Business Breakdowns
Business Breakdowns
Sep 8, 2025
•
3 min read
Listening to Customers: How Sentiment Analysis Can Refine H&M's Customer Experience
When competing in the same industry as Shein and Temu, a brand like H&M must do one of two things to survive: 1) match these competitors’ prices (which is near impossible) or 2) justify higher prices. And in order to justify higher prices, H&M has had to do a lot more than simply improve the quality of their clothing. For them, it’s all about customer experience. And while H&M’s customer experience initiatives have been receiving tons of hype from investors and shareholders, there’s a bit of disconnect between the opinions of customers and investors.
Business Breakdowns
Sep 8, 2025
•
3 min read
Pins That Predict: A Look at Pinterest's Content Recommendation Engine
Whether you still use Pinterest or no longer do, I think we can all agree that their content recommendations are absolutely spot on. But how does their algorithm work, and why is it even important in the first place? Pinterest’s mission as a company has always been to deliver the right content to the right people — meaning that a strong content recommendation system is essential to the success of their brand. But this is not to say that content recommendation models aren’t useful for B2C companies selling services or tangible products either. In fact, it’s just as important.
Business Breakdowns
Sep 8, 2025
•
3 min read
Beyond the Paycheck: How Staples Can Transform Employee Satisfaction Using Sentiment Analysis
Research has found that happier employees are more than 20% more productive in the workplace. And this is especially important for companies that still rely on in-store employees to deliver high quality customer service. Staples, for example, is one of these companies. This means that a lot of emphasis is (or at least should be) placed on hiring excellent employees to maintain high customer satisfaction. To show you what we mean, let’s use sentiment analysis to find out 1) how happy employees currently are, 2) how to make employees happier, and 3) how to use this information to attract more outstanding employees at Staples.
Business Breakdowns
Sep 8, 2025
•
3 min read
From Noise to Niche: The Magic of Segmentation in Personalizing Your Message
Finding new customers can be infuriatingly difficult, expensive, and time-consuming. While it’s always good to be on the lookout for potential ICP candidates, it’s also crucial to drill down on your current customers. After all, if you fail to cater towards your current customers, you might just lose them.
Business Breakdowns
Sep 8, 2025
•
3 min read
Glassdoor Revelations: What Really Drives Satisfaction in High-Paying Careers
Consulting, finance and tech firms are “people” businesses, getting their value from the talent they hire. These industries fiercely compete (often against each other) for top candidates, with recruitment efforts often starting as early as freshman year of college. The competition has intensified to the point where many firms are offering close to $200k in total compensation for fresh grads. However, in this high-stakes talent war, an important question emerges: can companies attract the best and brightest with more than just hefty paychecks?
Business Breakdowns
Sep 8, 2025
•
3 min read
Turning the Tide: How Outdoor Voices Can Rebuild by Prioritizing Retention and Personalization
Outdoor Voices, a loved outdoor apparel company, recently made the decision to close ALL physical retail stores, all while barreling toward bankruptcy. Unfortunately, their reckless spending decisions caught up to them this year, and a once very successful apparel brand suddenly ran fresh out of cash. So let’s look at how their marketing efforts contributed to this unfortunate turn of events and what they can try to do to make a comeback.
Business Breakdowns
Sep 8, 2025
•
3 min read
Predicting Express's Bankruptcy: The Warning Signs in Their Social Media
A lot of brands fail to understand that social media engagement doesn’t only rely on the quality of the content you’re posting. It more importantly relies on how customers feel about your brand in general. Express recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. But if you had just quickly scrolled through any of their social media pages, this announcement wouldn’t actually be too surprising.
Business Breakdowns
Sep 8, 2025
•
3 min read
What is CX?
Customer experience, CX, is not customer service. Yes, that’s right. Though they seem to imply the same thing, customer service is actually just one part of what customer experience entails.
Business Breakdowns
Sep 8, 2025
•
3 min read
Customer-Centric Marketing: Segmentation vs. Personalization
No matter how intertwined personalization and segmentation are, they are certainly not one and the same. Sure, they both accomplish the same goals — improving customer experience, increasing AOV per customer, strengthening customer loyalty, driving repeated purchases, and etc. BUT differentiating the way they’re used is key to use them together more effectively. One other way to think about it is, segmentation answers the question, “What types of people am I selling to?” and personalization answers the question, “How will I sell to this specific person?” Often, you’ll see through the way these two strategies work together, that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Let’s get into it.
