January ’08 Commentary: Scotch Whisky 100

Headlines:

Another Islay whisky tops Scotch Whisky 100, well done to Lagavulin.

Macallan keeps steady in the top 5 with Laphroaig re-joining at no.2.

Fettercairn makes a surprise top 5 placing.

Further commentary:

Whyte & Mackay brands of The Dalmore and Fettercairn make the top 5. Fettercairn could be seen as a surprise brand inclusion. Last month it was Tobermory inclusion in the top 5 that produced a few comments which we thank you for. With Tobermory it was not mentioned that many times in blogs but when it did, it scored high. Fettercairn is different, it is scoring real high on number of mentions and when it is mentioned in context, it score really well too. Be interesting to know why the online community has sparked such interest?

The volatility of movement in the top 30 is less marked than Decembers index. We still have new entries with Highland Park and Speyside Distillers. These two brands present a challenge: both the words, Highland and Speyside are used in a much wider context than a bottle of whisky, i.e. regions of Scotland or referring to the Scottish mountains etc. For the Scotch Whisky 100 we want to score these two brands words on their whisky context and this month we have included them as we apply a new scoring technique to our service.

Positive Scoring of a brand:

We score brands on the frequency they appear online and score them on the context they appear. The scoring is based upon these following words coming up in context of a whisky brand:

malt
single
skye
speyside
whiskey
whisky
blend

dram
favorite
favourite
good
great
highland
islay
like
happy
positive
scotch

These words are: words to name whisky, whisky regions and positive words to do with the whisky experience.

We are building a more sophisticated scoring model, if you have ideas on that please get in touch. Also, remember the Scotch Whisky 100 is deigned to give an industry wide, consistent view of whisky conversations. The scoring words can be personalized for each brand, we have done that and for that service we offer a paying service.

Listening to individuals, the new market research

Traditional market research asks questions of individuals. We get stopped on the street, the telephone rings and a delivery of post/mail at your door will know doubt include a survey. But what topic is the survey on? It’s not going to be of our choosing, and the questions asked on the survey are asked to serve the needs of the business issuing the survey. We may have some feedback we would like to express, if that random topic that crosses our path is of interest but this current market research medium fails to allow us to express our thoughts.

Online market research has started by enabling those surveys to be popped up, to our surprise at best or usually annoyance. The placing of the surveys and questions may be more in context, so we could call that progress. However, market researching online can be done in a different way: listening to individuals.

Large numbers of us individuals are using a range of authoring tools to express our thoughts, feedback, view, opinions: blogging, socialnetworks, pictures, tagging etc. All this information will relate to people, services, products, business and organisations. We author this information free, no questions ask of us, the topic chosen by us and the format free to be expressed in text, images, video or voice. Businesses now need the ability to listen and individual the ability to channel there stories to relevant businesses or to find peers (know and unknown) to share with.