Probably the best definition of marketing I ever heard (heard it at Mplanet 2006) was that marketing’s job is to drive profitability by unlocking consumer insight. Thus, perhaps the search for the new holy grail is where can we find newer, more accurate, and the most actionable consumer insight. Perhaps text analysis should be a new part of your marketing research toolkit. My guest today was Cindy Mobley, product development manager for Maritz Research and she’s helped uncover and discover what text analysis is and does.

For marketing researchers, you may already have heard about text analysis. It's history found its roots in national security, but today's businesses are using it as a way to glean richer meaning from customer surveys or other customer input channels. For marketers who haven’t heard about text analysis, this may be a tool you’ll want to consider if you’re at all interested in getting a clearer read into the intentions and feelings of your customers – and I am guessing even your prospects.

Cindy mentioned that she heard a statistic that 85% of all information in the world today is in text form. The ability to analyze this text for meaning and actionable data points is huge. Subjectivity, for the most part, is removed...and since this is a technology-based solution, we get a much faster outcome.