Consumer insights are the interpretation and analysis of consumers' behavior, expectations, or needs. They reveal what your customers feel or think of your brand, what they expect to get when they pay for your product or service and why they behave in certain ways before or after their purchase. This article clarifies the importance of customer insights for businesses and explains how to get them.
Why are consumer insights important?
Here is the simple answer: It works like a compass for businesses and brands. Consumer insights show you the direction to allocate your future resources and efforts.
- Businesses can use the data to customize their product or service to their customers' preferences, needs, or expectations.
- Consumer insights are a source of inspiration for businesses to expand, refine or invent products or services.
- They help with designing or redesigning buyer personas as well as improving consumer journey. A better consumer journey makes a better consumer experience and that causes a higher revenue generation.
- Consumer insights help you target specific promotions to the customers most likely to use them.
- It's easier to precisely forecast the inventory a brand might need with the help of customer insights.
- The data shows if the businesses are in a well-performing market and whether or not they need to change it.
- Last but not the least, customer insights are crucial for every brand to beat their competitors.
Also read: How Consumer Insights Help Your Business Grow
Value of consumer insights for brands
Andy Mantis of Mastercard Advisors states:
"More and more companies are hungry for insights because its harder and harder to compete and with so little organic growth in the economy and market, a lot of success is about gaining share or stealing shares and getting closer to your customers and treating them in a way that resonates is more and more important."
When it comes to customers, it's a gamble to make decisions based on gut feelings and guesstimates. It would be a waste of time and resources to rely on intuitions instead of data.
Consumer insights help brands validate their decisions with data and evidence coming from people who are going to choose your product among countless options in the market.
Also read: Seven Consumer Research Methods; 2022 Version
How to get consumer insights?
It doesn't matter how many people you have access to. You only need to get information from the right people. It can be a group of 10 people, but they have to be able to answer your questions. They need to be from your target audience, otherwise, the data will not be of help.
Collecting customer insights takes two main steps:
- Verbal or written conversation with customers
- Interpret and analyze data
Getting information from consumers can take place in different formats. You can interview them in a focus group, send them surveys via email, or have an online chat with them.
However, in order to utilize consumer insights, the team must have the right tools, skills and the right technology for data interpretation.
You may be interested in: Product Sampling; Tried and Trusted Method to Conduct Consumer Insights Research
Key takeaways
- Benefits of using consumer insights are such as product refinement, buyer personas redesign, customer experience improvement, inventory forecast, and market performance evaluation.
- In a competitive market, role of consumer insights is outstanding. It helps brands get closer to customers and gain or steal share in the market.
- To get consumer insights, you need the right people, a medium of conversation, tools and skills for data interpretation.
Read more: Differences Between Market Research and Consumer Insights Research; Summarized and Simplified
