Understanding how customers perceive a brand has become increasingly important in today’s digital marketplace. Premium tire manufacturer Vredestein partnered with Hammer to transform millions of online conversations into actionable brand intelligence, delivering fresh insight into brand awareness, customer sentiment and competitive positioning.
Founded in 1909, Vredestein is a premium tire manufacturer that develops high-performance tires for passenger cars, agricultural equipment and bicycles. The company is one of the industry’s best-known brands, recognised for its focus on safety, quality and innovation.
To strengthen its market position, Vredestein wanted a deeper understanding of how consumers perceive its brand relative to key competitors. The company sought answers to questions such as:
While traditional market research and consumer surveys provide valuable insights, Vredestein also wanted to tap into the enormous volume of consumer-generated content available online. Every day, customers share opinions about tire performance on specialist forums, compare brands on social media, and publish reviews following purchases. Together, these conversations provide a rich and authentic picture of how brands are perceived in the market.
Hammer was engaged to unlock the value hidden within this vast amount of unstructured data. By analysing millions of online discussions, the consulting firm transformed dispersed digital conversations into competitive intelligence that could directly support branding, marketing and product strategy.
To uncover authentic consumer sentiment, Hammer developed a scalable analytics solution combining large-scale data collection with advanced natural language processing and text classification. The methodology consisted of five key steps.
The project began with the large-scale collection of publicly available consumer conversations from online forums, communities, review platforms and other digital sources. This dataset was enriched with articles from news and content databases, creating a comprehensive view of market discussions. In total, more than 2.8 million text items were collected across multiple countries, vehicle segments and online channels.
The next step focused on measuring brand awareness. Using fuzzy keyword recognition and entity matching, every conversation was automatically classified according to the brand being discussed. By comparing the relative share of online conversations across millions of data points, Hammer created a robust proxy for brand awareness and market visibility.
The frequency analysis was complemented by sentiment analysis. Each individual text item was automatically classified as positive, neutral or negative, enabling an objective comparison of how favourably each brand was discussed across the market.
Building on this foundation, Hammer performed deeper analysis into the topics driving consumer opinions. Advanced text classification identified discussions around specific product attributes, customer needs and vehicle segments, while linking these themes to overall sentiment. This enabled Vredestein to answer strategic questions such as:
The result was a detailed picture of both brand awareness and brand perception, revealing not only how frequently brands were discussed, but also why consumers viewed them positively or negatively.
Following the success of the initial analysis, Hammer built an automated pipeline for Vredestein covering data collection, categorisation, sentiment analysis and reporting. This pipeline moved the process beyond one-off research studies, automating the steps needed to keep brand intelligence current.
While the engagement concluded at this stage, the pipeline was designed with continuous monitoring in mind. It provides a ready foundation that could be extended into a full, always-on dashboard – enabling ongoing tracking of changes in brand perception over time, evaluation of marketing campaign effectiveness, early identification of emerging customer trends, and close monitoring of competitor developments across multiple markets.
Reflecting on the collaboration, Hammer said: “We’re proud to have supported such an iconic brand by transforming unstructured online data into competitive intelligence that directly supports decision-making and strengthens branding efforts.”
The consulting firm believes that the millions of consumer conversations taking place online represent one of the most valuable yet underutilised sources of market intelligence available today.
“Whether organisations want to benchmark their brand, monitor competitors, evaluate marketing performance or better understand changing customer needs, large-scale sentiment and topic analysis provides a powerful complement to traditional market research. In an increasingly digital-first world, organisations that can turn unstructured data into actionable insights gain a significant competitive advantage.”
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