Who Has the Most to Gain from Insights: Innovation, Brand or Marketing Teams?
Our clients share a passion for insights but often sit in different parts of their organizations. Whether you're leading an innovation project, developing a brand strategy, or crafting marketing campaigns, integrating customer insights can result in huge strategic unlocks for your team. We happily work with different types of teams– innovation, brand, and marketing—because we believe they all can benefit from research.
1. Innovation: Fueling Relevant Solutions
Innovation is often seen as the realm of groundbreaking ideas and cutting-edge technologies. However, even the most visionary innovations can falter if they don’t address real customer needs. By tapping into customer insights, innovation teams can ensure their solutions are not only forward-thinking but also relevant and desirable. Understanding customer pain points, needs, and behaviors allows teams to create products or services that genuinely resonate with users. This alignment increases the likelihood of adoption and success in the market.
Inquisitive examples: Recently we helped a food client understand which flavors their existing customers would be most likely to try, and a retail client determine which in-store services would bring in new traffic.
2. Brand: Building Authentic Connections
A brand isn’t just a logo or a tagline; it’s an emotional connection between a company and its customers. Customer insights are crucial for developing a brand identity that reflects what consumers value and how they perceive the company. These insights help brand teams create messaging that resonates with their target audience and fosters loyalty. By understanding the nuances of customer sentiment and preferences, brand teams can craft authentic narratives that differentiate them in a crowded market and build lasting relationships with their audience.
Inquisitive examples: We helped the brand team at a clothing company understand which value propositions resonated with (or confused) their growth market, and a health care system learn which messages were most compelling to patient families vs. physicians.
3. Marketing: Crafting Targeted Campaigns
Marketing strategies thrive on precision. The days of one-size-fits-all campaigns are long gone. Customer insights provide the data needed to tailor marketing efforts to specific segments of the audience. This means personalized messaging, targeted offers, and strategic channel selection, all grounded in a deep understanding of what motivates and interests your customers. Effective use of insights not only enhances engagement but also optimizes marketing spend by focusing resources on high-impact activities.
Inquisitive examples: We helped a CPG client determine which packaging would allow consumers to most easily understand the benefits of each product in a new line, and another CPG client explore price perceptions of different pack sizes.
So who has the most to gain? An acceptable answer is anyone. But the best answer is EVERYONE. While different team functions may benefit individually from customer insights, the true power lies in the way they can be integrated across the organization to create a unified strategy. In successful organizations, the overlap between innovation, brand and marketing is strong, because all three are looking to drive business results instead of simply executing tasks.
When innovation, brand, and marketing teams share and leverage the same customer data, they create a unified approach that drives consistent and impactful outcomes. This synergy ensures that all aspects of customer interaction are aligned, from brand values to product concepts, through marketing communications.
