by Gareth Schweitzer
©
2009
http://www.KeltonResearch.com
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
market—through 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.
