Knowledgeistics

Posts Tagged ‘Hunch’

You may have noticed the soft launch of Hunch.com, a site that “helps you make decisions and gets smarter the more you use it.”Hunch is very intriguing, and not just from a SMM standpoint.  While it’s still in pseudo-beta phase (the creator eschews the term “beta” but acknowledges some rough edges), the site is fully functional.  I gave it a spin and noticed a few interesting things.

Hunch delivers value by giving advice on a range of topics.  It claims to deliver accurate answers by creating correlations between answers to simple questions.  An example they use is a supposed Republican/Democrat, Fiji/Evian correlation.   A new user is asked to answer at least 10 questions of the type “Do you use a Mac or a PC”,  “Do you think global warming is a seroius threat”, “Are you employed”, and so on.

From the Hunch site, about how their algorithms become “smart”:

Hunch is powered by collective user knowledge, decision topics mature over time. Newly submitted topics often won’t be very smart at first, but as more and more people train and refine them, the topics will get much smarter. Second, Hunch’s decision outcomes will become increasingly customized for you the more Hunch gets to know you. How does that happen? By your trying many topics and also answering the ‘Teach Hunch About You’ questions which appear on the top right of the homepage.

Once initiated, you can dive in and query this web 2.0 magic 8-ball.  Examples of available topics include serious quandaries like “Am I Adopted?” and less weighty ones like “Should I go to Bed?” (My answer – yes.)

It’s an interesting site for a typical user, but it should be even more interesting to anyone involved in market research or SMM.  With proper analysis, the correlations and answers in the Hunch database could deliver extremely precise demographic and psychographic insights. Hunch claims to make all their money from referrals – basically affiliate links stemming from “What sort of Item X should I buy?”  They also claim that they don’t sell user data:

“Will Hunch share my individual answers or user data with other companies? No. That’s simply not the business we’re in.”

Well, that’s pretty clear.  But it doesn’t preclude using the data for targeting, branding, or other marekting purposes – not necessarily.   My interest was piqued by one of the introductory training questions: “Do you typically pay more or less than $7 for shampoo?”  If you compare the correlates of my answer with the consumer profile of any given shampoo brand, you’ve suddenly produced an immediately valuable (and marketable) bit of information.

Hunch seems to have put together a highly efficent system for correlating psychographic, economic, geographic, and demographic data.  In my opinion, however, Hunch has an edge mostly because they’ve come up with a way to collect a great deal of consumer data on the cheap.  The real breakthrough is that they’ve made it fun (and social) for consumers to turn over their data en masse.

While their user base currently seems to be quite skewed (currently, 41% of their users own an iPhone, 66% identify as liberal, and the great majority live in urban areas,) their data on each user is so robust that this type of bias should present an unusually small obstacle.   Hunch is a good system for generating referral sales, but I expect that it might be a truly great system for generating market insights.  It will be interesting to see how their team utilizes this tool in the next 12-18 months.  Furthermore, it will be interesting to see how marketers and researchers find ways to leverage the site from the user end.  Twitter provides a level playing field and delivers value to businesses and consumers alike – will Hunch allow emergent uses for business to develop?