How Consumers Express Value

At the start of each year, 4Sight publishes our annual Evergreen Awards to celebrate the best rated and reviewed new product launches.??One theme has often floated to the top of the winners’ reviews is the product or brand’s value, which is clearly linked to better rated and reviewed products, and it also tends to lead to repurchase.??

Positive attributes around value (price, cost, etc.) are expected, but what’s curious is seeing?how?consumers express the value or worth of a product. Rarely in reviews do consumers offer phrases such as “this product is good for its price,” or “I really like the value of this product.”??Instead, review verbatims can hint at what users found valuable in the product user experience, giving brands an insight into how their product is used to address the consumer’s needs.??This context becomes even more important because user-perceived value changes based on the product. For many products, the value is in its functionality compared to price. Other qualities such as durability and quality of materials are seen as value adds by the consumer.?

Over the past three years of doing the Evergreen Awards,?Value-themed positive drivers (those around cost) have not been prevalent in the top 10 positive drivers for the winners.??In fact, only one winner out of thirty expressly had the word?Value?as a top positive driver.???

To understand the real worth consumers get from their products, 4Sight strategists must go beyond specifically value-conscious words. This process begins with the Drivers Analysis.

Any 4Sight reviews analysis begins with our Drivers’ Analysis.??Positive consumer drivers appear in the analysis when they have a high prevalence (how many reviews mention the word or theme) combined with a high star rating (a?proxy for user satisfaction).??Using these two metrics, 4Sight’s proprietary equation produces the driver percentage, a measure of consumer satisfaction.?

Value isn’t determined by price alone but rather by the worth consumers see in the product. When consumers consistently use words such as “lasts,” “quality” or even “durable,” it indicates the value they get from the product. Over the previous three years, consumers noting this in reviews grew consistently. For our 2019 winners, top positive drivers like?Best?and?Fast?emerged.??In 2020, drivers such as?Lasting?and?Staysappeared.??Finally, in 2021, we see drivers such as?Quality,?Durability?and?A lot?(of product).?

Another 2021 winner, Tyson True Meals (Pet Consumer Category) had?Quality?as a top positive driver. User verbatims added the context: owners praise the quality of the pet food because of its healthy ingredients, and the food looks and smells appetizing. Users for the 2020 Cosmetics Winner, ColorStay Satin Ink (Revlon), noted how?Lasting?the lipstick is, which resulted in a positive experience with the product.?

However, drivers alone don’t tell the whole story. To understand the user experience, we need to understand the context in which the drivers are used.??First, we leverage driver word correlations and consumer verbatims to understand the?how?and?why?beyond each driver. Previous Evergreen Award Winners had important driver correlated words such as cost-conscious value words, and words related to product durability, to luxury, and to product amount.??

The 2021 Health Care Winner, LPOW Pulse Oximeter, had?Excellent?as a top driver, rated 4.95/5 stars.?Excellent’s?top correlated word was “Value,”?which provides context that users are very pleased with the value provided by the oximeter. Another top driver was?Happy, which correlates with “Price” and “Purchase”. Using these top correlated words as a guide to looking through verbatims, our Brand Strategy Team extracted the insight that LPOW users are pleased with the oximeter enabling them to monitor certain vitals at home and present the readout on an easily readable display – all rather inexpensively.

Our earlier-discussed 2020 OTC Category Winner, Advil Liquid Gels Mini had the word?Needed?as a top driver, with “Price” as the top correlated word.??The earlier-cited driver?Value?also has interesting word correlations in “Price” and “Relief,” indicating that users were pleased with the gel’s ability to provide a good level of pain relief for their price point.?

The 2021 Skincare Winner, No. 7 Retinol Night Cream, had a top positive driver?Feels, with a word correlation of “Luxurious,”. This suggests the product sold through mass channels could compete with higher-priced night creams in specialty channels. Other products, Redkin’s Acidic Shampoo or CeraVe’s Cream to Foam Cleanser, had word correlations that suggested consumers were pleased with how?much?product they received in their package.??For Redkin, the positive driver?Lot?has word correlations of “Worth” and “Product”.??For CeraVe, the driver?Bottle?had correlations of “Value” and "Giant”.?

Other interesting insights:??Our 2021 Cosmetics winner, Benefit POWmade, had a top driver of?Brush, correlated with words with “Angled” and “Wiper”. A look through their consumer qualitatives shows users pleased with “the right amount of product” because of “how innovative the side is so you can get rid of excess product and use it later” – pointing to the value consumers find in the product! Another beauty winner, Huda Beauty’s eyeshadow palette, has a top positive driver of?Perfect, which correlated with words like “Versatile,” “Glad” and “Purchasing” – again suggesting the value users found in the pallet, this time for the ability to use the palette for many occasions.?

Value has always been important to consumers and always will be.??However, the importance of it is dialed up or down depending on numerous factors, and users write about value differently for each product. This is why it’s critical to use quantitative data along with illustrative qualitative examples to understand the context and extract the?why?behind what users are saying. At 4Sight, this is what we do. We combine machine learning and natural language processing with human derived qualitative analysis, to get the full picture and extract the deep-rooted human insights from ratings and reviews.?