Harnessing Sentiment Analysis: How Do Shoppers Really Feel About Erewhon's Sea Moss Gel?

Purpose of Case Study

When a brand first launches a product, people from their own team are usually the ones to decide how to market it. In other words, it’s the company itself that chooses what product benefits to emphasize to the consumer.

But what if their customers end up disagreeing? What if the benefits and use cases customers are seeing from a product aren't what the brand intended for the value proposition to be? And even worse, what if the customers aren’t seeing the benefits at all?

In that case — changing the way the product is advertised might boost sales, and even pulling the product from their brand entirely might save their reputation.

And the simplest way to figure out what customers truly value or dislike about your product is sentiment analysis.

So we took a pretty controversial product — Erewhon’s $40 Sea Moss Gel — and ran it through our software to see if customers were actually seeing benefits from this fascinating (and very expensive) substance. From our results, we’d be able to see if Erewhon has been advertising the right benefits and if it’s still a product worth putting on the shelf.

Our Analysis

Since Erewhon doesn’t have a large sample size of reviews on their website, we decided to scrape the comments from a viral TikTok video about their Sea Moss product instead. After cleaning up the data, we used our program to categorize comments into “positive” and “negative” to firstly understand what impression consumers had toward the product.

We were left with nearly 500 relevant comments, with the majority of comments being negative, rather than positive. With that said, nearly all of the negative comments revolved around taste, rather than a lack of benefits.

Generally speaking, the most concrete benefits we could identify (excluding health, which is a bit more difficult to measure) included weight loss, skin improvement, and digestion.

On the negative side, we found that the taste and texture were key complaints people had about the sea moss.

Meaningfulness of Results

Currently, some of the most-advertised benefits of sea moss include digestive support, immune system health, and skin health.

And while our results show that several people who have tried Erewhon’s sea moss are seeing improvements in digestion and skin health, an even bigger benefit seems to be that the product helps support those undergoing weight-loss journeys.

However, the proportion of people mentioning any kind of concrete benefit is actually quite small. Even as we were sifting through the comments, we also noticed people mentioning that they routinely eat sea moss to stay “healthy,” but almost no one actually mentioned any specific health outcomes.

Many people also seem to be upset about the actual taste and texture of the product. That right there is great feedback that might lead Erewhon to consider making some improvements to the product’s taste in the future.

To summarize, here are a few suggestions based on our data that Erewhon might find helpful:

1. Advertise the “concrete” benefits that people seem to praise (ex. digestion, skin health, supporting weight loss)
2. Experiment with the taste and texture of the product (ex. selling packaged, sweeter drinks made with sea moss)
3. Gather more feedback from longer-time consumers to understand what other specific, tangible health benefits they have seen over time — and if people are seeing no change, don’t risk your reputation; you can simply take it off your shelf. Better safe than sorry!

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