MutualMind - Back to school

MindMeld - Back To School
#ListenSmarter
August 2014

Headline Here
Sub-headline, date, event or other details can go here
Topics on the Table
1. Study Overview
2. Retailer Breakdown
3. Product Breakdown
4. MutualMind Command Center
All Content ©2014 MutualMind • www.mutualmind.com • #listensmarter 2

Back to School
Study
Overview

Study Overview
Executive Summary
• The date range of this study is August 1st
through August 25th. During that time
there were a total of 32,822 mentions of
one of the retailers and the phrase “back
to school”.
• The majority of the conversations had a
positive sentiment. Marketers can take
advantage of the excitement of Back to
School shopping to boost sales and
profits.
• Moms of elementary school children
most often disclosed the grade her kids
were going into. These were found most
regularly in blogs.
• Twitter made up the majority of content.
Because of Twitter’s ease of use, many
consumers choose to make posts while
out and about from their mobile devices.
The command center views highlight such
real-time posts that marketers need to
pay attention to.

Study Overview
Executive Summary
• Students created videos and uploaded to
YouTube to show off the purchases they made.
You no longer have to wait for the first week of
school to show off all of your new outfits, and
you have the potential of sharing with a much
larger number of people. Youth today play an
incredible role as online influencers for their
favorite brands.
• Target is winning the social sphere for Back to
School by creating discussion-worthy shopping
experiences and content. Amazon, while arguably
an even better experience for a time-starved
mom isn’t getting NEAR the passion and fervor.
• Back to School excitement isn’t about the stuff on
the school supply list – that’s “have to have,” and
doesn’t ignite emotion. Apparel is where retailers
should focus their growth efforts, as customers
are more willing to discuss (and potentially buy)
these wares.

Study Overview
Introduction and Scope
• Back to school often has a bit of nostalgia associated with it. Adults (and some older
students) remember shopping for crayons and new spirals fondly. Before embarking on
a new school year, students, parents and teachers hit the sales for school supplies and
new attire. Marketers have taken this opportunity to capitalize on consumers who will
be shopping during this time.
• This year, MutualMind decided to do a study to determine the who, what and where of
back to school shopping. Using keyword based listening and manual tagging of
content, we were able to understand who’s talking about back to school shopping,
what they’re talking about purchasing and where they’re going.
• To achieve our social listening objectives, we setup advanced keywords that would
collect any mention across all the major social networking and news sites that
mentioned “Back to School” AND one of the following retailers:
• Walmart
• Target
• Kohl’s
• JC Penney
• Kmart
• Amazon

Study Overview
• For each retailer, we set up a keyword with several variations of their name based on
previous research on how people refer to the brand. For example, we would include
hashtags, Twitter handles and common spellings-
• (walmart OR #walmart OR @walmart OR “wal-mart” OR “wal mart”)
• Further, we would make each keyword more advanced by using an “and” Boolean
search clause. This will ensure that the only data collected included mentions of “back
to school” or its common variants as well as one of the aforementioned retailers-
• (“back to school” OR backtoschool OR #backtoschool)
• While this setup has the potential of missing some relevant posts, the design was to
aid in collecting less but highly relevant content.
• Once content was collected, we studied each post and tagged it with an appropriate
tag. Custom tags were created to organize content by the grade the student was going
into (or teacher taught), and whether the author of the post was a mom, dad, student
or teacher. Posts were only tagged if the content of the post/bio made it possible to
tag with accuracy.
Study Design

Study Overview
Keywords Setup Custom Content Tags

Study Overview
36,000 Foot View
Below you’ll see the high level insights of
the entire campaign.
• The study was conducted for August 1st
through August 25th. During this time,
there was a total of 32,822 mentions. On
Monday August 11th, there were 1,801
mentions- the peak of the 25 day study.
Saturday August 16th saw the least
number of mentions with 721.
• The majority of the content came from
Twitter (79 percent) but blogs made up a
large percentage of the source makeup as
well (9 percent). Much of the blog
content analyzed came from mothers
writing about their children’s first day of
school and their back to school shopping
experience. Facebook was the third most
popular source (5 percent), followed by
news, Tumblr and YouTube.

Study Overview
Total Sentiment Total Mentions by
Retailer
Walmart
30%
Target
32%
Kohl’s
14%
Amazon
14%
JC Penney
4%
Kmart
6%

Study Overview
Sample Content

Back to School
Retailer
Breakdown

Retailer Breakdown
Target
• It may come as a surprise to some that Target
actually exceeded Walmart by holding two
percent more of the conversations on back to
school shopping. Target carries trendy
clothing for all ages as well as school supplies
and after school snacks.
• There were 100 tagged pieces of content
where Target was also mentioned.
• 16% negative
• 78% positive
• The average Klout score of this group was 34
with a reach of 38,816.

Retailer Breakdown
Walmart
• More teachers talk about shopping at
Walmart during ‘Back to School’ than Target.
• The tags for moms, kindergarten and first
grade were all still first second and third by
volume, but the quanities were less than
those for Target.
where Walmart was also mentioned.
• 17% negative
• 76% positive

Retailer Breakdown
Amazon
• The kindergarten and teacher tags were both
higher on the Tags by Volume for Amazon
than they were for Target and Walmart.
• When going through the content, we
discovered that a lot those talking about
shopping on Amazon during ‘Back to School’
were talking about purchasing books.
where Amazon was also mentioned.
• 20% negative
• 80% positive

Retailer Breakdown
Kohl’s
• Moms and students talked about shopping at
Kohl’s during ‘Back to School’ more than
teachers. This is probably because the
students and their mothers are more likely to
need to shop for apparel than a teacher
would.
• There were 9 tagged pieces of content where
Kohl’s was also mentioned.
• 11% negative
• 56% positive
with a reach of 386.

Retailer Breakdown
JC Penney
• Moms are still ranked as the number one tag
by volume for JC Penney.
• There were 8 tagged pieces of content where
JC Penney was mentioned.
• 0% negative
• 100% positive
with a reach of 32,066.
• An influencer known as
@OurOrdinaryLife tweeted several
times about her shopping trip with her
daughter. She tweeted positively about
the experience with her kindergartener.

Back to School
Product
Breakdown

Product Breakdown
• As for the ‘what’ people are shopping for- we did a search using our robust post
collection filters of some of the items we thought would be the most popular. Here is
the breakdown for the following items-

Product Breakdown
To understand better what people were shopping for, we did a post collection search
using the following Boolean logic (similar logic was used in the rest of the Product
Breakdown section of this report)-
outfit OR outfits OR #outfit OR #outfits OR shoes OR #shoes OR apparel OR #apparel OR
clothes OR #clothes
Apparel

Product Breakdown
backpack OR #backpack OR backpacks OR #backpacks
Backpacks

Product Breakdown
pen OR #pen OR pencil OR #pencil OR pens OR #pens OR pencils OR #pencils
Pens/Pencils

Product Breakdown
Spiral OR spirals OR #spiral OR #spirals OR "note book" OR notebook OR #notebook OR
"note books" OR notebooks OR #notebooks
Spirals/Notebooks

Product Breakdown
Crayons OR #crayons OR crayon OR #crayon OR markers OR #markers
Crayons/Markers

Product Breakdown
folder OR folders OR #folder OR #folders OR binder OR #binder OR binders OR #binders
Folders/Binders

Back to School
MutualMind
Command
Center
Views

MutualMind Command Center
The MutualMind command center provides visualization for Real-Time
analytics and monitoring

@mutualmind
info@mutualmind.com
214.699.9424
16200 Addison Road, Suite 100
Addison, TX 75001

MutualMind - Back to school

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