Closing The Gap Between Social Signal and Business Decision Hinges On Analyst Execution

Most organizations still treat social listening as a weather report: a steady read on sentiment, trends, and conversation volume that informs the room without ever deciding anything. The function's real value sits one step further down the line, in the translation of fragmented consumer signals into a single recommendation an executive can act on. The gap between those two things is the difference between a dashboard and a decision. Breaking that loop requires the analyst to take a position and stand behind it with evidence.

Working to shift the perception of social listening is Sanjyog Dowerah, Manager of Social Intelligence at PepsiCo. He has spent years focused specifically on the translation layer between consumer signal and executive decision-making, and writes and speaks regularly on where the social listening discipline needs to evolve. In his view, bridging the gap between raw data and executive action usually requires analysts to rethink how they position themselves within the business.

"It's about the commitment. It's about understanding the entire ecosystem and the business call. Everything ties back to that one single line of insight," Dowerah says. That single line is where social intelligence either earns executive trust or forfeits it.

The perception gap caps the function's influence

The first barrier Dowerah identifies is the executive perception that social listening reads sentiment from a handful of platforms and reports it back as conversation, not consumer truth. "A lot of C-suite leaders still have a perception of social listening as background noise, more about signals, more about trends. The awareness is still not 100 percent, not just on how to curate the insights, but also how to translate the insights into an actionable form."

That awareness gap, he says, runs in both directions. Leaders don't always know what to ask of social intelligence, and analysts don't always deliver in a form leaders can act on. Dowerah's response is to feed leadership a steady diet of work that's not only trend-driven, but explicitly actionable, and to present it with enough clarity that the recommendation is unmistakable.

The presentation discipline matters as much as the analysis. An executive asking a direct question does not want a menu of scenarios. "If they're asking one question, they probably want a very clear-cut, directional, to-the-point answer. If you present it in an executive-proposal kind of way, giving a lot of scenarios, you're not actually helping them make a decision," he explains.

The recommendation has to carry conviction

The standard Dowerah holds himself to is conviction backed by depth. The executive summary of any project resolves to a single recommendation he's willing to vouch for, named directly, with the evidence stacked behind it.

The clearest proof is a recent project for a beverage brand planning an IP partnership where the brand wanted to tie a new flavor launch to a cultural property in a specific market. The flavor and the IP were meant to fuse into a single product identity, which raised the stakes on choosing the right partner. Dowerah ran a competitive audit across candidate IPs, analyzing fandom scale, cultural relevance, consumer perception, sentiment across each IP ecosystem, and the growth or decline signals visible across platforms. The analysis produced the inputs. The commitment produced the decision. "I'll be brave enough, because I have my data and I know my consumer behavior, to call out crystal clear that this IP is absolutely a win for my brand, and the basic facts that support that decision. So I'm going with a very deep commitment that I'm vouching for this IP," he says.

That conviction is only credible because it sits on a foundation of work. Dowerah starts every brief by interrogating why the brand wants the partnership in the first place, mapping the thought process behind the leadership ask before curating any findings. The recommendation fits the brand's culture and intent, not just the data.

The proof is in the product, not the report

The real test of social intelligence isn't just whether the analysis was sound, but whether the business did anything with it. In Dowerah's IP project, the business acted on the recommendation, launched the product, and saw it move in the market. "It's not just consumer insight. It's not just social. It is about launching a product, actual dollar sales, actual dollar volume," he says. "That's the kind of influence that a social listening project can have."

The launched product generated retail volume, showed up on shelves, and was ordered online through delivery platforms. That outcome reframes what social intelligence is for. Rather than engagement reported or sentiment tracked, the function's success metric is a product in market and revenue on the books, traced back to a recommendation an analyst was willing to commit to.

The future is beyond platforms and tools

The discipline's evolution, in Dowerah's view, depends on breaking two habits at once. Executives need to stop seeing social as a narrow, platform-bound slice of the consumer voice. Practitioners need to stop anchoring their identity to specific tools and sources. "We have to move beyond platforms. Today there is a variety of platforms, even the niche ones. If you talk about a gaming project, you go to Discord, you go to Twitch. There are review platforms, blogs, articles, comments. You can't stick with just one set of sources."

The deeper shift he sees is methodological. It requires reading consumer behavior closely enough to explain the why behind it, then translating that into a brand-specific decision. Dowerah is direct that the analyst's own conviction is the precondition for everyone else's. "You yourself have to be convinced first. If you are not convinced, your leaders won't be," he says. "That convincing will come from the depth of study you do. Move beyond platforms. Move beyond sources. Just go deeper into the consumer."