Keeping tabs on your brand's online presence used to be straightforward – a quick review of retailer listings and a few search results could tell you a lot. But in today’s ever-evolving landscape of eCommerce, social media, and direct-to-consumer platforms, the digital shelf has expanded dramatically – and so have the challenges brands face in understanding their place on it.

Consumers now engage with brands across a wide range of digital touchpoints – from product detail pages and customer reviews to influencer videos and third-party resellers. Each of these interactions contributes to a brand’s digital shelf presence and can influence consumer decision-making in real time. This means brands need more robust tools and thoughtful strategies to not just collect data, but interpret and act on it meaningfully.

More Data, More Noise

One of the biggest shifts in digital shelf monitoring is the sheer influx of unstructured data created by online conversations. Reviews, ratings, sentiment, competitor mentions – platforms like Brandwatch offer the ability to track all of it. But with such a high volume of data, many teams struggle to separate signal from noise.

Finding answers to questions like, "What language are consumers using to describe our product?" or "What are the consistent pain points across our category?" requires more than just scraping data – it requires expert interpretation. That’s often where DIY tools fall short, especially without the right skill sets on hand.

Hybrid Shopping Behaviors and AI

Consumers are also navigating more hybrid purchase journeys – discovering products on social, researching via reviews, and purchasing on different platforms. Insights need to align with how your actual customers shop, not just where they leave feedback. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is disrupting toolsets and changing how data is processed and visualized, adding another layer of complexity to digital shelf tracking.

New Tools, New Expectations

Many brands have invested in DIY research platforms to save time and streamline competitive monitoring. While these tools can offer speed and autonomy, they can also lead to missed insights or misinterpretation if teams are learning as they go—or worse, working without clear frameworks or guardrails. That’s where expert market research support can make a difference.

Tools like Brandwatch are powerful, but to unlock their full potential, brands need a blend of data, strategy, and expertise. That’s why more companies are pairing internal teams with On Demand Talent – experienced research professionals who can quickly bridge skill gaps, ensure insights stay on target, and make digital shelf data both actionable and meaningful.

Brandwatch is one of the most sophisticated social listening and market intelligence platforms available today. It allows companies to track what’s being said about their brand, their competitors, and their category—across millions of data points. But for many insights teams, especially those newer to digital shelf monitoring, simply having the tool isn’t enough. Navigating Brandwatch effectively requires more than access—it requires expertise.

So what does that look like in practice?

Here are some of the most common problems when using Brandwatch for market research and competitor analysis:

• 1. Struggling to extract actionable insights from online reviews. Brandwatch surfaces a large volume of consumer feedback, but many teams find themselves overwhelmed by the unstructured nature of these reviews. What's the actual takeaway? Without designed frameworks, it’s easy to get lost in sentiment without identifying root causes or purchase barriers.
• 2. Difficulty capturing truly competitive language. Identifying "value language"—the specific words that customers use to describe positive product features—can be tricky. Teams often miss terms that resonate with real buyers because they rely on automated analytics over nuanced human interpretation.
• 3. Comparing apples to oranges. Brandwatch allows you to set up custom dashboards, but when comparing your brand to competitors, it's easy to lose consistency across measurement. If your team isn’t experienced with setting clear filters or taxonomies, you could be comparing different attributes or consumer segments without realizing it.
• 4. Insights that don’t connect to the purchase journey. Social listening can bring in attention-grabbing conversations, but unless they're mapped to a buyer's journey—awareness, consideration, decision—they may not support strategic actions. Understanding when and how people talk about your product versus a competitor is key to prioritizing responses.

How Experienced Professionals Can Help

When facing these challenges, many brands turn to SIVO’s On Demand Talent for support. These are expert insights professionals with hands-on experience in platforms like Brandwatch who know how to:

• Build comparison frameworks that make digital shelf data actionable
• Extract true voice-of-customer language that guides messaging strategy
• Connect review insights to consumer behavior and moments in the purchase journey
• Set up reporting that keeps leadership aligned and confident in direction

The goal isn’t to replace your tool—it’s to unlock its full potential. Through flexible, scalable support, On Demand Talent can immediately step in to provide guidance, structure, and storytelling strength. That means more clarity, less rework, and faster momentum toward decisions that matter.

If your team is hitting roadblocks in Brandwatch—or any social listening tool—it may not be the platform's fault. It could simply be a question of having the right expertise on your side.

One of the biggest challenges teams face when using Brandwatch for digital shelf monitoring is making sense of the overwhelming volume of customer chatter, reviews, and feedback. Brandwatch is a powerful tool for collecting data – from social listening across channels to monitoring real-time reviews – but turning that raw data into usable insights is another story.

For many insights teams, issues start when trying to analyze unstructured data to identify key product pain points, extract value language, or understand how a brand or product is truly perceived in the market. Without clear frameworks or established best practices, it's easy to get lost in the sheer amount of information – or worse, draw the wrong conclusions.

