We get asked all the time why insight is so important, and it’s something we know plenty about. So it’s time to share a little bit of what we know.
Creative meetings can sometimes be littered with jargon that does nothing to help demystify conversations about brands attracting their target audience. As a market research company, we like to keep things simple and on the level.
Keep reading, and we’ll tell you what you need to know.
What Are Consumer Insights?
Information. That’s what they are, and specifically about audiences brands want to attract. So, if you’re a brand that wants to attract a younger audience, here’s a little taster of what consumer insights will tell you:
- What your audience likes/dislikes/worries about
- What their spending habits are
- What’s important to them
- How your brand stacks up with consumers against your competition
- What their consumer journey at every step of their journey with your brand
- Where your audience spends time online and what they watch
- What words do they use to find your products
Or, as the dictionary puts it, insight is to gain an accurate and deep understanding of a person, product or issue. That’s pretty much it in a nutshell.
How Can Brands Use Consumer Insights?
By knowing and understanding audience behaviours, brands can develop more targeted marketing strategies and offer audiences products and services they actually want.
They can also tailor their messages, so they resonate with their audience’s values and belief systems. Consumer insights mean brands can create customer journey maps and personas for their target audience.
Once a brand has insight into how their target market behaves, thinks. What it believes in, entire marketing spends can be reconfigured to justify spending that will actually see an ROI because there’s no shooting in the dark, no guesswork.
Think of it as an insurance policy that will help your brand stay ahead of the competition and not get left behind when new trends and behaviours emerge or change. But, of course, you’ll be setting trends instead!
Having consumer insights means brands can also improve their customer experience offer, which in turn has the potential to generate more revenue.
There’s no point in brands launching products or awareness campaigns without any consumer insight. It’s like throwing jelly at the wall. Consumer insights help brands reach their audience, but they also help brands find out if there’s even a need for those products in the first place and whether any prototypes you already have are up to the mark or not.
Some of our favourite brands launched products using consumer insights. For example, Barbour Beacon and its Outside to Outsiders campaign used consumer insight to attract a new Gen Z audience looking to make their own journeys in life.
Consumer Insights: Algorithms vs People
There are thousands of blogs about the importance of algorithms and data and how brands can’t manage without them. There are also masses of software brands that can invest in to give them consumer insights.
While we certainly see the value of all this, we also see and experience the value of real-live actual people telling us what they think too, and our customers agree.
The value of data to assess campaign successes cannot be understated, but neither can give brands insights into their target audience. We have SELFHOOD. It’s a 2,000+ cohort of U30s. They’re social natives who help brands uncover insights, co-create ideas and products and more.
It Doesn’t Have to be Complicated
Consumer insights are the ideal way for brands to create personalised marketing campaigns to attract new customers. It’s how you can put your customers at the heart of all your campaigns and marketing strategies.
Having insights means you and your chosen consumer insight company can work hand-in-hand to identify key customer behaviours and buying patterns before creating personalised and bespoke campaigns.
Check out how we told the New Balance story while aligning it with Gen Z and the changing nature of football and what it means to them.
