Consumer insights: What they are and how to use them

Have you ever wondered how big brands create blockbuster ads? Or how your favorite snack brand landed on that new hit flavor?  What about how that food delivery app created its user friendly design? 

With most Americans being exposed to around 4,000 to 10,000 ads a day and 95% of product launches tending to fail, it certainly isn’t an easy feat for brands to stand out from the crowd or make a hit. To do that, you need consumer insights.

In this article, we’ll cover what consumer insights are, the benefits, types and some examples to help you better understand why it’s such an important tool for brands.

Consumer insights are used to collect information about consumers that businesses use to better serve them. This is typically done through surveys that are targeted towards their consumer, and is more beneficial the earlier you bring it into the process. 

Big brands and businesses of all industries can use consumer insights to make better business decisions and get the answers to big “why’s” behind human behavior.    

For example, say you’re revisiting your ad spend and want to find out where your target consumers recall seeing you the most. You can use consumer insights to get a quick pulse check that asks a variety of questions like, “Which social media platforms have you seen us on?” or “How did you hear about us?” If you see Instagram is in the majority of the responses, it’s probably best to reallocate more of your advertising budget there if you’re looking to optimize for where your audience is.         

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Let’s dive deeper into the benefits of consumer insights:

The benefits of consumer insights

“Can you think of a better way to show your consumer you understand them than by being present in the most relevant areas of their lives?” 

- Lauren Stafford-Webb, CMO at SoFi

Consumer insights will help you know your consumer

Having an understanding of what your target consumer wants, needs and struggles with is key for brands. The deeper you’re able to get into the minds of consumers, the better you’ll be able to communicate with them and understand any gaps they’re experiencing — which influences how you position your messaging and concepts.    

If you don’t take the time to understand your consumer through insights, chances are much higher that you’ll miss the mark and flop in market.

Consumer insights will help you improve your ad, innovation or experience

Using consumer insights to inform business decisions reduces the risks and costs involved in creating a new product or advertisement, creating better user experiences, spotting upcoming trends and more.

By researching how people respond to ideas or situations, you can see what they tend to react positively or negatively to. And if you’re researching early enough, this gives you the opportunity to iterate or address any issues. 

This can be something as small as getting a gauge on your employees (think: quarterly employee satisfaction surveys) or spot any hiccups in user's experience while navigating your new app. All of these things are where consumer insights come into play to give you information that will help you make the right business decisions. 

And in the advertising and innovation realm, some consumer insights tools can even give you the opportunity to create learnings over time.

“I always call it getting a head start. It's going to make your outcome better. No one's going to care that you got to a great outcome because you used what people did previously and it wasn't all new to the world thinking. No one cares. They just care about the outcome. Give yourself the head start.” 

- Matt Cahill, Senior Director, Consumer Insights Activation at McDonald's

This means that you’re able to capture all of the learnings you’ve gathered from your consumers in one place. Why is this so important? Because this means that you’ll be able to look across the data to see what you already know works or doesn’t work, so you can more easily create ads, products and experiences they love.

Consumer insights will help you obtain better understandings

Consumer insights can also be used to tackle big picture things like understanding why people behave the way they do in certain social settings or cultures. This is more in the realm of exploratory research and isn’t based on numbers or stimuli, but by way of in-depth interviews or focus groups to figure out what makes people tick.

In a similar vein, consumer insights can also help your business better understand its in market activity, whether it be sales or brand related. Understanding these pieces can help your business calibrate your go-to-market efforts and attributions — something a lot of businesses struggle with. 

Now let’s get into the different types of consumer insights.

There are two main types of consumer insights, qualitative and quantitative.  

1. Qualitative - Qualitative consumer insights are all about collecting descriptive data (not numbers or statistics) to understand the “why” behind behaviors, beliefs and motivations. This type of research typically involves focus groups, interviews and simple observation.

2. Quantitative - Quantitative consumer insights relies on numerical data to come to a conclusion or hypothesis. This type of research typically involves surveys, experiments and questionnaires. 

