Consumer and Market Insights

Consumer/customer insights has become a common job description and required skill set for researchers and many UX roles. But what are customer and market insights and why is it so confusing to understand what role this plays in organizations?

Let’s dig into what consumer (and market) insights are, why they are critical for developing business strategies, and how to become an insights pro.

WHAT ARE INSIGHTS?

Basically, insights are foundational elements of intelligence that allow executives, managers, and teams to make effective decisions for business success.

If you ask Microsoft’s Copilot what are consumer insights, it spits out the following definition:

Consumer insights merge quantitative and qualitative data from various sources, including website metrics, social media mentions, market research, and customer analytics. By analyzing this data, businesses gain a granular understanding of customer needs and behavior.

Copilot notes market research as:

Market insights are the result of deep understanding of a market and its components. Businesses use these insights to make informed decisions and drive growth. They are typically uncovered through research and data analysis, revealing sometimes hidden or quick-moving truths about the market.

Zendesk defines consumer insights as:

Consumer insights (or customer insights) present information about behaviors, trends, and motivations for specific groups of buyers. This data provides an in-depth look at how consumers interact with your marketing content, sales team, support representatives, and product. With this critical knowledge, companies have a strong foundation for deciding what to pursue as an organization.

So basically, insights are the output of a deliberate, ongoing, and interpretative process of data collection to support business planning and decision making. As Sun Tzu noted:

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.

Simply, a consumer insights professional is part detective, part analyst, and part politician. As a detective the first job is to understand what your client wants and then find the data. Then, do the analysis including perceiving the decision maker’s biases. Follow-up analysis with a good rebuttal of decision-maker objections, and effectively answer valid objections. As a politician, a good analyst spots things before others. She survives by becoming very persuasive and able to defend her conclusions well.

INSIGHT SOURCES

The two main sources of insights are quantitative and qualitative data; primary and secondary. In addition, other data sources which should be collected, examined, interpreted, and shared on a continuous basis are:

  • Online reviews

  • Social media mentions

  • Demographic data

  • Behavioral insights

  • Survey responses

  • User experience insights (e.g., surveys, warranty data, call logs, service data)

  • Trend tracking (e.g., political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental)

  • Industry publications

  • Competitor annual reports

  • Regional and national news media

  • Data analytics (internal and external)

  • Industry organizations

  • Conferences and shows

  • Field sales and service teams

A good insight team will continually monitor and track key information from these and other sources. The intelligence will be consolidated into easily digestible forms of information for executives and teams. Teams should share insights with a variety of communication forums on a regular basis; for example;

  • Internal blogs

  • Reports

  • Presentations

  • Videos

  • Email blasts/newsletters

  • Dashboards

Be careful if your organization is extremely siloed and has multiple “intelligence” departments. When an organization has multiple insight departments it is difficult to clearly understand what is happening. And when the insights are not shared and discussed on a regular basis, the organization suffers. Remember 9/11? Make friends with your colleagues who gather insights and if possible, analyze and share conclusions together for a full, 360-degree perspective.

INSIGHT BENEFITS

All businesses need to gather a variety of market and consumer insights to understand the health of their business, industry, customers, and competition. In addition, insights are critical for identifying and exploiting opportunities before competitors. A robust insights function is the critical intelligence business leaders need to guide operations. Think of insights as the intelligence to help generals make the best strategies and allow front-line managers to develop effective tactics to achieve organizational goals. The following are several areas where insights are valuable.

  • Strategic Decisions: Answer crucial questions like why sales are down for a specific product, how to succeed in a new target market, and how your brand is perceived.

  • Product Improvements: Shape services and products around customer preferences.

  • Customer Profiles: Construct detailed customer profiles and journey maps.

  • Personalization: Personalize messaging and improve the overall customer experience.

INSIGHT SKILLS

A key trait of insight professionals is inquisitiveness. It is the desire to learn, dig, learn, dig, and repeat. It is the excitement of connecting the various puzzle pieces to form a cohesive and logical story and uncover areas to excite your customers, entice competitor customers, and develop new advantages.

Many insight pros see themselves as investigative reporters or intelligence analysts within an organization. The following definition of an intelligence analyst can be used for an insight professional (Careexplorer, 2024):

An intelligent analyst specializes in leveraging data analysis, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and advanced computational techniques to extract meaningful insights and patterns from large sets of data.

Their primary responsibility involves gathering, processing, and interpreting complex data sets to provide actionable recommendations and strategic insights for organizations.

Successful insight pros continuously examine internal sources of sales data, customer feedback, service and warranty data, marketing analytics, and ongoing conversations with every area of the organization. In addition, external data is continually analyzed and collected to ensure new competitive activities, emerging trends or technology, or socio-economic changes are being tracked. The role is never boring, no two days are the same, and provides value to all areas of the organization.

