Five major trends driving insight innovation

A tremendous amount has changed since the onset of the ‘Era of COVID.’ This has been particularly the case in regards to consumers and how they engage and interact with brands. With the influences and pressures the pandemic has placed on the markets and consumers approaching its one year anniversary, several trends have emerged across the customer insight, data analytics and market research realms.

Here’s a look at five major trends researchers, marketers and insight professionals are seeing evolve as the need to understand consumers increases in order to effectively motivate them.

Need for Speed

Given the ever-changing real-time shifts in consumer behaviors, attitudes and decisions, brands need faster access to immediate findings. This means truncating the time to develop and execute surveys with the immediacy that digital delivery and analysis provides. It also means more rapid capabilities to collect, synthesize, analyze and distribute the findings.

Outside Perspectives

Varying perspectives from third party data sources is another critical point for brands to have in order to gain a holistic view of the attitudinal, behavioral and competitive trends across the markets. Having easy access to this data has always been a challenge, but emerging technology solutions are starting to address this, allowing marketers and researchers alike to economically access a diverse set of data perspectives to drive strategies, develop experiences and design innovations.

Single-Source Evidence

Traditionally, data sources have been fragmented across the various tangents of the organization’s technology stack. This is due to different owners and constituents of the varying applications and platforms. Given the growing need for rapid data-driven insight, having a centralized, synthesized evidential foundation which is democratized across the company is critical. This ensures that every team is working off the same set of evidence in order to accomplish the same goals. Thus, an end-to-end congruent process.

Do It Yourself

Companies need a balance of efficiency and efficacy in terms of research and insights, which largely means streamlining the research process with tools and technology. This is why the DIY approach is an increasing priority for many businesses. With many organizations forced to become leaner, they are relying on solutions to do the heavy lifting while also serving as a guide for teams to follow in the process. 

Let’s Get Visual

As research’s importance continues to elevate across many companies, the need to visualize and illustrate findings to enhance the utility of the insights is critical. This is largely why the migration to visual-based solutions is so important in order to enhance understanding and build consensus around the discoveries and findings.

These trends are largely serving as the backbone to innovation for market research as it continues to evolve as a critical component for brands to deliver customer value and build customer loyalty. As consumers continue to shift, so do marketers, researchers, insight experts and brands as a whole in order to maintain a clear understanding of the changes. The companies that embrace these points of evolution will gain a firm grasp on the changes they have to align to with their strategies and innovations, but it all starts with this evidential understanding.