The Selfie, Data Mine for Business

2014 was the year of self-portraits, the so-called Selfie, with hundreds of millions of Selfies snapped and posted on social networks each day. While so far companies have analyzed the text of the post on Facebook or tweet, the explosion of Selfie opens new scenarios on how to study consumer behavior. Not surprisingly, Google, Yahoo, Twitter and Pinterest have bought companies engaged in the development of technologies that can recognize and analyze images. But what benefits can be obtained from the analysis of Selfies? We try to provide four examples.

First, Selfies allow companies to understand in which situations consumers use their products. Traditionally, such data were collected through ethnographic research that requires an entire workgroup to spend weeks (sometimes months) taking photos and shooting video of their customers. With Selfies, these data are supplied directly, albeit unintentionally, by consumers themselves, allowing huge savings in terms of cost and time. For example, Ditto Labs, a company specializing in the analysis of images, found that many people post photos of themselves while eating yogurt in their car. This information is currently used by Chobani, a US brand, to develop packaging specifications for the consumption of yogurt in the car.

Second, the Selfie allows you to discover what your customers' tastes are and what other products they also use. For example, by analyzing Selfies, Adidas has discovered that 13% of its customers are also fans of Justin Bieber, Heineken that Metallica fans prefer their beer, while fans of Beyonce are great drinkers of Smirnoff Ice. On the basis of the context depicted in Selfies posted on Instagram and Tumbrl, Ditto Labs is able to divide the consumers into different categories such as, for example, "sports" or "food lovers". It is easy to see how this information can be used to develop new partnerships or advertising campaigns for a precise target consumer.

You can then monitor the popularity of your products and those of competitors. Companies like Ditto Labs Inc. or Piqora weekly draw up a ranking of the most popular brands in Selfies, divided into categories of products. Think about the usefulness of such information for marketing directors: in this way, the competition's most successful products can be identified in real time, without having to wait for the sales data, and the necessary countermoves can be prepared.

Finally, Selfies permit the identification of so-called "evangelical consumers", ie those consumers who are so tied to a brand that they are willing to do anything to promote it in their network. The identification of these consumers has always been one of the most difficult tasks for businesses: while recognizing its absolute importance, 48% of marketing directors admits to not being able to do so. Although at the moment no company provides such a service, you can measure the level of identification of a consumer with a certain brand by analyzing how many times the brand in question appears in consumer Selfies, or the predominance of the brand in them.

At a time when image is everything, businesses have access to new tools for understanding consumers. If it is true that a picture is worth a thousand words, a Selfie could be worth more than a thousand hours of market research.