Who are your customers, and why would they buy a product like yours? Or — if you’re having trouble staying on grocery store shelves — why might they NOT be buying it, and how can you change that?
It’s easy to assume you’ve got your customers figured out, but you don’t know the full story until you research. Growth is one thing; maintaining your hard-earned market share is another. You might know what makes people bite, but not what makes them keep coming back for more.
If once-interested customers are slipping away, or they’re just not flocking to your product display like you expected, you might need to try harder to get inside their heads. In other words, it’s time for customer insights analysis.
While market research focuses on general trends within a given industry, customer insights and analytics efforts focus on how people interact with your specific brand. Strong consumer insights data is anything that you can actually act upon to save money, broaden your reach, or garner more loyalty from your shoppers.
Insights should be concrete and actionable — ideally, transformative. You could be looking at consumer spending data, shopper behaviors and attitudes data, generational trends, or something else, but the “insights” part shows up when you let this data inspire your next action or inform your long-term strategy.
Functioning as a roadmap to guide business decisions, consumer market insights should inform every stage of the product lifecycle, not just a small slice like pricing strategies. If the insights you glean from the data surprise you, that’s even better — you might be onto something that your competitors haven’t discovered yet.
Are you an emerging brand? Or a legacy brand? In the customer insights retail world, this question is moot. That’s because — these days especially — it pays to act like an emerging brand, even if you’re as old as Kikkoman Soy Sauce.
This is an era where product development trends are changing fast and the product launch process is getting shorter and shorter. In many ways, emerging and legacy brands are in the same boat. If you’re counting on familiarity alone to save you, this attitude could cost you your coveted shelf space.
You need to rev up your consumer product testing to the speed at which your customers’ preferences change (somewhere close to the speed of light). Agile product testing, which gives you actionable data at the rate you need it, is possible thanks to tech-enabled in-home usage testing (IHUT) platforms like Highlight.
Let’s take a look at how to use customer insights to save money and keep shoppers coming back.
How much are your customers willing to spend on your product? Use insights like consumer spending data to get this down to the penny — and then don’t charge a cent less.
It’s easy to assume that a lower price point will make you stand out. However, a lot of the time, something else will. Highlight recently helped Country Luau Spirits increase customer excitement around their canned cocktails with data to inform their package design and flavor names — NOT by lowering their prices.
So, don’t cut prices if you don’t have to! Let the data point out a better way to stay on the shelves.
Your customers are showing interest in ads for your product on social media, but they usually don’t purchase the first time they click on an ad. Or maybe your discounts aren’t hitting like you thought they might. With consumer behavior insights, you can determine:
Sometimes there are emotional motivators that prompt people to buy. People can be motivated by fear of missing out (FOMO), a desire to feel comfortable, or the sense of being special for getting a good deal. If you use customer insights and analytics to find these motivators, you can capitalize on them.
Industries like fashion are extremely trend-driven, and concept testing is a vital starting point for physical product development. Apparel brands can use consumer behavior insights to improve their wear testing and avoid having large amounts of product end up in landfills.
For skincare and wellness brands, spot-on messaging is key. Are your customers looking for specific benefits like skin tightening or gut health? Your research will point to the things that will resonate most with people, and you can make sure to highlight these on the packaging and in your ads.
Don’t flail around in the dark — use data to shed light on your strategy. Your marketing budget will thank you!
Perhaps you’re a clothing brand and some of your more grandiose dresses aren’t selling well. However, a certain subset of buyers — particularly artistic types who are into live music and dancing — LOVE them. Instead of discontinuing the underselling dresses, find more artsy dancers to show the ads to.
People with unique tastes often have a hard time finding brands that really speak to them. When a company shows them exactly what they’re looking for, they feel seen, and their appreciation turns them into loyal buyers and brand champions.
Technology makes it easy to target specific audiences and hyper-personalize at scale. You can have artificial intelligence sift through consumer behavioral data in real time, giving you a stream of insights about who might want those snakeskin high-heeled clogs, oversized cowgirl belts, and swing dresses covered in pictures of taco cats.
Also, with a curated community of testers like Highlight’s, you can hyper-target your tester audience to determine who your biggest fans are and filter by extremely granular criteria like favorite bands and TV shows. Highlight regularly assembles audiences that correspond to less than 3% of the general population.
For everyone who wants to try something new, there’s someone who just wants the same old, same old — no changes whatsoever. How can you satisfy both types of people?
It may be a daunting task, but at least you can make sure to only incorporate changes that have been thoroughly vetted by your target customer base. This practice, known as alienation testing, is essential for legacy brands that are trying to keep up with the times without disappointing people who love the old product more than anything.
Skipping alienation testing risks pushing your most committed purchasers into the hands of other brands. It’s not a risk worth taking.
The insights you should be focusing on are the ones that will have a transformative impact on your product strategy. Here are a few techniques that help get you those insights:
Customer insights can be either quantitative or qualitative (i.e., countable or non-countable). Open-ended (qualitative) data can be very powerful because it allows you to get more in-depth and unexpected insights. Highlight has built an entire business model around getting the most relevant, detailed qualitative data.
Creativity pays huge dividends. To understand how its testers really felt, one popular coconut water brand asked customers to write “love letters” or “breakup letters” to the product being tested, depending on whether they liked it or not. The words the testers chose provided greater depth and a high level of qualitative honesty to the brand’s sentiment analysis.
Trying to be the All-Seeing Eye with respect to your customers can quickly lead to data overload. (Come to think of it, how does the All-Seeing Eye avoid analysis paralysis? But we digress.)
Inconsistent, inaccurate, and just plain irrelevant data can set you back even further, wasting the effort you put into consumer insights data collection. Many companies that attempt DIY customer insights analysis can’t build a representative testing audience or ensure high levels of test completion, and they also have difficulty organizing the data that comes in.
Highlight helps you reduce the trial and error that could put your product development on the wrong track. With digital tools that enable precision marketing and AI-powered algorithms that streamline data processing and analytics, Highlight’s tech-enabled offering turbo-charges concept testing and insight discovery.
Consumer insights and analytics will be streaming into your inbox almost as soon as you sign up for IHUT. From concept testing to sensory testing to alienation testing, the information you need will be there in a heartbeat, ready to inform your next strategy and help you market your products in the most cost-effective way.