Overview in particular, leverages a highly detailed and curated taxonomy, spanning multiple product attributes – Solution Type, Benefit, Feature, Ingredient, Texture, Nutrient, Flavor, Taste – and hundreds of parameters across 21 food categories. The data analyzed includes more than 800,000 products, nearly 100 million consumer discussions, 700,000 key opinion leader posts, five million product reviews and 200,000 patent filings, important for cross-category and macro trend analyses like Halloween that can affect multiple cross-sections of the industry.

What do advanced analytics say about Halloween 2020 and why does it matter?

A recent Food Dive article warns that the pandemic is putting candy makers on the defensive to protect their $5B in sales, forcing them to alter their strategies on packaging, marketing and sales in order to respond to changing consumer needs. Past recessions have resulted in candy booms and candy makers are still expecting to do well this time around, but with Coronavirus spiking all around, it is important for brands to read consumer sentiments properly and act accordingly.

With advanced analytics that connect more than 13,000 data sources and an AI-driven NLP engine that delivers more than 90% accuracy, Skai enables brands to extract very specific and relevant insights that can guide their decisions for this Halloween, into the holiday season and beyond.

Here are 3 key findings from our platform and what action enterprises can take as a result:

1. From a retailer’s perspective, consumers are engaging more via product reviews as opposed to social discussions, but there are significant variations across channels. These insights help determine the relevance for specific products at each retailer and uncover new marketing and conversion optimization opportunities for ads at higher funnel touch points like social media, search engines and content publishers. By digging deeper into the conversations with highly contextualized analytic engines, it is then easier to evaluate customer preferences and needs and identify high-value customers.
2. Chocolate and candy are not the only categories associated with Halloween, and in fact the second highest category generating consumer discussion is dairy, behind only sweet and savory snacks and ahead of chocolate and sugar and gum confectionery. Analyzing this phenomenon further may reveal new areas for innovation, reformulating existing products or optimizing marketing messages.
3. Analyzing trend associations across all the different product attributes, yields very clear consumer preferences for the perfect Halloween product. As shown in the screen below, the main priorities for consumers are chewy, affordability, chocolate, bite-size and individually-packaged, while staying away from sticky and chalky textures and bland and stale tastes. (The thickness of the lines in the chart below represent the strength of the association, while the color represents a positive or negative sentiment. It is possible to filter for specific categories; the below image covers the entire ecosystem.) This level of market intelligence can be used to optimize keywords and advertising search terms in marketing campaigns, prioritize product development, adjust product formulations and determine white space opportunities.The findings above came from entering the keyword “Halloween” into the Explore feature within the Food Market Overview. Any search term may be entered to reveal other insights and answers to specific business questions.

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*This blog post originally appeared on Signals-Analytics.com. Skai acquired Signals-Analytics in December 2020. Read the press release.