How Dow business intelligence transforms global market strategies through data
By Beatriz Lima, Global Consumer & Market Insight at Dow
Working at the Dow Chemical Company means I get to play a small role in helping global brands develop materials that shape our everyday lives. The mission of Dow’s Global Marketing Technology team is to enable our clients to innovate. And when it comes to increasing the performance of a product — whether it’s improving branding, messaging, packaging or formulation — innovation starts with understanding what customers want and what’s most important to them.
In my role as the Global Consumer & Market Insights lead, I use social listening to uncover customer insights that guide business strategy. The insights provided can inform everything from new products and materials to strategies for massive international marketing campaigns.
Innovation starts with understanding what customers want and what’s most important to them."
Data is the bedrock of Dow's technology innovation. It drives our product development, operational efficiency and sustainability initiatives. My role is to ensure our teams have access to critical insights that drive strategic decisions and facilitate bold and transparent conversations with Dow customers and stakeholders. My work helps to refine our sales and marketing strategies through data-driven insights, enabling smarter and more impactful decisions.
But I can’t deliver value without clean, insight-rich data. Achieving this consistently, however, can be a significant challenge. Limited data collection, inaccurate translations across geographies and irrelevant data can hinder progress and make it difficult to generate actionable insights. I've been able to overcome these hurdles with Sprinklr's powerful Insights platform, which has become indispensable to my work. It enables me to provide accurate, relevant and complete data to my colleagues, who use the insights to unlock exceptional value for multiple industries. A great example of this approach in action is a recent social listening project that uncovered consumer trends in the Asian personal care market that would inform our market approach in Latin America.
Uncovering consumer trends in the Asian personal care market
In May 2023, a social listening project from the Dow Consumer Solutions team came across my desk. The business needed assistance gathering data they wanted to use in conversations with a multinational chemical and consumer goods company that has a portfolio of hair care brands. The goal was to analyze consumer opinions about hair softness claims in Asian markets — specifically Japan, China and South Korea — by examining product reviews. This analysis would be leveraged to develop hair care marketing strategies for Latin America. The project was highly strategic, forming part of a broader development initiative with the Dow client.
The first stage of the project involved backfilling data. In 2022, we captured only a little over 1,000 mentions related to hair softness, most of which were from China. There were just three mentions from Japan and 18 mentions from South Korea. We continued monitoring reviews in 2023, but switched our approach at the start of 2024. That's when we brought the full power of Sprinklr's enhanced social listening capabilities to the project, which enabled us to collect more than 126,000 mentions: 60,000 from China, 57,000 from Japan and over 9,000 from South Korea. This significant increase in data allowed us to build a much richer and more comprehensive dataset for generating insights.
With so much more data, I could dig deeper into trends and provide robust evidence that my team would feel confident using as the basis for marketing experimentation. For example, we found that consumers evaluated the product's effectiveness across various hair textures, showing its versatility.
Additionally, regional differences emerged for trends and keywords: the word "dry" was commonly used as a descriptor in China and South Korea, but less so in Japan. This understanding would allow Dow's marketing and technical teams to refine marketing communication strategies and product offerings to better match regional consumer preferences.
Advanced translation capabilities removes noise and powers international data collection
One of the main reasons we could gather more data was Sprinklr’s language translation capabilities. Analyzing customer feedback and sentiment for global projects spanning Asia Pacific and English-speaking regions is always challenging because of the differences in languages and alphabets. In the past, I would call on a colleague to translate or use free online translation services, which was rarely accurate enough for our use case. It would take me days to clean up and validate data in translation.
This project required us to translate around 120 English keywords into Mandarin, Japanese and Korean. Previously, translating this many keywords could take the Asia Pacific team 48 hours to return. Sprinklr translated each keyword in around five seconds, which meant the whole thing was complete in just 10 minutes — more than a 99% decrease in time spent. The translations enabled us to create better queries on the topics and keywords we wanted to investigate, delivering even more data points.
Accurate translation also helped us clean up the keywords to filter out noise from the data. To edit keywords, I need to make sure that the terms are correct in the regional languages. Using free online translators, it is almost impossible to know whether we are eliminating the correct terms. Sprinklr allows us to remove keywords from queries in their regional languages, ensuring we are getting rid of the right ones. In this project, we excluded 90 words across the three language groups, resulting in cleaner data that was more reliable and easier to analyze.
When we completed the data collection, I could immediately see the results in English and begin analysis. Having the accurate translation directly in Sprinklr Insights also made it easier for me to create the report we would share with the client and reference moving forward.
Delivering value through detailed insights and report-ready visualizations
Sprinklr is an integral part of my work. Even though I’ve worked with other solutions, including Sysomos and Meltwater, I keep returning to Sprinklr.
One of the biggest differences between Sprinklr and other solutions is the graphics. I used to have to pull data into Excel or Power BI in order to manipulate visualizations and get them ready for slide decks and client deliverables. Sprinklr automatically generates visualizations and offers more freedom and flexibility to customize them.
The visual elements also make analysis more straightforward, allowing me to uncover unexpected details quickly. For example, in our social listening project for the Asian personal care market, I found that customers chose products based on features, ingredients and messaging we hadn’t initially thought would matter to them. I also explored keywords as they related to specific products, giving my Dow colleagues insight into whether certain keywords might work better for some products than others.
In the report for this social listening project, I used different types of graphs and word clouds to provide a multidimensional view of the data. I also included screenshots of reviews translated into English in the presentation to provide additional context.
Sprinklr enables me to deliver a visually appealing product that’s easy to understand and makes insights more actionable internally. Sprinklr’s visualizations help my colleagues and me to communicate our findings more effectively, which makes our contributions much more valuable.
Strong results that drive strategic decisions
I collaborate with team members across regional marketing departments, but I don’t think I could provide the same results without Sprinklr. The solution saves me time, enables me to research a global customer base and helps me deliver actionable reports to my colleagues. Using our research to build and implement client strategy is the real value of our market listening services, and Sprinklr facilitates that.
I don’t think I could provide the same results without Sprinklr. The solution saves me time, enables me to research a global customer base, and helps me deliver actionable reports to my colleagues and our clients."
Sprinklr delivers strong results that I am proud to share, and we’re continuing to explore its full potential. As we test and validate findings in new regions, Sprinklr’s insights will be instrumental in helping our sales and marketing teams craft strategies that better position our products and our clients' products, ultimately deepening Dow’s partnerships and expanding our market influence.