This article is written and owned by Gareth Schweitzer
Before you can create a compelling brand, or successfully
market your product or service, it’s essential to know who
your target consumers are and what they want, need, think
and feel. Gained through quantitative and qualitative
research, consumer insights can supercharge your messaging,
helping you capture the attention of your target audience
and sharpen your competitive edge.
Following are descriptions of three of the most common and
valuable ways you can apply customer insights to your
marketing and product development efforts:
Concept Development and Testing
It’s axiomatic that any product or service designed without
a real connection to the market will miss the mark.
Conversely, there is incredible value in understanding the
key emotional and functional benefits that drive consumer
behavior before new concepts are brought to market. Thus,
once you’ve gained insights into your marketthrough
qualitative or quantitative research you’ll have the raw
material for developing end products that truly satisfy
your customer base.
Specifically, these insights can be used in workshops,
brainstorming exercises and creative problem-solving; they
can provide platforms around which designers, engineers,
marketers, and developers can collaborate on generating new
ideas. These ideas can then be tested to determine not only
which ones have the greatest go-to-market potential, but
also why consumers feel they way they do about your
concepts.
Brand Positioning
A consumer insight can help you use language to shape
consumer opinion and behavior and adapt your brand to the
needs of your market. A research consultancy can be
invaluable in helping you:
Understand how to position your brand or product to
resonate more powerfully with existing users and potential
new users; Examine who your primary, secondary, and
tertiary targets should be to maximize sales and product
expansion; Develop and test a broad range of messages based
on the parameters set by actual customers; Apply
quantitative methods to understand which specific messages
have the strongest impact on each audience; Create a
strategic roadmap for growing your brand.
Advertising Testing
Is your creative truly hitting the mark with consumers?
Once your insights have driven a concept and a position for
your brand, it is important to test how your message, and
accompanying creative, are coming across to the people you
need to reach. The emotional connection you establish with
your audience is the key determinant of ad resonance and
directly affects consumer behavior.
By working with a market research or customer insight
company, you can understand and measure emotional reactions
to concepts while also capturing the purchase intent and
message recall metrics essential to effective ad testing.
Successful ads driven by customer insights will show
themselves to both surpass quantitative benchmarks and
elicit the emotional reactions.
Marketing that Speaks to Your Consumers
Consumer insights allow marketers to cut to the core of
what matters to a consumer. With that established, you can
properly develop, position, and test your product or
service to address those wants and needs.
Executed on properly, true consumer insights can positively
impact all elements of your marketing efforts.
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Gareth Schweitzer is the Founding Partner of Kelton
Research (http://www.KeltonResearch.com). Kelton Research
is a full service consumer insights and customer insights
company with offices in Los Angeles and New York, and is
America’s fastest growing market research firm.
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