Disney and the Importance of Unstructured User Feedback in the Age of Big Data
Analytics: - the discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data.
Whether you’re looking to optimize your workflow or out-strategize the competition, analytics can add value to almost every business function. As Big Data and analytics tools have matured, organizations are devising new ways to leverage data to increase their competitive advantage and identify new business opportunities. While Enterprise have benefited greatly from Big Data driven quantitative analysis, a huge dimension of insight has been left untouched - unstructured user feedback.
Analytics are the means to a singular purpose: to help Enterprise (better) understand their customer/user. Understanding the user enables product teams to design products & services that appeal to their core base and customers-to-be -- folks who are sitting on the fence or using a competing service. Customer-first organizations that iterate for their user base will build proven winners. Products that don't, quickly find themselves on the wrong side of history. The consequences can be unforgiving.
Nowhere has this paradigm been more visible, as of late, than at Disney.
In recent years, Disney has steadily churned out an unprecedented string of box office gold. As of 2015 alone, Disney served up not one, but two multi-billion dollar movies. Already 2016 is shaping up to be another banner year with The Jungle Book, Zootopia, and Captain America: Civil War. Disney is cranking out movies that are appealing to people and building on them with appealing iterations (Captain America, Avengers: Age of Ultron, and soon-to-come Finding Dory). People are responding in kind, voting with their feet (and wallets).
Yet, in a footnote to its second-quarter earnings, the Mouse announced they were pulling the plug on the Disney Infinity franchise and getting out of the video-game business altogether. (Disney Infinity combines onscreen MMOPORG with collectible toys that can be ‘brought to life’ in-game)
It’s no secret the MMO space is worth a pretty penny. Time has proven that with hits from Activision Blizzard (World of WarCraft), SuperCell (Clash of Clans, Boom Beach), and the slew of copycats that have followed since. Where did Disney go wrong?
All that glitters is not gold
To be sure, it is not the lack of material. Disney assets as of late have been blessed by the Midas touch with big hits like Star Wars, Toy Story, and a pantheon of successful Marvel superheroes (backed by highly visible box office gold). Indeed, Disney Infinity helped lift Disney’s interactive unit to its first annual profit of $116 million in 2014. Collectible, highly sought-after and recognizable assets that can ‘come to life’ - what’s there not to love?
Yet, a quick look at the first few pages of user reviews paint a very different picture.
Disney’s CEO, Bob Iger, argued that making and distributing toys and video-game equipment proved costly and the risk of getting stuck with unsold inventory was high.
A Missed Opportunity
Where does the rift come from? Customer feedback enables an organization to see which problems are most visceral and pressing to their user base, but only if you can get to it in time. Feedback encapsulates user sentiment and, like the wick on a bomb, has a time to live (TTL) before users pull the trigger (terminate service). In Disney’s case, people just weren’t buying.
If Disney product and business teams were able to qualify and quantify user feedback and sentiment, they might have been able to identify critical features enhancements (e.g. highly desired usability like localized multiplayer and co-op, offline play) and business strategies (e.g. rethinking embedded pay-walls in the demo) necessary to retain and engage an increasingly disenfranchised user base.
The Devil is in the Details
“Just read the reviews,” you might say. While the solution sounds simple, ask yourself how easy is it to do your job and find time to read, analyze, process, categorize, and distill insight from 1,000 reviews? 10,000?
What if…?
What then might have happened if business teams were running SiteFocus analytics? Well, they might have been able to systematically get the big picture without losing sight of the details. Business teams might have parsed user feedback into real-time streaming trends and easily juxtaposed user sentiment against quantitative data points they already had access to (e.g. purchases, activations, in-game engagement metrics). By adding the user’s voice back into the equation, they might have been able to more quickly isolate, identify, and qualify obstacles to adoption before they got out of hand. This in turn would have enabled business and product teams to focus their energies on solving problematic features while nurturing a potential game-changing revenue channel.
Thinking outside the box and beyond
Looking for validation, business teams could have pointed the SiteFocus engine outwards - processing thousands of public domain content (PDC) such as user reviews and forums from competing products by Lego and Activision. Using SiteFocus, business users could have processed this unstructured data into sentiment trends of the competition’s user base. This real-time market intelligence could’ve had implications for product (What’s working? What’s not?) and sales (prospective defectors lying in wait) teams.
In 2005, Google Analytics was launched. It had a profound change on the way people consume and produce content on the Internet. Using quantitative data, Google Analytics made it possible for website publishers to easily understand their user base, divining insight from traffic patterns and interaction metrics.
With technology finally reaching maturity, analytics engines like SiteFocus are finally here to help change the way people build for and service their customers.
