insight

Making Sense in a Sea of Opinions — A Tale of Connectivity

Laura Möller

Berlin, both as a City and as an Idea, boasts an ever growing Following, especially the Start-Up Ecosystem has developed rapidly over the last few years. As one of the few Venture Capital Investors who have been around for most of it, we felt we needed to share some of our experiences and experiences of others we have been so lucky to share. That being said, welcome to “Tales of Berlin”.

The current crisis and its effects on our society from an economical, cultural and a health perspective has thrown the world into a phase shift. Making sense of consumer sentiment on a real time basis might never have been as important.

Fortunately, this episode our very own Laura Möller sits down with Nico Jaspers, Founder and CEO of Dalia Research, a leading provider of Consumer Insights by means of micro surveys. They will discuss how Dalia is managing the crisis, what they were able to observe and what they expect of the coming months.

Nico Jaspers Source: Dalia Research

Laura: Good to have you Nico, thanks for taking the time. To begin with, it would be interesting to hear how you have handled the challenges caused by Covid-19?

Nico: Thanks and great to share some thoughts! The past half year was quite a ride: we started the year in hyper growth mode and were in the closing stage of a large funding round to support our international expansion. Covid-19 unfortunately interrupted both, so we had to go back to the drawing board and adjusted our strategy for 2020. Doing this completely remote wasn’t easy, but the changes that we made are already paying off and we’re seeing rapid growth again over the past months. 

Is the current crisis a threat or an opportunity?

In times of uncertainty, the need for reliable insights on consumer behavior is more important than ever. The demand from our clients changed significantly since March this year as major global consumer goods companies had to adjust entire production lines. From a commercial perspective, the crisis first looked like a threat, but is now increasingly turning out to be an opportunity.

You published a study on how „the world ranks their governments response to the pandemic,“ was there something in your findings that surprised you?

Yes, that study received lots of attention. It was certainly impressive that Vietnam led the ranking, especially in contrast to Thailand, which came at the bottom of the 45 countries where we measured how people perceived their government’s response to Covid-19 . It is noteworthy, though, that we gathered that data near the beginning of the pandemic in March this year, and much has changed since then. This is part of our work on political and social topics, along with the global Democracy Perception Index and eupinions, our collaboration with the Bertelsmann Foundation to better understand the opinions, moods and preferences of European citizens.

Source: https://daliaresearch.com/blog/democracy-perception-index-2020/

And what’s an omnibus?

An omnibus study is one where we run surveys in regular intervals and clients can submit individual questions to be added to the survey, rather than running an entire research project themselves.

What else can we expect to see from Dalia in the coming months, where does your focus lie?

We’re currently working very hard on our brand analytics solution, Latana.

It’s a very exciting and new approach of combining survey data with advanced analytics to help small and mid-sized companies understand how niche audiences perceive their brand. Specifically, we use Multilevel Regression and Poststratification (MRP) to predict the responses for unobserved members of the population. Latana excels at extracting insights into niche audiences to fully understand their perceptions. Additionally, we provide features such as the Sustainability Tracking Index which allows companies to gain insights on a broad scale to whether or not customers perceive the brand as sustainable.

A variety of companies are already using Latana, to help guide them in their marketing efforts, those include Philips, Greenpeace, N26 and Blinkist.

What´s your favorite statistic or metric?

I recently learned that fake news spreads six times faster than real news in social media. This was really shocking to me.

Photo by Nastya Dulhiier on Unsplash

We are very grateful that Nico was able to take some time to answer our questions, we hope you enjoyed this episode and we hope to see you around for the next one, Stay Safe!

To learn more about Dalia (daliaresearch.com) and Latana (latana.com).

About the Author:

Laura is an Investment Manager @ IBB Ventures with a focus on all things enabled by software and driven by passionate founders. She’s always open to get in touch and give feedback.

You can reach us at:

www.ibbventures.de