In this ESOMAR 2017 award-winning presentation, Preriit Souda, Data Science Director of Kantar TNS UK and I, we will demonstrate that chairs can talk by combining data mining techniques and artificial intelligence in an innovative way to understand brand interest in the design brand Arper and its key competitors on digital platforms.

2. Arper is an award-winning Italian design company that creates chairs, tables and
furnishings for community, work and home. We use design to improve relationships
between people and spaces.
Who is Arper?

3. CITY HALL
Amsterdam/
The Netherlands
INFOPACT
Rotterdam/
The Netherlands
With eleven international
showrooms and a world-wide
network of subsidiaries and
branches, Arper collections are
distributed in 90+ countries.
Today Arper has a turnover of
€71.8 million and employs
approximately 250 employees.
“Arper has always been about
relationships: we frame
everything in terms of human
values.”
Who is Arper?

4. In a world where consumers communicate
through more channels than ever before,
marketing professionals face the challenge to
accurately describe brands’ share of voice
and share of people’s discussions.
The challenge

5. With this awareness, at Arper
we wanted to complement our five year
strategic plan with
an insightful understanding of the
amount of interest in the brand through
digital media in key markets.
The final goal was to understand the
evolving market in order to improve our
future communication plans.
The challenge

6. The challenge
We involved Kantar TNS
to analyse the current
levels of interest in the
brand on digital platforms
compared to key
competitors in the USA,
Germany and Sweden.
The analysis considered
only conversations in
English.

7. Preparation
Understand market, brand, competition
 to help ourselves teach computers.
• Desk Research of Industry.
• Qualitative Interviews.
• Marketing Collaterals of Arper and
competition.

8. Created linguistic libraries of:
• Influencers
• Common design aspects
• Furniture delighters, painpoints,
hygienics etc.
• Media portals
• Brands and their collections
Total of 70,000 terms, phrases and
patterns
were added to the linguistic database.
Preparation for
text mining

9. 500+ linguistic rules (created using NLP and ML).
Which.
Using combinatorics expand to 10K + rules.
These rules are able to decipher not only sentence
level sentiment but also entity level sentiment.
About
products
and
collections
Opinion
Brand
imagery
Preparation for text mining: opinion

10. value=($mTopic|$mOpinion) $mPrep $mDetermin
($mTopic|$mOpinion) $mBe $mOpinion
output(1)=$1 $4t#1t$6t#6
Sample rule

11. Used search data to crawl
and extract news, media
articles, forum, forum
threads about Arper, its
collection, competition and
general category level data.
Data extraction (text based)
Extract data about Arper, its
collection, competition and
general category level data.
From
• Twitter (GNIP 100%
firehose)
• Facebook API (brand
pages, media pages etc.):
data + meta data
• YouTube (brand channels,
media channels)
Internal website search
crawling to extract articles,
forums, threads, comments
about Arper, its collection,
competition and general
category level data.

12. Was able to show:
• Strength and weakness of each
brand, collection and others
• Functional, emotional and creative
attributions
• Opinions
• Impact of influencers
• Country specific nuances
• Influence of marketing
Text mining

13. Problem (missed a large portion of data)

14. Solution
Extracting images from existing data
(using meta data):
• Twitter (GNIP) metadata –
image url
• Facebook
• Webcrawled data
Extracting from known sources
of images:
• Instagram IDs of brands,
media, others
• Pinterest
• Websites and brochures – scraped images
• In total, around 15 GB of images
were extracted

15. Solution
Image tagging
Broad category of tags:
• Types of furniture
• Brand, logos and collections
• Colours used in the image
• Colour distribution
• Type of background,
• Context
• People, etc.

16. Image segmentation
Basis:
• Color similarity
• Context similarity
• Duplication
Solution
Reduced number of
images
from 15,000 to 9,000
images – making it
easier to process.

17. Image crawling:
Tagged images were used as seed images for crawler (offered by rezf/shareiq)
Solution

18. Media
and
forums
Others
Algorithms for
text mining
Image tagging

19. Text minded
analysis
Image analysisImage crawling

20. Analysis: Combining text mining and image analysis
Brand imagery
Brand 2
Brand 3
Brand 5
Brand 4
Brand imagery 1
Brand imagery 2
Brand imagery 4
Brand imagery 3
Sub brand imagery 1
Brand imagery 5
Functional attribution 1
Functional attribution 2
Brand imagery influenced
by geographic connotation
Brand imagery tied to other
non-designer brands
Brand imagery influenced
by geographic connotation
Brand 1Brand 1
Brand 2
Brand 3
Brand 4
Brand 5
Brand imagery 1
Brand imagery 2
Brand imagery 3
Brand imagery 4
Sub brand imagery 1
Brand imagery 5
Functional attribution 1
Functional attribution 2
Brand imagery influenced
by geographic connotation
Brand imagery tied to other
non-designer brands
Brand imagery influenced
by geographic connotation

21. Inter-relations between brands
Analysis
Brand 1
Brand 2
Brand 3
Brand 6
Brand 7
Brand 5

22. Analysis: Overall metrics
1 2 3 4 5
x%
Comparative rank
Combined interest
Tonality
Images only

23. • Arper’s brand sentiment in the category
is positive (over 95%).
• While being Italian, Arper is perceived as
an international brand with creative traits.
• Arper is the second most powerful brand
in the category and is cross-related with
the category leader.
• But the gap between first and second
place is still big.
Strategic insights

24. Strategic insights
How can we close that gap?
• Brands in the category should be more
human to be more successful.
• People talk about a design brand
because of its collections linked to
cultural projects, so cultural
investments can make a difference in
brand perception.
• The leading brand in the category
generates a lot of conversation using
the name and fame of its collaborating
designers.

25. Strategic insights
How can we close that gap?
• Using innovative visual approaches
to showcase digital content is a smart
way to be more relevant.
• Different types of audience are
attracted to different media, so
concerted efforts on multiple
communication channels can boost
conversations around the brand.
• Arper’s core audience is made up of
architects, but this audience can often
derive inspiration from art experts.

26. ADIDAS GROUP
Amsterdam/
The Netherlands
ENECO
Rotterdam/
The Netherlands
Strategic insights
• The results of our research, detailed
benchmarking of all the brands in
the study and our recommendations
were combined into a toolkit to be
used by the brand, marketing teams
and senior management.
• The work was also applied to
Arper’s long-term strategy.
• At operational level, in 2017 we
strengthened our digital investment
and adapted our social media
strategy based on insights from
the study.

27. Analysis in image
influenced industries
Consumption analysis
Societal trends
Wider applications