How Unilever, Skullcandy Are Using AI to Drive Consumer Insights
Unilever and Skullcandy are tapping conversational AI to translate consumer feedback into instant, actionable insights.
Using a tool called “Ask Yogi” from an AI consumer insights platform, the companies can immediately query their feedback — asking questions such as "What consumer pain points have emerged in the last six months?" or "How has sentiment shifted across our top brands this year?" — and receive data-backed answers in seconds instead of days.
The model parses through structured and unstructured data from reviews, social media, customer care logs and proprietary research to provide answers in various formats, including charts, metrics and consumer quotes.
Tech in Action
Jane Hooper, consumer marketing insights associate manager for Unilever’s premium ice cream business, said in a statement the technology allows its teams to get a real-time pulse on its brands.
“From reproducible metrics and trend tracking to uncovering whitespace opportunities, it’s some of the most impactful AI-driven reporting I’ve seen,” she added.
Mark Hopkins, Skullcandy CIO, told CGT that it makes answering complex question easy, enabling employees to ask what they need from unstructured text, sentiment, themes and star rating data in a way that’s familiar and fast.
Example use cases include:
- Consumer insights teams analyzing negative review themes for specific SKUs.
- Marketing teams comparing brand perception versus competitors.
Angela Wambach, product quality engineer at Skullcandy, said the company used to spend two days manually analyzing sentiment, running regressions and surfacing key issues. With the new implementation, this time is down to five minutes.
Other CPGs such as Every Man Jack and Liquid I.V. are also leveraging the technology.