Business Breakdowns
Sep 8, 2025
•
3 min read
What is a good sales conversion rate?
In today’s data-driven landscape, mastering key metrics is vital for any successful business. And out of the countless number of metrics out there, the sales conversion rate is one of the most important metrics that e-commerce businesses should master.
Business Breakdowns
Sep 8, 2025
•
3 min read
The Luxury Paradox: How Hermés Balances Exclusivity and Customer Loyalty
If you follow the luxury industry at all, you might’ve heard a little something about 2023’s best performing company in the industry, Hermés. Now, luxury brands aren’t necessarily known for their retention efforts. Most customers buy one or two luxury products from a brand and say that’s enough. But Hermés isn’t just a winning brand because they play it safe when it comes to pricing and strategize carefully when it comes to marketing. They’re also well known for their discrete loyalty and retention frameworks that keep their customer loyalty rate sky high.
Business Breakdowns
Sep 8, 2025
•
3 min read
Future-Forward Retail: How Macy's is Reinventing the Customer Experience
Macy’s recently announced that they plan to lay off over 2000 employees AND shut down several stores entirely. But why? The answer is simple. Traditional marketing, sales, and growth strategies were simply no longer cutting it, so they *had* to cut down on costs to fund new projects that would completely change their business strategy for the better.
Business Breakdowns
Sep 8, 2025
•
3 min read
Turning Fans into Advocates: Canva's Winning Approach
If you go back just several years, you’ll remember that it used to be WAY harder to whip up a design on command. What changed? For me, the first game-changing platform that comes to mind is Canva. So how exactly did this tiny startup transform into a multi-billion-dollar unicorn? They’re not only smart about what target market they decided to capture, but they also do a pretty solid job of keeping their users active and eager for more. Let’s dive further into what innovative strategies Canva puts into place to attract and keep users like me engaged.
Business Breakdowns
Sep 8, 2025
•
3 min read
Brewing a Brighter Future: Reviving Mountain Man Through Data-Driven Solutions
The beer industry is one where people either care deeply about the brand they consume or don’t care at all. For the folks who do care, there’s a set of criteria they typically use to decide which beer to purchase: quality, taste, price, brand image, tradition, and authenticity. For Mountain Man Lager, it was clear that they absolutely nailed every one of those factors. For nearly a century, Mountain Man never once deviated from its core identity as a family-owned quality beer brand with a consistently strong, bitter recipe and a local bond to East Coast consumers. So when Mountain Man Lager suddenly started to consistently lose 2% of its revenue every year, Chris Prangel, the next inheritor of the family-owned brand, began to panic. For over 75 years, Mountain Man never once saw a decline in sales - so there was clearly a reason to be concerned. But what exactly happened?
Business Breakdowns
Sep 8, 2025
•
3 min read
Soda Diplomacy: How Coca-Cola Speaks the Language of Every Region
In Las Vegas, CA, tourists from all around the country line up outside the doors of the Coca-Cola Factory right before it opens. Why? To try Coca-Cola’s ATW (Around the World) Tray. On each ATW Tray, customers get to taste a cup each of the various flavors of Coca-Cola offered in different countries across the world. What makes it so special is that each country’s Coca-Cola drink has a distinct flavor catered to the tastes, preferences, and sometimes even the traditions of the people living there. But why is this effective?
Business Breakdowns
Sep 8, 2025
•
3 min read
Fine-Tuning UNIQLO's Customer Experience: From Good to Great
It’s majorly impressive how smoothly UNIQLO has adapted to the overseas market — global expansion is a task most brands tend to struggle with. And while their products are great, their product line isn’t necessarily the main reason for their success. The truth is — UNIQLO does a fantastic job of utilizing data to fuel its customer experience strategy — so much so that it’s allowed them to connect their physical and digital touch points in a seamless way. BUT there’s always room to improve, and here’s how.
Business Breakdowns
Sep 8, 2025
•
3 min read
Beyond the Stars: How Sentiment Analysis Offers Deeper Insights into Levain Bakery
Levain Bakery, based in New York, exploded into a huge craze pretty recently — in fact, many have named them the source of New York’s most famous cookies. But it seems a little unbelievable, right? I mean — people are naturally impatient and a high price brings on high expectations. But despite all that, they still have a nearly 5-star rating across all locations. Do people really think Levain is worth it? And how can they be sure they’ll be able to keep this vast sea of customers around long term? These are the questions we wanted to answer using a little help from sentiment analysis.