There are many types of insights that stem from these two buckets that narrow in on specific queries or opportunities businesses are in search of. Here’s a few examples: 

• Demographic insights: These explore how people of a certain gender, religion, age group, ethnic background, etc. respond to stimuli. 

• Brand perception insights: These explore how your brand is perceived or viewed by a specific demographic or consumer.  

• Purchasing data insights: These can analyze consumers’ purchasing behaviors and amount spent to inform business decisions. 

• Online reviews insights: These allow businesses to (typically publicly) hear how people feel about their product or service, straight from consumers.  

If you’re looking to better understand how to use demographic insights, brand perception and purchasing insights to make better business decisions, learn how Zappi can help. 

Now that you know the two main forms of research used in consumer insights as well as some examples, how do you find the right consumer insights tools you need?

Step 1: Set a research goal

To find the type of consumer insights tools that are right for your business, you need to first determine what you’re looking to achieve. 

Are you looking to optimize ad or innovation concepts? Do you need quick insights to answer a specific question on the fly? Are you looking to conduct more exploratory research? Determining the questions you want answers to will help you narrow down the specific types of consumer insights tools you need.  

Step 2: Identify the right metrics 

…and the type of insights you’ll use to get the answers to your queries. For example, if you’re trying to determine how one of your products will perform in a new country, demographic insights and brand perception could be useful areas to focus on. (See full list in section above)  

Step 3: Choose the research method 

Once you’ve solidified your needs in steps one and two, it’s time to choose your research method! The research method you use will depend on what your research goal is. For example, if you’re looking for that breakthrough opportunity mentioned above, you should look at survey research or interviews to help you hear straight from your potential consumer.  

Step 4: Select a research goal

With your goals, metrics and method in place, you now have to find the right consumer insights tool to solve for these needs. And there’s a plethora to choose from! 

Keeping with the same example in step two, if you’re looking to see whether a new product will successfully break through in a new country for your brand, platforms like Zappi’s Innovation System can help you nurture and optimize your product ideas based on how actual consumers in your target region respond.

Step 5: Conduct unbiased research

Now you can launch your research with all of your criteria set on your consumer insights tool of choice. Some best practices to keep in mind here to make sure the tools you use allow for unbiased research, that you keep a record of your resources and data, and of course derive learnings from the data that you can effectively communicate more broadly.  

Step 6: Analyze the results

Once your results come in, take the time to go through the data to analyze how consumers have responded. Are there clear areas for improvement? What did they like or not like? Did they seem largely receptive to the idea? Is there anything they would change? 

Step 7: Report on the findings 

This is what you take to stakeholders. They want to hear what the next move is and what needs to be done to ensure the product is a hit (backed by the “why” in your findings). 

Step 8: Make recommendations based on the data

Based on how consumers reacted, your report will help the business make informed decisions on next steps. But remember, if you’re the one presenting the report, you're the voice of the consumer! So be sure to communicate what the data means so their wants and needs are accurately represented. 

That’s a simplified run through of the steps to find consumer insights. Now let’s walk through some of the different consumer insights tools that can help:

With more than 1,300 consumer insights vendors on the market today, there are certainly a lot of options to choose from. But if you know what you’re trying to accomplish, it can be easier to sift through to find the right tools for your brand. 

Here, we’ll focus on three common areas of consumer insights (advertising and innovation, trend spotting and UX) and some helpful tools to solve for those areas.  

Zappi: Ad and Innovation Systems

Whether you’re trying to pinpoint what works or doesn’t work for your consumers, test out an idea or concept, iterate on a storyboard for an ad or a new product packaging, Zappi’s advertising and innovation systems help you better understand your consumer so you can be sure you’re creating something they’ll love. 

"Zappi is a very efficient platform for agile learning. It has struck the right balance of technical simplicity and flexible customization as well as being really easy to handle reporting."

- Jessica Cao, Global Consumer Insights, Centrum innovation lead, GSK Consumer Healthcare

Zappi uses an agile online platform to run and store all of your consumer insights research — getting you results in an average of 12 hours. The platform is also very easy to use, providing automatically populated charts as your data comes in, any relevant themes seen across responses, consumer verbatims, and direct comparisons of key metrics by country, category, brand and other relevant benchmarks. 

