Nowadays, consumer issues are no longer discussed solely in parliaments and specialist circles, but increasingly in digital spaces – on news portals, social media, forums, search engines and AI-powered information systems. These communication spaces provide a data foundation for identifying public sentiment, emerging trends, information needs and dominant narratives at an early stage, and for contextualising them within the framework of consumer policy.

For our clients, we tap into publicly available digital data sources – or those obtained through our own surveys – using modern computer-assisted methods. Through automated data collection (including web scraping) and subsequent content analysis, we structure relevant data from digital sources. Sentiment and topic analyses reveal how consumer policy issues are assessed and discussed. Narrative and framing analyses reveal which interpretative patterns shape public discourse. In addition, analyses of search queries, prompts, algorithmic visibility and information ranking can shed light on which topics, content and actors dominate the digital information landscape. Depending on the research question, such analyses can be carried out on an ad hoc basis or as part of continuous monitoring to highlight changes over time.