Using Social Sentiment to Drive Supply Chain Planning

The effects of social media on business has led to an emerging practice of measuring the emotions behind social media mentions.

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The food and beverage industry is under extreme pressure to reduce costs, improve customer service and drive incremental revenue. To stay ahead of changing consumer tastes, capture new market share and grow revenue, food and beverage companies find they must introduce new products at a faster rate than ever before. More products distributed through more channels may improve customer satisfaction and increase revenue while also creating unintended consequences such as lower forecast accuracy, higher total inventory, increased distressed inventorand lower in-stock availability.

New product introductions often have limited demand histories to base future projections and can display both erratic and localized demand patterns. In today’s connected and always-on world, the impact of a social post can quickly and significantly impact the demand for a new product. Celebrities, for example, often serve as arbiters of taste, style and public opinion. A positive tweet from one can send demand soaring, while a negative post can quickly drive a product out of the market.

The effects of social media on business has led to an emerging practice of measuring the emotions behind social media mentionssocial sentiment. Social sentiment measures the tone of the message and assigns a value or score to it based on several factors such as: is the comment very positive, positive, neutral, negative or very negative? Without sentiment, data can be misleading. Just because you receive a high volume of mentions following the launch of a new product does not necessarily mean the new product has been well-received.

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