Business Breakdowns
Sep 8, 2025
•
3 min read
Standardizing Excellence: Using Sentiment Analysis to Improve Consistency Across Corepower Studios
When you have a brand that sells a product or offers a service in-person, no two locations can really be the exact same. But if the quality of these different locations are vastly inconsistent, customer sentiment toward your brand will also vary — and that’s not a good thing. Corepower Yoga is a pretty good example of this. All their yoga classes are led by specific instructors, but standardizing the quality of instructors is a very difficult task. But it's not impossible. The first step is finding out which locations people think are better and why.
Business Breakdowns
Sep 8, 2025
•
3 min read
Everlane vs Zara: Why the Two Have Unexpected Parallels in Customer Satisfaction
The go-to assumption most people make is that a more sustainable brand = higher quality, especially when it comes to the fashion industry. And for the most part, that’s pretty true. So we wanted to run an experiment comparing two apparel companies with drastically different brand images — Everlane and Zara — to compare and contrast what customers REALLY think about each company. Our goal here was to try to understand how big a difference a brand’s public perception can really make on customer satisfaction.
Business Breakdowns
Sep 8, 2025
•
3 min read
Worth the Upgrade? A Sentiment Analysis of Premium Dating App Reviews
When you download a new, free app, there’s a good chance they’ll probably try to upsell you premium features or a premium version once you actually start using it. Dating apps like Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge all have their own niche quirks and target users. But despite these differences, we’ve identified two overlapping metrics used to measure user satisfaction: “match success” and “user experience.” We wanted to understand how these two metrics compare for the premium (paid) version of each app against the free version. And not from just one perspective, but thousands.
Business Breakdowns
Sep 8, 2025
•
3 min read
When the Shoe Doesn't Fit: Allbirds' Segmentation Missteps
Most people attributed the fall of Allbirds to poor quality, but the truth is, the source of their problems was more than just the material of the shoe. Allbirds, originally a sustainable sneaker company, had not only failed to pay attention to the underlying needs and values of their ICP, but had also lost its way by attempting to expand the brand to irrelevant segments. Much like what we described for Nike, trying to enter new markets too quickly fogged up Allbirds’ core brand image and diminished overall perceived quality. But even this is too short a summary of what truly happened to Allbirds — so let’s break it all down.
Business Breakdowns
Sep 8, 2025
•
3 min read
The Power of Positive Sentiment: Tatcha's Social Media Strategy for Successful Product Launches
Does the sentiment toward a new product launch (which could be observed through Instagram likes) foreshadow the future sales of that product? If we find evidence that the positive sentiment toward a new product's content (from its launch until the present) correlates with the product's current total sales quantity, it suggests that the amount of positive sentiment toward a product over time can drive sales. Or, if we find evidence that the first few weeks of positive sentiment toward a new product's content correlates with the product's current total sales quantity, it suggests that social media can predict whether a new product will be successful.
Business Breakdowns
Sep 8, 2025
•
3 min read
The Engineer's Guide to Hiring Top Data Talent
As a founding engineer, there’s a lot of technology out there to know. You need to know the differences between the front and back end, how to manage deployment – not to mention the nightmare of scaling, especially when you recently gained a *ton* of popularity in Malaysia and you now need to also work out of an AWS region in Asia. How on *earth* are you supposed to also know how to hire the right first data hire? Fear not, Mr. “SQL-is-not-engineering” — this article is here to help. We’ve also included some code to give you some context as to what you’re going to be reading here in the coming months.
Business Breakdowns
Sep 8, 2025
•
3 min read
Shoe-in Success: How Nike “Just Did It” with Strategic Segmentation
What’s the first brand that comes to mind when you think of footwear? There’s a good chance you immediately thought of Nike (or Adidas, but let’s save that story for another day). And who can blame you? Nike is not only the largest shoe brand in the world, but they’re also one of the most well-known brands as a whole. At least in the footwear industry, their brand awareness is truly unparalleled.
Business Breakdowns
Sep 8, 2025
•
3 min read
Where Art Meets Hype: A24's Trail of Success Carved by Unconventional Marketing
The film industry has been on fire recently. We got Barbie and Oppenheimer and Spiderman this summer, with even more coming along the way. However, even for those of us who aren’t cinephiles, one studio has been producing hit after hit after hit, such as Oscar Best Picture Everything Everwhere All at Once and Academy Award-winning Moonlight. Despite being an indie film studio, A24 has been blowing everyone’s minds away with their top-notch movies. So the question is: how did they blow up?