Data-driven ranking and visualization of products by competitiveness

Abstract

Competitive analysis is a critical part of any business. Product managers, sellers, and marketers spend time and resources scouring through a huge volume of online and offline content, aiming to discover what their competitors are doing in the marketplace and to understand what type of threat they pose to their business' financial well-being. Currently, this process is slow, costly and labor-intensive. We demonstrate Clarity, a data-driven unsupervised system for assessment of products, which is currently in deployment at IBM. Clarity has been running for more than a year and is used by over 1,500 people to perform over 160 competitive analyses involving over 800 products. The system considers multiple factors from a collection of online content: numeric ratings by users, sentiment towards key product drivers, content volume, and recency of content. The results and explanations of factors leading to the results are visualized in an interactive dashboard that allows users to track the performance of their products as well as understand the main contributing factors. main contributing factors.