The Internet gives market researchers a massive space to mine consumers for opinion of a product. Lucky for inquisitive game companies, if there's one thing that videogamers love more than playing videogames, it's praising or utterly trashing games and consoles on Internet message boards. By reading through a few forum threads, you can get the general feel for product sentiment albeit in a small pocket of the Internet.
"In the videogame space, we find that gamers are fairly enthusiastic when they like a product," says Alan Dean, BrandIntel VP of business innovation.
But if you didn't notice, the Internet is a big place, and there are lots of people using it to comment on blogs and message boards.
That's where BrandIntel comes in. The Toronto-based company released its "Top Video Game Console Report: Consumer Insight Monitor," which claims that sentiment and purchase intent for the Nintendo Wii tops that of Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
BrandIntel's scale rates purchase intent on a five-point scale. The Wii ranks in at over 3.5, the Xbox 360 just under 3.5 and PS3 intent is just above the 3.0 neutral mark. We'll get to those scores in a moment.
Dean explains further how gamers are often ready to love or hate a videogame product; praising it to high heaven or mercilessly crucifying it. "If gamers like something, scores tend to be very high, over 4.0 in the games space… If [gamers] don't like it, we tend to see scores that are around 1.0… this is fairly consistent over time," says Dean.
Data taggers and emotional payloads
So how does BrandIntel aggregate Internet opinion about a videogame console? The firm monitors "Google-esque" amounts of search results across the Internet for consumer discussion forums using proprietary technology. Comments about a product need to have some kind of "emotional payload" to be considered, according to Dean. In order for a comment to be included in the final data, consumers can't merely mention a console, but must attach some kind of sentiment. BrandIntel utilizes language processing that looks for clues that indicate that sentiment.
Once the technology gathers enough relevant data, a human workforce that Dean calls the "data taggers" actually reads through all of the comments that the technology identified. Then those web conversations are deconstructed and assigned codes that define the topic of console-related conversation: the feature set, graphics, gameplay, library, etc.
"In the videogame console report, we started out with 437,000 hits and through technology we sifted out the duplicates and the other stuff and we wind up with 106,000 web pages of interest," Dean says. This was then whittled down to 2,000 consumer mentions related to next-gen consoles.
This sentiment is then quantified on the five-point scale. "The middle of the scale is three, which is neutral, where somebody doesn't say whether something is good or bad. If somebody just says 'well, I just saw a new ad for the Wii, and I understand that it already comes with a controller,' That'd be tagged as neutral."
The rules for quantifying sentiment seem fairly simple. An unqualified positive comment (merely "good") is a 4/5 on the scale. However, comments like "extraordinary," "excellent" and "this is the best console ever created" are all rated at a five, for example. Same goes for the negative end of the scale.
"It's testing at times, but we don't try and make the scale more than it is. It's simply a rough and ready kind of guide." Regardless, he claims the method is consistent.
Dean adds, "These numbers aren't likely to change dramatically in say, the next two weeks" barring surprise developments such as, for example, a major PS3 price cut tomorrow or if Wiis begin exploding.
"Then all bets are off," he says.
Are the results accurate? or The Wii as a McDonald's burger
But is measuring purchase intent via Internet message boards really a good way of accurately testing the market waters? Anyone who frequents message boards knows that many are infested with fanboys whose opinions don't necessarily reflect the overall market.