Consumer market intelligence keeps your company physically fit and in center view of consumers’ searching eyes. It provides intel on how to connect with your consumers and offers product and marketing ideas based on unfulfilled consumer needs. There are so many ways consumer intelligence serves essential needs, and you need a tool to facilitate it. Let’s explore!
In this article we’ll discuss how consumer intelligence offers a roadmap for your marketing efforts and:
- How data science is the foundation of consumer intelligence
- Why satisfaction is guaranteed when you’re armed with the right intelligence
- Ways in which consumer intelligence provides long-term value to brands
As we know, consumers can be really hard to please. Approaching them without information around who they are and what they need is like going on a road trip without a map. You might end up where you wanted, but you’ll have no idea how you got there. It will be pure luck and not a repeatable process. Here are some stats that bear this out:
- In a global consumer trends survey, 62% of respondents considered family/friends to be a very important influence on their buying decisions – they’re listening to other consumers, which is why you should too.
- Value today for consumers is more than just a great price as it also includes quality, experience, convenience, authenticity, novelty, corporate social responsibility and more. Which values resonate with your consumers? Some matter more than others and you need to understand which those are!
The Data Science Powering Consumer Intelligence
On average every person produces 1.7MB of data every second. As a result, it has become necessary to develop effective ways to store, manage and analyze these pieces of data. And this is where data scientists save the day.
Data scientists developed methods of recording, storing and analyzing different types of data, and to extract actionable intel from it. Over time, they also created ways to consistently mine it to discover patterns, categories and other useful information to inform brands in an organized way. It’s a super simple explanation of a complicated process, really! But it’s something every brand seeks to learn more about.
Data Science Mentions in One Month — Spikes in mentions tie to webinars, courses and further reading available about data science. It’s a hot topic.
Data science sorts every piece of data into actionable bits of insight. This means when searching the topic of coffee, for example, the data is sorted by a bunch of attributes, including demographics, attached sentiments, trending words, common interests, brands mentioned and much, much more. This produces valuable intel that informs marketing strategies and allows brands to track consumer behaviors over time. So, data science is basically the life force of consumer market intelligence. It provides deep and actionable social analytics pulled from the social web and any other bit of structured or unstructured data set that you can imagine would be useful to your sleuthing efforts online.
And data science is growing. Grand View Research reported in 2019 that the global data science platform market size was expected to expand with a CAGR of 26.9% from 2020-2027. And this year ,Statista shows the global big data market expanding to 103 billion U.S. dollars by 2027. With a share of 45%, Statista expects the software division to become the largest big data market sector by 2027.
This growth will nurture more competition in the space, which is good for brands – but also more savvy competitors, which is not so good. Data science informs consumer market intelligence with details on consumer behaviors and the corresponding sentiment analysis that reveals what drives those behaviors. And this isn’t restricted to intel about your brand, but also about everything from politics to what people ate for dinner to which celebrity they pay attention to – which is key for influencer marketing intel.
Consumer Intelligence Enhances Satisfaction Quotient
Customer care has come a long way in a short time. From the invention of telephones, to call centers, email, live chat, CRM systems and social media, it continues to evolve. And this is directly related to the evolution of consumer demands.
In today’s atmosphere a brand’s value is more than just a great price. It also includes quality, experience, convenience, authenticity, novelty, corporate social responsibility and more. As a result, customer care isn’t just checking in to be sure your product met your consumers expectations. A brand needs to look underneath the surface to get a better understanding of consumer behavior.
- Why did they purchase the item?
- Why don’t they like something about it?
- How do they feel about the brand?
With consumer intelligence, you can answer these questions. You can view posts segmented by brand attributes such as authenticity, trust, value, price and much more. And this is crucial, as conversations discussing these brand attributes are happening right now between consumers and their friends and family. In fact, 62% of respondents in a global consumer trends survey considered family/friends to be an important influence on their purchases.
If they are talking online about your service or product like the social media user below, capturing that consumer intelligence with a social listening tool can help you show up in a moment’s notice, turning an unimpressed customer into a permanent fan. Conversely, posts left unaddressed can have the effect of a wildfire, spreading rapidly with no mercy.
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Consumer market intelligence can help you identify brand detractors and stay on top of brand expectations from consumers. And when consumers feel heard, creating lifetime customers seems not only possible, but probable – even today . . .
Creating Lifetime Value for Consumers
Consumer intelligence provides a detailed understanding of customer experience with your brand. It also digs deeper, revealing insights into what’s driving consumer behavior as well as brand sentiment. And it’s able to pull from many different channels, giving a complete picture and helping your brand meet the needs and wants of consumers.
Discovering key themes in discussion is pivotal to unlocking what your consumers want. And locating what drives consumer sentiment is critical too! For example, we might see a Pizza Brand discover that their consumers care about plant-based diets. And they can use consumer market intelligence to discover what was driving this behavior. Maybe it’s animal rights focused for some and others may be concerned with sustainability. Others may want both. And group three maybe just doesn’t like the taste or texture of meat. As a brand, they have three different views of the same topic. And now they have three different ways to connect with and draw in these consumers.
Sometimes consumers are more focused on the value for the price. They want the best deal and though they may be concerned with a company’s personal ethics behind the product, it’s not the number one item of their list. This may be a group of single parents, or a demographic of people who really have to pinch pennies. You don’t want to market to them in the same way you would market to someone looking to support a company solely based on beliefs. Consumer market intelligence can provide this intel, aiding in curating messaging to your different audiences.
Customer care is about more than just providing a product that works and advertising it. Today, you need to consider the wants, needs, loves and hates of your consumer base to be able to market effectively. If you’re missing key elements to your customer care strategy, reach out for a demo and let consumer market intelligence get your brand on track.
