Welcome back for our next installment of Food Intelligence: Under the Hood!

Thanks for joining us for our next look under the hood at Tastewise’s tech abilities. For a refresher: over the course of a few weeks, I’ll be guiding you through a sneak-peak at what makes Tastewise’s cutting-edge technology tick. Last post we covered Natural Language Processing. Today, we’re jumping into another way our technology sorts, processes, defines, and extrapolates (oh my!): Audience Segmentation.

What is audience segmentation?

Audience segmentation: Sounds a bit dry, you say? You’re on to something -- oftentimes, the language we use as an industry to talk about the groups of people that interact with our product can feel a bit clinical. Segments of audiences. Consumers. Targets. Stakeholders. While each of these terms are significant, and certainly have their place, it’s a good reminder that when we speak about consumers, we aren’t just talking about faceless beings that mindlessly consume -- we’re talking about people who bring their full selves to every moment that they interact with what we put out into the world. Everyone has their own identity that influences how they make decisions, and this certainly includes food and beverage. Food is a basic commodity that all people need, and serves as the underpinning for how we provide for our families, treat our bodies, and expend our energy.

Before I veer too heavy-handedly into the poetics of food, an explanation: what people bring with them to every decision they make, the “why” behind their purchasing, eating, and cooking, is the basic cornerstone for food and beverage brands. Having a clear understanding of the problem a person is trying to solve, and anticipating it with your offering before they even do, is the name of the game for F&B product innovators, marketing whizzes, and sales reps. These groups may once have relied on industry tools like focus groups and surveys to get inside the heads of target groups, but those methods are increasingly subpar in this digital, dynamic age. So how can we realistically understand what people want and need on a large scale?

Enter: AI audience segmentation.

At Tastewise, we’ve spent almost 3 years training our algorithms to understand the digital world of food and beverage. Through the trials of guiding our technology through the processing of billions and billions of data points, our tech development team honed in on the importance of audiences, handy tools for both technological processing - and providing significant value to food and beverage industry customers. An “audience” is what we call a group of individuals, connected by verifiable attributes, whose online presence is captured by our dataset. Each audience shares certain qualities that differentiate them from all other consumer subsets.

How do we create audiences?

• We identify a small subset of users that define themselves as part of an audience on social media (example: “proud mom of three!”).
• We study their behavior using AI, and extrapolate characteristics of their social media behavior to identify others that belong to the same audience. (example: a mother who doesn’t necessarily write “mom” on social)
• We group these individuals together as an ‘audience’, and cluster the data drawn from their activity.

We’ve trained our AI to understand a diversity of audiences - everything from gender to age to professions to affinities. Our AI analyzes everything related to food and beverage appearing on social media, from #hashtags, to location, to posting patterns, to provide a lens into consumer behavior.

Great - all of this is well and good, but what can audiences actually do for food & beverage brands?

Our audience classifier allows food & beverage brands to understand on a deeper level what their audiences are actually eating, drinking, cooking, and ordering. Say, for example, that I am developing a grab’n’go lunch menu, and I’m curious what students in Arizona like to order. Tastewise’s classifiers allow me to filter food & beverage insights down to my specific audience in a specific zipcode, consolidating millions of data points into clear, actionable insights for my menu based on my target demographic. I am able to view what motivates students in their eating and drinking habits, how trends are behaving for that audience in both foodservice and home cooking, and what overall diets, ingredient pairings, functional wellness trends and more might influence my demographic. With this information in hand, I am also able to create incisive marketing campaigns to target Arizonian students using language that I know will resonate with them.

Ready to try out audience segmentation for yourself?

Book a demo with our team to understand exactly what Tastewise AI can do for your product development, marketing, and sales strategies.