The following are foundational skills for insight professionals, but not limited:

  • Quantitative research: ability to design and program online surveys in software such as Qualtrics or Alchemer.

  • Qualitative research: interviewing and moderating skills, discussion guide design, ethnography, etc.

  • Data analytics: strong Excel, SPSS, Tableau and other data tools to analyze large sets of data; SQL, Python or R programming skills are becoming required.

  • Storytelling: the ability to share insights in an engaging format, beyond just boring reports or Powerpoint presentations; video and audio editing software, visual design, personas, user journey maps, storyboards, etc.

 The 5Cs

As a product planner and product manager, I have always had a dual role as both a strategist and insights professional. Most of the organizations I have worked with had no formal insights team when I joined, so I developed internal functions to ensure our strategic planning decisions were based on data and had strong competitive advantages based on a thorough understanding of competitors and markets. In my career I used the 5Cs to guide my insights journey:

Continuous: it never ends and must be ongoing, if you cannot conduct formal research, you better be talking to internal sales and service teams, interacting with call center agents, and gathering all the internal and external data available – insights never stop.

Collaborative: you should not be an island. Insight pros are constantly talking to internal teams, retailers, and customers. Gathering a variety of perspectives from all corners of the business landscape (inside and outside) will allow you to triangulate all the various puzzle pieces into a logical story.

Comprehensive: as discussed above, insights come from many different sources, so insight pros need to be continuously reviewing a variety of sources both online, in-person, and via traditional media such as magazines, newspapers, and the latest scholarly writings (make Google Scholar your friend).

Creative: the fun part of being an insights pro is using creativity during each stage of collecting, analyzing, interpreting, and communicating findings. Every part of the process can be done in a variety of ways, especially how things are communicated to different stakeholders.

Conscious: insights gathering and the entire process must be a conscious decision and accepted activity within the organization. Decisions should not be made on guesses, assumptions, nor hunches.

CONCLUSION

The key benefits of insights are better decision making and organizational alignment. Ensuring every level of the organization has a deep and wide understanding of the business, competitive landscape, and areas of opportunities ensure decisions are made from “data” rather than guesses or assumptions. The benefits of a formal insights function are:

  • Informed decision-making: Market insights provide valuable information about consumer behaviors, preferences, and trends. This knowledge is essential for making informed decisions about product development, marketing strategies, pricing, and more.

  • Competitive advantage: Understanding the market better than competitors offers a significant edge. Insights can reveal gaps in the market, emerging trends, or areas where competitors underperform, allowing businesses to capitalize on these opportunities.

  • Customer understanding: Insights help businesses understand their customers more profoundly, leading to improved customer experiences, targeted marketing, and products/services that better meet customer needs.

  • Risk management: Insights enable businesses to anticipate and respond to market changes and challenges, reducing risks associated with new product launches, market-entry, and other strategic moves.

  • Innovation and growth: Insights spark innovation by highlighting new market opportunities or underserved customer needs, guiding businesses in diversifying their offerings or entering new markets.

  • Resource optimization: By understanding market dynamics, businesses can allocate resources more effectively, focusing on high-potential areas and reducing waste in less promising ones.

  • Performance benchmarking: Knowledge enables businesses to benchmark their performance against industry standards or competitors, identifying areas for improvement and growth.

In summary, market insights empower businesses to navigate complex landscapes, adapt, and thrive in a competitive environment. As Zendesk notes:

Consumer insights improve your business, personalize the customer experience, and beat your competition.

If your organization does not have a formal, coordinated insights function, it is like flying an airplane without GPS. You might make it to your destination, but the risks will be high. Similarly, to taking the time to stop and ask directions, insight functions help avoid wasting resources and worse, losing the game of business.

Stop thinking you know more than your customers or competition. Guessing and assumptions will only get you so far. Your decisions need to be supported by data and multiple sources of information. Don’t fly blind.

Even if after reviewing all the insights you still make the same decisions, you will have the confidence that you are on the right path. Without analyzing all the available information, the chances of poor or negative growth and revenue is highly probable. Why chance your organization’s future on guesses? Gather, analyze, and apply high-quality customer and market insights for intelligent decision making, to develop lifetime customer loyalty, and a wide and profitable moat around your organization.

References

What are consumer insights?, Zendesk Blog, https://www.zendesk.com/blog/consumer-insights/

What does an intelligence analyst do?, CareerExplorer, https://www.careerexplorer.com/careers/intelligence-analyst/

How to make war by James F. Dunnigan