When considering or conducting market research, you may encounter the terms “opinion” and “sentiment”. These terms are similar, and represent similar metrics, but they should not be confused, as they are distinct and measure different things.
What is opinion?
In the context of market research, you may seek consumer opinions and conduct opinion analysis to understand how a brand is perceived. Here, opinion often refers to a judgement the consumer is making about the brand.
Opinion examples
In market research, opinion may look like “not as good as I expected,” “dessert was delicious,” “very affordable,” or “I would like it if it was blue and not red.” If you conduct market opinion research, it is important that you take note of which opinions provide actionable insight, and which don’t.
Opinion analysis
Opinion data is qualitative data, and as such, cannot be represented by quantitative methods like graphs and charts. Because of this, it can be harder to summarise, process, and present. Due to this complication, it may be set aside in favour of sentiment analysis.
What is sentiment?
Where opinions may be nuanced and complicated, sentiment is a lot more simple and straightforward. People tend to have positive, neutral, and negative sentiments about various products and services, and in market research, we can use those sentiments to understand how an audience feels, in general, about a brand.
Sentiment examples
Market research sentiment is simpler than opinion. You can gather sentiment information by asking questions like “how would you rate this product or service on a scale of 1–10?” Where 10 is a positive sentiment and 1 is a negative sentiment.
You might also gather sentiment from opinion data. Taking opinions like the above and simplifying them into sentiment.
“Not as good as I expected”—negative sentiment. “Dessert was delicious”—positive sentiment. “Very affordable”—positive sentiment. “I would like it if it was blue and not red”—negative sentiment.
The danger in simplifying opinions into sentiment is that doing so loses the nuance of the opinion, and you may not discount instances that should be discounted, such as a preference for blue over red.
Sentiment analysis
The benefit of sentiment being a simpler metric than opinion is that you can easily analyse and quantify the data. If your results come back with 55% of responses showing positive sentiment, 30% showing negative sentiment, and 15% neutral sentiment, you can easily visualise this in a graph, such as a pie chart.
With data visualisation, you can get the whole picture of how a brand is perceived in an instant and start to build a business strategy in response.
Ready to work with a team of experts to conduct market research and gather opinion or sentiment intelligence? Book a free consultation with the Agile team today.
