Want the secret to business growth? Ask consumers

What if one tiny nugget of infor­ma­tion could unlock a huge new rev­enue stream for a busi­ness? With self-ser­vice providers mak­ing access to con­sumer data faster and cheap­er, brands of all sizes are tap­ping into this resource and uncov­er­ing new growth oppor­tu­ni­ties. 

Con­sumer insights that once took weeks for research agen­cies to pro­duce (and charge thou­sands of pounds for) can now be at the fin­ger­tips of any­one who wants them. This democ­ra­ti­sa­tion of data is trans­form­ing how brands con­nect with their cus­tomers, enabling them to devel­op goods and ser­vices more flex­i­bly and cre­ate mar­ket­ing cam­paigns that tru­ly res­onate with their tar­get audi­ence. 

Some­times it starts with a hypoth­e­sis, as in the case of Bloom & Wild. In the run-up to Valentine’s Day 2021, direct-to-con­sumer flower brand felt that giv­ing red ros­es as gift had become a cliché. To con­firm its sus­pi­cion, the com­pa­ny used research plat­form Attest to sur­vey 1,000 con­sumers and found that 79% of them would pre­fer to receive a thought­ful gift rather than some­thing tra­di­tion­al.

“Red ros­es were ranked as the least favourite gift that peo­ple had received for Valentine’s Day,” says Char­lotte Lan­g­ley, brand and com­mu­ni­ca­tions direc­tor at Bloom & Wild. “So that gave us con­fi­dence that we’d cor­rect­ly sensed con­sumers’ sen­ti­ments towards those sorts of clichés.”

Armed with this infor­ma­tion, the com­pa­ny took the bold step of dis­con­tin­u­ing the sale of red ros­es and bas­ing a PR cam­paign on that deci­sion. This sparked debate across the nation and secured a 51% year-on-year increase in press cov­er­age. It end­ed up being Bloom & Wild’s most suc­cess­ful Valentine’s Day to date.

A surprising discovery about Barbie

As well as con­firm­ing hunch­es, con­sumer data can help brands to put the find­ings of oth­er types of research into con­text. When Mat­tel, the mak­er of Bar­bie, con­duct­ed a study with neu­ro­sci­en­tists from Cardiff Uni­ver­si­ty and found that play­ing with dolls helps chil­dren to become more empath­ic, the com­pa­ny want­ed to under­stand how impor­tant this fac­tor would be to par­ents. 

Mat­tel used OnePoll to sur­vey 15,000 par­ents in 22 coun­tries. This found that 91% of respon­dents ranked empa­thy as a key social skill that they would like their chil­dren to devel­op, but it also revealed that only 26% were aware that play­ing with dolls could aid this process. 

See­ing a huge oppor­tu­ni­ty to edu­cate con­sumers, Mat­tel cre­at­ed both a mar­ket­ing cam­paign pro­mot­ing the ben­e­fits of doll play to par­ents across EMEA and an online hub with resources for par­ents, care­givers and chil­dren. This has con­tributed to the company’s strong per­for­mance so far this year, with mar­ket researcher NPD Group nam­ing Bar­bie as the top sell­er in the glob­al doll mar­ket in the first half of this year.

“If you aren’t active­ly lis­ten­ing to, and engag­ing with, con­sumers, are you even rel­e­vant?” says Mattel’s head of insights for EMEA, Michael Swais­land. “We always aim to guide our inno­va­tion using what we learn from our ongo­ing engage­ment with kids, par­ents and soci­ety at large. Keep­ing aware of the issues affect­ing peo­ple across the world is a cru­cial com­po­nent to a brand’s suc­cess.” 

Turning a TikTok craze into long-term growth

Large-scale con­sumer research isn’t only for large, well-estab­lished play­ers such as Mat­tel. It can also be huge­ly valu­able for star­tups in help­ing to pro­pel them to that next phase of growth.  

Take Lit­tle Moons for exam­ple. The ice-cream dessert brand made its first for­ay into con­sumer research when it want­ed to learn more about its tar­get mar­ket, hav­ing built a loy­al gen‑Z fan­base on social media.

“You might think that the peo­ple who are moti­vat­ed enough to fol­low you on Insta­gram are the same peo­ple buy­ing most of your prod­uct,” says Lit­tle Moons’ mar­ket­ing direc­tor, Ross Far­quhar. “Our Insta­gram fol­low­ing would sug­gest that our audi­ence com­pris­es main­ly women in their late teens and ear­ly 20s. But con­sumer pro­fil­ing iden­ti­fied that the peo­ple dri­ving most of the vol­ume in pre­mi­um ice cream are actu­al­ly afflu­ent over-30s.”

This insight proved cru­cial when Lit­tle Moons sud­den­ly start­ed trend­ing on Tik­Tok at the start of this year, with young peo­ple film­ing them­selves shop­ping for its desserts in Tesco (which had been stock­ing the prod­uct since Novem­ber 2020) and then exper­i­ment­ing by mix­ing flavours. At the end of Jan­u­ary 2021, the brand’s week-on-week sales at Tesco increased by 700%. But Far­quhar and his team knew that this would be only a short-term spike if the craze remained the pre­serve of Tik­Tok users.

“We recog­nised that, if the trend was going to trans­late into the busi­ness out­comes we want­ed, we’d need to take what was hap­pen­ing on Tik­Tok and make it acces­si­ble to peo­ple who weren’t on the plat­form. We there­fore encour­aged the press to cov­er this sto­ry. The the­o­ry was that, if we could get it into the Tele­graph, the Express or the Sun, it was far more like­ly to become part of the cul­tur­al con­ver­sa­tion than if it just stayed on Tik­Tok.”

The con­sid­er­able amount of press cov­er­age achieved by the com­pa­ny helped to give its sales even more of a boost. Research con­duct­ed by Attest before and after the cam­paign found that prompt­ed brand aware­ness of Lit­tle Moons had tripled among its tar­get mar­ket.

Fast-changing behaviour

The pan­dem­ic has proved to be a boom time for con­sumer insights, as com­pa­nies try to stay on top of con­sumers’ fast-chang­ing opin­ions and shop­ping habits. But, even though Covid cri­sis appears to be eas­ing, brands would be well advised to keep their eye on the ball, warns Katie McQuater, edi­tor of the Mar­ket Research Society’s Impact mag­a­zine. 

Even Mat­tel man­aged to fall short in this respect recent­ly. The com­pa­ny may have made Bar­bie one of the most diverse and inclu­sive doll brands on the mar­ket, but it attract­ed unwant­ed pub­lic­i­ty in August after it released a col­lec­tion themed on the Tokyo Olympics that didn’t fea­ture a doll that appeared to be Asian.

“To deter­mine whether changes in con­sumer atti­tudes and behav­iour are fleet­ing or indica­tive of a longer-term trend, busi­ness­es should main­tain invest­ment in insight and put research at the fore­front of their deci­sion-mak­ing,” she says. “The fact that brands are still mak­ing high-pro­file mis­steps rein­forces the need to ensure that strate­gies and com­mu­ni­ca­tions are backed by data on what peo­ple are think­ing, feel­ing and doing.”