Customer Insights: Why you need them?
Suppose you wish your product or service to be successful. In that case, your product or service should be well-located in the market to solve a problem, seize an opportunity or create value for customers. The question is, “How would you position your product or service correctly in the market?”. To do that, you need to have your audiences’ insights and understand what their need or expectation is. Last week I joined a seminar with Julie Vander Kloet. She works as a senior manager (consumer Insights) with Weston Foods. She shared handy information about why understanding insight is important and how you can have customer insights.
Who is Julie?
Julie a strategist, leader, researcher, and storyteller in consumer insights who has spent over 11years.
Learning about consumer behaviour and insights. She is currently leading an insight team at Weston Foods: a company that serves its customers in two divisions, foodservice and retail, making bread, rolls, cupcakes,
donuts, biscuits, cakes, pies, cones and wafers, artisan baked goods and more. Some of its brands include Wonder, Ace Bakery and Country Harvest.
What is the insight team doing?
Weston Food’s insight team is responsible for understanding how consumers use a product and how they feel about it. They are organizing innovation sessions which are team sessions to discuss possible innovations or new ideas for products or services; this is like what other companies call “Ideation sessions.” They use Weston’s resources to create and develop and test a product; this is something that most companies with a lower budget cannot do. Usually, companies that cannot have an insight team have to depend on third parties for marketing research and market insights. In Weston’s case, with their vast resources, they can correctly utilize them to find out information and trends about customers and products that not many others can easily copy or replicate.
Why is the insights team critical?
Now, insights have become valuable in any area. The insights team’s current role is more of a consulting role, where the team is collaborating on strategy and the company is being proactive. Insights teams should have the strategic vision to unearth powerful insights that tell us how best to change and influence customer behaviour. For the insights team, it is all about analyzing data to understand your audience better, helping you take better steps about how, when and what to sell them. The insights team allows the company to try to move forward and to think about the future. Insights works alongside other departments such as marketing, sales and product development.
A successful example and an unsuccessful example for using insights
An excellent example of insights being used is Lady Gaga’s recent Oreos. The flavour is the same, but the colours and branding make it new and exciting. Sometimes insights are good, but new products still can be failed. For instance, Weston Foods introduced Harvest Bakes, which was intended to be a snacking item. The item failed, though, due to a lack of marketing support and proper merchandising. The insight and product were both good, but it still failed. Products can fail for a lot of reasons. In this case, the item was placed beside the bread but was intended to be a snacking item. This incorrect location in stores hurt the product to the point of failure.
How should marketers present insights/data?
With insight research and presentations, it’s essential to get to the main idea. A lot of executives don’t want an extended presentation to have the information. They instead prefer a clean, quick, concise presentation that includes the core information. Information should be prioritized and streamlined, so the executive gets the main idea and key points only.
In the end, this was a very eye-opening experience to be able to see how a massive company works to develop and expand their products by understanding all that data that is around us.