Common problems when analyzing online reviews and chatter in Brandwatch:

• Noisy data: Sorting through irrelevant mentions, off-topic posts, or sarcastic comments can make it difficult to find real consumer insights.
• Lack of context: A single quote can be misinterpreted without understanding the broader sentiment or consumer journey behind it.
• Difficulty extracting value language: Understanding how your audience talks about your product (or competitors’) is key for messaging, but can be subtle and hard to spot at scale.
• Missing patterns: Without experience in qualitative analysis, teams may struggle to synthesize large volumes of feedback into recognizable, actionable themes.

For example, let's say you’re tracking reviews on a new skincare product. You might see recurring themes about it being “lightweight,” “non-greasy,” or “absorbs quickly.” An experienced insights analyst can identify this as potential value language that resonates with shoppers – language that can inform everything from marketing copy to product positioning. Without expert lens, these elements may get overlooked or buried among less relevant data.

This is where many insights teams hit roadblocks. DIY tools like Brandwatch are built to scale fast, but human interpretation is still critical to unlock deeper meaning, especially when evaluating emotional language and nuanced consumer pain points. If insights aren’t connected back to the purchase decision-making journey, they risk staying surface-level or unactionable.

To solve this, pairing Brandwatch's monitoring technology with the expertise of skilled researchers ensures that the data is not only observed but translated effectively. It takes experience to segment types of chatter, detect underlying sentiments, and tie those findings directly to brand perception and user needs – especially when competitor analysis and shopper behavior are evolving rapidly.

If your team is finding it challenging to translate Brandwatch data into clear, compelling consumer insights, you’re not alone. Many organizations are discovering that while DIY tools offer speed and scale, they often require specialized expertise to extract full value – especially when it comes to digital shelf monitoring, competitor analysis, or review interpretation.

This is exactly where On Demand Talent from SIVO can step in. Our experienced insights professionals are trained in both the technical functionality of platforms like Brandwatch and the strategic thinking required to make research meaningful, actionable, and aligned with your business goals.

What makes On Demand Talent different?

• Not freelancers: These are seasoned consumer insights experts who bring industry knowledge, not just platform skills. They won't need training or hand-holding.
• Strategic filtering: On Demand Talent can cut through noise in Brandwatch, identifying brand-specific insights and avoiding distraction KPIs that don’t move the needle.
• Experience with patterns: Knowing which review themes are standout value drivers – and which are just background noise – comes with depth of expertise.
• Custom workflows: These professionals can build reporting systems tailored to how your team works, saving time and improving impact.

Imagine you’re a beverage startup trying to understand why certain flavors are performing better in specific regions. Brandwatch can offer review data, sentiment scores, and online chatter – but an On Demand Talent expert can go further by drawing connections between taste descriptors, shopper motivations, and geography. The result? Actionable recommendations to guide product development or go-to-market strategy.

With hundreds of experts across industries and insight roles, including product claims testing, competitor tracking, and consumer journey mapping, our network can step in and support your team fast – often in days or weeks, not months. By integrating seamlessly into your process, they help turn digital shelf data from Brandwatch into strategic direction, not just dashboards.

Whether you're detecting brand sentiment shifts, benchmarking competitors, or reassessing positioning, On Demand Talent ensures the signal isn’t lost in the noise – and that every insight has a clear purpose.

As insight needs grow and pressure mounts to do more with less, many businesses are asking the same question: How can we elevate our research quality without extending budgets or hiring permanent staff? The answer, increasingly, is flexible access to high-caliber experts – like SIVO’s On Demand Talent.

Permanent hires can take months to onboard and carry long-term budget implications. Traditional agencies offer expertise but are often structured around large, fixed-scope projects. Freelancers can fill gaps but may lack the strategic alignment or reliability needed for impactful work. In contrast, SIVO’s On Demand Talent offers the professionalism of a full-time partner with the flexibility you need.

Here’s how it works:

Our On Demand professionals are embedded seamlessly into your workflow. They adapt to your tech stack (Brandwatch included), act as part of your extended team, and get up to speed quickly – no lengthy ramp-ups necessary. Whether it’s a short-term need like review analysis or an ongoing requirement like competitor benchmarking, they bring both executional support and strategic value.

This model works especially well for fast-moving teams who are already using DIY tools for consumer insights, such as social listening or digital shelf monitoring, but need backup to ensure their research remains focused, rigorous, and connected to the bigger picture. Rather than scale down ambitions because of resourcing gaps, clients use On Demand Talent to keep delivering at a high standard – without burning out internal teams or compromising insight depth.

Let’s say your team is fluent in using Brandwatch to track discussion volume and sentiment. But when it comes time to interpret nuanced brand perceptions or extract value language from lengthy reviews, you feel stuck. By bringing in On Demand Talent for even a few hours a week, you can complement your internal team’s strengths, avoid blind spots, and maintain research rigor – all without taking on another full-time salary.

These professionals don’t just execute projects. They also empower your team to build long-term capability in using tools like Brandwatch. Many of our clients find that with support from On Demand Talent, they go from struggling to interpret data to confidently applying findings in strategic ways – improving team capacity and delivering stronger outcomes for stakeholders.

In short: better insights, faster delivery, no headcount headaches.