Since people are more honest with their search engines than they are with their families we thought search engine data would be a great place to start. We knew simple keyword volume wouldn’t give us the kind of insight that would help us win in the marketplace.

We wanted to know what was happening before someone searched for specific ‘toothbrush’-related keywords/phrases. What was the root of the problem they were trying to solve? In other words – we wanted to identify the intent behind what people were searching. Enter Caffeine.

Caffeine is a semantic search tool that analyzes and connects search queries in the exact order they are being searched for.

Caffeine uses multi-session search data, natural language processing, and semantic clustering to group related keywords into networks. Clustering nodes, exposes how people progress through their search, the relative significance of each pattern/connection in aggregate and, thusly, identify searchers’ intent.

We ran a Caffeine analysis on the search term “electric toothbrush” and found an unexpectedly strong link between “electric toothbrush” and “gum health.”

In aggregate, people were progressing from “electric toothbrush” queries to “gum health” queries and, finally, to queries indicative of electric toothbrush buying intent such as, “electric toothbrush consumer reports” and “electric toothbrush reviews.”

The reason this was unexpected?

For years, traditional research had suggested the link between gum health and electric toothbrushes was negative -- people reported they were worried about electric toothbrushes damaging their gums.

So – we wondered – is it possible, in the digital path-to-purchase, gum health is perceived as a positive outcome of using an electric toothbrush?

Enter M2.

M2 is a proprietary tool that uses eCommerce reviews and restructures the data into topic clusters using sentiment analysis, natural language processing and vocabulary

Our behavioral driven research approach worked. Not a lot of billion dollar global brands see a year-over-year sales increase of 8% during the critical Holiday Gifting season, but with the help of Caffeine and behavioral research, Oral-B was able to do just that.