Deploying Insights to Benefit Innovation
In short, putting a focus on consumer insights, business, competitive and market intelligence, creates a more actionable and scientific direction for deploying insights to benefit innovation’s research and development efforts. From mapping out the consumer journey to measuring key performance indicators, insights plays a key role in innovation. We asked Gemini to identify some of those key insights advantages.
1. Identifying Opportunities and Needs
- Uncovering unmet needs: Consumer insights help businesses understand the pain points, frustrations, and unmet needs of their target audience. By analyzing consumer behavior, preferences, and feedback, companies can identify gaps in the market and opportunities for new products or services that address specific consumer demands.
- Understanding motivations: Delving into the “why” behind consumer actions reveals the underlying motivations driving their choices. This understanding allows companies to develop innovations that align with those motivations, increasing the likelihood of adoption and success.
2. Guiding Product Development
- Informing design and features: Insights into consumer preferences and usage patterns guide the design and development of new products. Understanding what features and functionalities are most valued by consumers enables companies to create products that resonate with their target audience, enhancing the likelihood of market success.
- Optimizing user experience: Consumer insights provide a deep understanding of the customer journey and the factors that contribute to a positive or negative experience. By incorporating these insights into the product development process, companies can design products that offer superior user experience, leading to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.
3. Reducing Risk and Uncertainty
- Validating ideas: Consumer insights help validate or invalidate initial product ideas. By testing concepts and prototypes with target consumers, businesses can gather feedback and refine their offerings before investing heavily in development and launch.
- Making informed decisions: Launching a new product involves significant investment and risk. Consumer insights reduce this risk by providing data-driven evidence of market demand and consumer preferences. This information helps companies make informed decisions, prioritize development efforts, and allocate resources more effectively, increasing the chances of a successful product launch.
4. Driving Differentiation and Growth
- Inspiring innovation: Consumer insights inspire innovation by revealing emerging trends, preferences, and behaviors. This knowledge enables companies to develop unique and innovative products that stand out from competitors. Differentiation based on consumer insights helps create a competitive edge and drives brand loyalty.
- Expanding into new markets: By understanding the needs and preferences of potential customers in new markets, businesses can identify opportunities for expansion and tailor their products and services accordingly.
5. Ensuring Long-Term Relevance
- Adapting to changing preferences: Consumer preferences and behaviors are constantly evolving. Consumer insights help companies stay attuned to these changes and adapt their products and services accordingly, ensuring long-term relevance and market competitiveness.
- Building customer-centricity: By placing consumer insights at the heart of their innovation efforts, businesses foster a customer-centric culture. This approach leads to products and services that truly meet customer needs, fostering loyalty and driving sustainable growth.
Bringing Insights to the Innovation Table
Recently, All Things Innovation looked at several ways that insights have influenced innovation, through the lens of case studies and sessions highlighted at TMRE 2024.
Leveraging Insights to Reach Innovation
With the production of insights comes learning about your marketplace and consumer, actionable findings, and agile decision-making—all of which can significantly influence the innovation process. As All Things Insights held a special panel at TMRE 2024 featuring our Future of Insights Report, we thought it relevant to feature it here as well. With the market research community currently reaching a key inflection point focused on AI and human insights, much can be gleaned for the innovation community as well.
Shift Retail Lab Brings Together Insights & Innovation
Cross-disciplinary collaboration, innovation and entrepreneurship are at the heart of the Shift Retail Lab, a student innovation lab and storefront. Just what makes the lab unique? At TMRE 2024, Dr. Garret Westlake, Associate Vice Provost for Innovation at Virginia Commonwealth University, and Lloyd Young, Director of Innovation and Design at VCU Shift Retail Lab, presented the session, “Shift Retail Lab: A Vision for the Future of Customer Insights and Product Innovation.”
Integrating AI-Enabled Insights to Guide Innovation
At TMRE 2024, ZS and The Hershey Company presented a fireside chat on “Reinventing Innovation with Generative AI-Enabled Insights.” As insights and innovation teams accelerate their efforts with data-driven initiatives, artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming a valuable tool for product research and development. Tim Joyce, Principal at ZS, and Amanda Beacher, Senior Consumer Insights Manager at The Hershey Company, discussed some of their experiences with AI tools and innovation.
Speeding Product Innovation Through Social Prediction
The new product development process is fraught with subjective opinions, evidence gaps, small sample sizes, and an increasingly complex and fast-changing consumer. At TMRE 2024, a case study discussed how Glanbia Performance Nutrition is using Black Swan Data’s Social Prediction AI to break the mold. According to the company, it delivers always-on, granular level trend intelligence that drives speed, science, and confidence in the innovation process.
Pushing Beauty Innovation Boundaries with Benchmarking
In a beauty market saturated with products competing closely on price, packaging, and performance attributes, distinguishing through competitive insights has become paramount. L’Oréal’s Evaluation Intelligence consumer performance team leverages a benchmarking program to decode the competitive landscape from a consumer viewpoint, guiding future product innovations.
Strengthening Product Concept Testing
Many product launches often fail, and it’s accepted as part of the nature of innovation. But does it really need to be that way? Cambri asserts that by utilizing AI you can now combine quant, qual, and in-market data to deliver more accurate and actionable insights—and from there enhance the product concepts that will succeed.
Empowering Business Intelligence
In essence, consumer insights empower businesses to move beyond guesswork and assumptions, grounding their innovation efforts in a deep understanding of their target audience. This leads to more successful products, stronger brands, and ultimately, a more sustainable and profitable business.
Video courtesy of Thornton & Ross
