Siri had me hooked when I said “smiley face” in an email I dictated to her and she translated it as an emoticon.  :-) I had resisted smart phones for the longest time. Finally, when my daughter started to call my traditional phone an “old man phone,” I knew it was time to take the plunge. I’d never liked Apple products in the past … perhaps they were too “intuitive” for my brain. But when I was at the Verizon store (yes, [...]

The positioning for Philz Coffee is all about hand-made, gourmet, and custom. The Philz site says, “If you are serious about coffee, we recommend you immediately fly down to Philz Coffee and try a cup of one of the 20 handmade coffees that 
are on the menu or get some Philz coffee shipped over to you. … Ask Phil how many times people have come directly from the airport just to taste his coffee.” OK, but there are only seven [...]

In the past, when you had an important purchase decision to make, you might have asked a friend or two for their opinion. Now, with the advent of social media, you can turn to a quarter million people and get their opinion in the blink of an eye—as long as you have sophisticated tools like NetBase’s to automatically analyze all that chatter so quickly. Here’s a personal example: When I bought my daughter a laptop a few months ago, I [...]

Do you use YouTube videos to promote your product? If so, how do you track what people are saying about them? You could search on the URL of a video, but typically the URL gets shortened when used in a tweet. And it might get shortened a different way for each tweet, so simply searching on the URL doesn’t work. But here’s what does work: Put a unique hashtag in the title of your video—like #BASSMOB in this example. Then, to see what [...]

Starbucks wants to be “a beacon for coffee lovers everywhere,” but they also want to be purveyors of “everything else that goes with a full and rewarding coffeehouse experience.” The question is, Does devoting time and energy to being “so much more than what we brew” take away focus and resources that could instead be spent on providing the best possible coffee? About Starbucks Since 1971, Starbucks Coffee Company, according to its website, has been committed to ethically sourcing and [...]

If you really love Peet’s coffee, you become a Peetnik®, and have “the freshest Peet’s coffee automatically delivered straight from our artisan roastery to your door so you never run out.” The term “artisan roastery” should clue you in to Peet’s positioning—they want to be perceived as the most gourmet coffee out there. Let’s see if consumers agree. BTW, the company has some unique job titles, like Vice President of Coffee and Director of Tea. Many people would like those [...]

This is the first in our series of netnographies on coffee brands, with Starbucks, Peet’s, and Philz Coffee to follow. We’ll have Insights for each brand, but the most complete analysis will come in the form of a summary post on the Ideal Coffee after we’ve looked at all four brands. Dunkin’ Donuts (DD) may not have the cachet of other, more upscale brands, but it offers a wide selection of flavors and blends. Many consumers who’ve done their own [...]

An eye-opening new post by NetBase Chief Evangelist Malcolm De Leo analyzes the correlation between social media sentiment and stock price for Netflix following the company’s controversial decisions about how it would distribute movies and charge customers for its services. Malcolm’s post investigates how Netflix could have used social media listening and understanding tools to avoid the strong negative reaction to the changes—or at least to react more quickly during the crisis and preserve more brand equity and stock value. [...]

According to its news releases, Southwest offers “a reliable product with exemplary customer service.” Consumers agree about the service part, saying the airline’s employees go above and beyond to be friendly and helpful. But the “reliable product” part? Not so much—Southwest comes in for its share of criticism regarding on-time performance. But are the delays their fault? More on that in the Insights section. On a personal note, I got a rude awakening the other day regarding Southwest’s frequent flyer [...]

How cute is too cute? That’s the question for the Hello Kitty brand. The target audience is “pre-adolescent females,” and they think that Kitty, the female white Japanese bobtail cat with a red bow, is, like, totally adorable. But not everyone who’s paying for the products is so smitten with the kitten. About Sanrio The company behind Hello Kitty is SANRIO, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. Hello Kitty, whose full name is Kitty White, is a fictional [...]