And in addition to helping you create a better product or ad, Zappi is the only agile market research platform that allows you to quickly and easily look across your research to learn what typically works for you and what doesn’t, making you smarter the more you use it.

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"A big benefit of the platform is being able to look back and see what worked and what didn't and theme the learning to focus on better product options in the future. We have learnings we can now apply and get smarter." 

- Amanda Addison, Senior Manager, US Menu Insights, McDonald’s

Qualtrics: UX research

If you’re looking to learn more about how consumers view their experience with your brand, Qualtrics offers an excellent experiential insights tool. And if you have consumers interacting with your brand online, UX research is a must-have tool for your team.

Their UX research software allows you to create surveys targeted at your consumer to help determine what makes an ideal user experience for them, giving you direct feedback and the ability to customize for your needs. 

Black Swan Data: Trendscope

If you’re looking to identify emerging trends, Black Swan Data’s Trendscope offers a great solution. By analyzing online social conversations, their Trendscope tool is able to predict new topics of interest and new trends your consumers are gravitating towards. 

This is a great place to start when your organization is looking to tap into short-term growth or find breakthrough ideas. After all, trends can come and go so quickly, that if you miss the window you may be missing out on a major opportunity for growth.

That’s our short list of top consumer insights tools. Now let’s walk through some examples from actual brands who’ve seen success with the help of consumer insights. 

Check out how these leading brands found success with the help of consumer insights:

Cheetos

In 2020, Cheetos wanted to bring attention to its new snack, Cheetos Popcorn. The brand determined the Super Bowl, one of the biggest advertising events of the year, would be a great time to shout about it.

What happened: The team created four rough drafts of the ads using animation to find the right balance of humor and relevance to resonate with consumers and make the ad stand out — which included a partnership with M.C. Hammer. 

By using consumer insights to test the ads, they found consumers understood and appreciated the uniqueness of their idea and loved how the idea of leaving orange dust on fingers was brought to life through M.C. Hammer’s “Can’t Touch This.”

Why it worked: By analyzing consumers' reaction in the second-by-second emoji analysis and open-ended responses, the team reviewed where consumers reacted more positively and negatively in order to optimize the ads. They were then able to gather the best parts from each version to create a single, best version to bring to consumers. 

This resulted in an ad that drove high ROI at the Super Bowl and even won an award at Cannes!

How this can work for you: If you’re in the early stages of developing an ad for your brand, it’s worth investing in consumer insights solutions like Zappi Amplify Ad System. By bringing consumer insights into your ad development process like Cheetos, you’ll be able to learn what works and what isn’t working with consumers to help you optimize and move forward with winning elements — ensuring you'll deliver an ad that they’ll love.

McDonald’s 

McDonald’s was looking to create a new limited time flavor for their ever-popular McFlurry. Their creative team had a plethora of ideas to work with, but wanted to make sure they moved forward with the right one.

What happened: Before getting too far along in the development process, which would cause changes to get costly, the team decided to use Zappi’s Innovation System to run rough sketches by consumers for initial feedback and gauge which flavors they’d be more interested in. 

  Why it worked: All of the ideas scored highly for trial potential (or the likelihood of consumers trying the product), a crucial metric for a limited-time flavor. The team was also able to review data on the breakthrough potential of each concept to understand how well it would cut through the noise in the market, which resulted in two winning flavors: turtle and peanut butter.

The team was then able to move forward and share these two new flavors with stakeholders, alongside their findings, confident that they would be a success (and they were!). 

How this can work for you: Similar to testing an ad concept, by using consumer insights to test out rough product ideas with your target consumer can set you up for success in the long run. Using consumer insights this way can help you narrow down the list of ideas you’re working with, backed by true consumer data, so that you only take the top contenders to stakeholders.

Consumer insights are a game changing tool for brands who are looking to gain a better understanding of their consumers, especially at the start of developing a new ad or innovation. 

By using consumer insights, brands can more confidently take ideas to stakeholders and ultimately to market with much less risk involved. 

Use the tips in this article to innovate the products, ads and experiences your target market will love.