Obtaining ideas for new products from consumer reviews – Utilizing visual social media
(X, Instagram)

Social media (such as Instagram and X) is where consumers share their creativity and ideas. If you are engaged in product planning and marketing, you may have thought about
formulating new product ideas from a plethora of online reviews before.
However, a lot of us also probably feel there are issues here with there being “too many
posts”, “a variety of comments on reviews, making them hard to sort through” and that
they “don’t know how to handle them” in terms of utilizing these reviews. INTAGE has
developed a review-centric method for ideation. We’d like to give you an idea of how you
can utilize reviews through work we’ve actually completed in this article.

1. Thinking up new curry roux products

We chose curry “roux”, something people often eat in daily life, as the subject of this
article. While sales for retort-pouch curry are on the increase, the market for “roux” has
matured, so we assumed new product ideas were needed to generate further growth.

The steps for this ideation are as follows:
① Gathering relevant social media posts
② Extracting social media posts that may generate ideas
③ Workshop 1: Grouping keywords (insights from social media posts)
④ Workshop 2:  Sorting through them via keyword axes, and deciding on the area to
　ideate in
⑤ Concept work: Sorting the value and benefits offered to consumers by the area
　determined in④, and engaging in ideation

Fig.1

From this point onward, we’d like to introduce the actual work we engaged in through
this work flow.

Our first step was ① “Extracting social media posts”.
If we narrow our search down to merely “curry roux”, we won’t be able to gather
sufficient social media posts to generate new ideas with. Even if we gather social media
posts focusing merely on curry “roux”, we still won’t be able to gather enough social media posts to generate new ideas with. We thus decided to expand our field of view to focus on “scenes where curry is eaten” and gather social media posts on this. Here, we are
striving to obtain hints to engage in product development with from how consumers
eat curry, and the background to and needs regarding when they eat curry.
We gathered and extracted relevant posts from X and Instagram in the current study.
Not only “curry” cooked at home, but curry categories for eating out and taking out were included in our search words to enable us to gather data on a broad range of curry-related
scenes.

Fig.2

2. Identifying social media posts that may generate ideas

Our second step was  ② “Gathering social media posts to generate ideas with”. The first
issue here was that we needed to deal with the fact there were “too many posts”. If the keyword was set to “curry”, we would be able to gather approximately 3 million posts on X, and 290,000 posts on Instagram in the one year from January ~ December 31, 2023. However,
this would cover a broad range of content including manufacturer’s PR ads and influencers’ posts to consumers. We thus needed to set standards to extract social media posts that
could be used in ideation.
*Only posts with original images, not including replies or reposts. Some may include
campaign content.

We focused on consumers’ frank feelings and needs, and using a system utilized by INTAGE, mechanically filtered down the posts to those that met the following criteria:
・Must be a post from a consumer, not a PR ad
・Must be linked to positive or negative behavior or feelings
・Must include images or videos in the post
・Must mention cooking needs (managing household budgets, maintaining one’s health,
　being practical, handy, an uncompromising approach to ingredients, liking cooking etc.)
・Must include words on the progression of their day (such as eating, exercising, or
　sleeping) or the consumer’s desires (such as wanting to become more beautiful,
　lose weight, or become healthier)
We read these posts and checked the poster’s profile and previous posts to surmise their
background and needs. We also extracted “insights” regarding scenes where curry is eaten and consumers’ needs from a researcher’s perspective. These keywords will play a crucial
role later in our work flow. The volume of photos and text synonymous with social media
served as good stimuli for us to discover a large number of keywords.

3. Sorting through social media posts

Our next step was ③ “Grouping key words”. We held workshops to group and organize the
abovementioned keywords (insights) as seen in Fig.3.

Fig.3

We mentioned the perception that “sorting through the social media posts extracted seems difficult” is an issue at the beginning of this article. We used a common methodology called the KJ method here where keywords are written on post its then stuck on a whiteboard,
and grouped nearby similar words. As long as you can extract keywords, you can organize
them in this way using this familiar methodology to sort them out.

4. Determining axes of consideration and ideation

In ④, “deciding on the area to ideate in”, we first used the main keyword groups created in Step ③ to find an ”axis” to use as a slant for product development, and then reorganized
them.
For example, “expertise” in which you arrange dishes in a variety of ways, and
“time-saving” where you spend as little effort as possible can be considered polar
opposites on the same axis. In addition, axes like “winter curry” vs. “summer curry”
can also be identified from the scene-specific keywords. We came up as many “axis”
candidates that express consumers’ needs and behavior, combining two types at a time,
then thought of product ideas that would occupy each quadrant, and evaluated their
validity.

Fig.4 is an example of the output of our work this time. “Ready in a short time” is
mainly a need common among young people, the polar opposite of “replenishes
supplements over the long term”, a need common among seniors, with these considered
to lie along one axis. At the same time, there also appears to be a simply “with rice” vs.
“without rice” axis. The four following ideas appeared through combining these two axes:
・Complete meal curry
・Cleansing curry with a perspiration focus
・Functional curry
・Supplement curry

Fig.4

While there are already products available for some of these, “cleansing curry with a
perspiration focus” fulfills young people’s needs to be “Ready in a short time” and comes
without rice, so promises to offer novelty and business potential. We summarized its target segment and values it can provide as seen in Fig.5 as our final output below.

Fig.5

5. Summary

We asked several marketing professionals directly involved in product development for
manufacturers to examine the process and output we presented in this article and to give
us their impressions. They noted that social media posts offer a grasp on trends, that the
visuals in these posts back their insights, making them highly convincing, and endorsed
them as a good way to systematically come up with new product ideas.
We talked about the sense of “not knowing how to handle reviews” being an issue at the
beginning of this article. If data is extracted and organized correctly, it should make it
possible for you to obtain ideas for new products using the same process as the workshops you normally conduct in qualitative studies and after quantitative surveys.

Consumer reviews possess the following characteristics:
・The large universe makes it possible to learn the opinions of large numbers of people
・They reflect a large number of consumer behaviors, needs, and their feelings at the time
・They enable you to identify hypotheses without prior hypotheses through exploring the
　broader market
・Many posts include images you can tell the background or settings from, or have
　descriptions  as well, making it easy to obtain insights for ideation

Interpreting the online reviews posted by the millions of consumers out there can enable
us as researchers to explore areas to expand into new business in, such as the creation of
unprecedented products and categories.

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