What is the consumer insight for?
From the start of the development chain for your offers, until the launch of your product, the consumer insight has a strategic impact within your innovation ecosystem. Is the true scope of this impact recognized?
Consumer insights can be used at several stages of the offer development chain:
We can specify its role in these three phases:
- High upstream to clarify the innovation priorities in which the company wishes to invest,
- During the offer development phase to best align the value proposal with consumer needs,
- During the launch of the offer to attract the attention of the public and make it amenable to the brand message.
We can specify its role in these three phases:
Upstream: innovation
Insights highlight consumer tensions, i.e. conscious or unconscious needs subject to certain barriers. Collecting consumer insights on a given topic thus serves to consolidate sets of assumptions and reveal areas of opportunity. Companies then organize their insight management to find the relevant insights to nourish and inspire their innovation strategy.
Development phase: positioning
Next, the product concept must be formulated clearly and convincingly to connect the consumer needs to the benefits the product can provide. In this value proposal, the insight serves to indicate the consumer need that is subject to tension, and must smoothly connect to the product response. Writing the insight and the concept is crucial to ensure an understandable and relevant value proposal.
Launch phase: communication
When the brand communicates, an insight must serve to attract consumers' attention and suggest that the proposal being made corresponds to their needs. The insight will therefore enable consumers to quickly orient themselves in an often hyper-saturated communication space (whether direct marketing, poster or broadcast advertising). Insights become key to enable the advertising message to be heard and understood. Being able to choose the right insight for the right target is crucial at this stage to transform the work done from the beginning into actual sales for the brand.
The insight thus plays a strategic role from the very start of the value chain. It nonetheless remains a living element, because it relates to a consumer whose needs might evolve over the course of a project, in particular if other brands offer responses in the category during your design phase. It is therefore essential to regularly check the relevance of an insight so that your projects remain aligned with the expectations of the market at the time of launch.