By Julia Schaefer
Empathy, Insights and Creativity is Vital for Consumer Research
While Big Data is all the rage, the art of storytelling and creativity should still remain at the forefront of any marketing strategy.
At the Marketing Week Live conference in London this past March, CMO of direct-to-consumer mattress brand Eve communicated her fears around the next generation of marketers who she feels lack intuition and instinct.
Gab Thomson, Chief customer officer at fashion brand Boden, agreed marketers heavily rely on data to endorse their decision. However, Thomson believes that it’s actually intuition, emotion, empathy and storytelling that should be really important to most brands.
“It worries me that is going to be a lost art if you come back in 10 years’ time,” he said. “Data is fantastic and you have to understand it, learn it and love it, but not at the expense of being able to empathize with your customers and tell a good story.”
Consumer Relationships and Research
Research helps build and strengthen consumer relationships by providing companies with authentic and unbiased insights. As products and services have become a commodity, companies need to listen to their customers and connect with them to understand their product roadmap, functionality and enhance the user experience.
Consumer Research Solutions
When doing consumer research, it is extremely valuable to understand customer needs early in development. Creating a Voice of Customer (VOC) program can gather and analyze customer insights and enable you to improve your customer experience and deliver positive business outcomes.
Insight communities are made up of a cross section of customers, employees, shareholders, etc. and provide ongoing feedback through closed online environments or panels. Online research methods like surveys to garner qualitative and quantitative insights. Insight communities work closely with C-level executives, marketing and product teams to inform business leaders of challenges and opportunities.
Consumer Research Should Be Part of Your Business Strategy
InterQ Research understands that market research will help inform your business strategy and needs to go hand in hand with Big Data. Data alone doesn’t suffice. Market research aims to find and understand the “why.” Any company selling products or services can greatly benefit from understanding qualitative customer insights to help drive growth and innovation. This can include person-to-person market research or focus groups, which all starts with the right qualitative recruiting.
Unlike a sales team, the market research industry can only have a return-on-investment figure if companies know how to effectively use the data. The ROI on research can have a huge impact on a company’s bottom line and will help inform brand concepts, messaging and advertising copy to ensure that your brand stands out from the competition.
It’s crucial for successful marketers to have experience in both data and creativity because innovation is often driven by a customer need that marketers aren’t even aware of yet.
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