Every day, market analysts use consumer insights to build and maintain beneficial alignments between producers, consumers, and organizations. Consumer insight data is used by sales, advertising, strategic planning, and supply chain professionals to improve their decision-making processes and results.
Enhance Marketing Effectiveness
Market analysts use consumer insights to design and execute successful marketing campaigns. They can accomplish this by monitoring social media analytics and conversations. For example, a company that creates snack foods like smoothies and frozen yogurt isn’t having success with their ads placed on Monday and Tuesday. A market analyst might discover that most social media conversations take place on Thursday and Friday when people are planning their weekend activities. The best days to maximize digital influence are logically on a Thursday or Friday.
Refine Products
Consumer insights are very useful for product development. Market analyst teams continually survey consumers and conduct research to understand popular products. This allows them to rank consumer sentiment and satisfaction, so they can provide direct feedback to R&D departments. More and more consumers are concerned about things like nutrition, sustainability, and corporate responsibility. The market analysts might find that consumers dislike specific artificial ingredients in certain foods, or they may find that consumers want product packaging to reference local recycling resources.
Streamline Supply Chains
Consumer insights allow market analysts to identify efficiency, cost-saving and improvement opportunities in supply chain operations. Understanding consumer demands, supply flows, and transportation conditions empowers supply chain managers to improve their inventory planning and management strategies. The Bureau of Labor Statistics states that operations research analysts may be tasked with identifying the slow-moving and low price-margin products that are taking up inventory space. They may be asked to help centralize logistical operations or simplify product return processes. Other complex logistics insights may include hundreds of factors like retailer pricing, sales interactions, seasonal demand, and Point-of-Sale (POS) data.
Better Data Management
Consumer insights help with raw data development and management. First, it motivates leaders to acquire better data sources and more rigorously validate information. Second, it promotes education and investment in data science and advanced analytics like machine learning, predictive analytics, and Big Data. Third, consumer insights enhance business intelligence services through more accurate and comprehensive financial reporting, HR functioning and procurement performance. Better data management is possible when companies centralize and integrate the three business operations above.
Grow Visionary Leadership
Gone are the days when companies controlled what products they would offer consumers, then created whatever benefited them the most. The explosion of social media and the proliferation of data from across channels and cultures means that companies must leverage consumer insights or face inevitable failure. Business leaders now rely on consumer insights as core elements of their strategic plan and overall agenda. This real-time data empowers them to make more informed policies, decisions, and campaigns that will keep their company profitable and sustainable.
Market analysts use consumer insights to keep up with rapidly changing business environments that are driven by social trends, brand loyalty, agile marketing, and information transparency. Companies that want to succeed in this new economy must upgrade their ability to extract and apply valuable insights from new sources of consumer behavior.
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