New Market Research Methodologies Are Here to Stay, According to Four Brand Leaders
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The dramatic events of 2020 caused companies around the world to adjust the ways they gather data and construct consumer insights. Why should brands across categories be hopeful for the future? Insights leaders from the likes of Nestle’s Garden of Life, Hershey’s ONE Brands, Ferrero, and GSK sound off.
“2020 was the year where everything changed — really, everything changed,” said Litthya Burgin, GSK’s Shopper and Category Insights marketer, during a recent webinar, “How Hershey, Ferrero, Nestle & GSK Are Transforming Market Research.”
Over the course of the conversation, produced in partnership between Suzy and GreenBook, Burgin recalled how fast and how often consumers pivoted when communicating their wants and needs across various stages of the pandemic. That meant GSK had to remain on the ball, no matter the state of the world.
The brand “really could not afford to be” out of daily communication with its shoppers, Burgin said. In order to do so, with social distancing restrictions in place, she explained that GSK had to use “different tools to understand what was going on.”
But Burgin and the rest of her team were hardly alone in adopting new techniques and technologies to make sense of the chaos that was 2020. This year, the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel consistently grows brighter, and industries will soon learn which of the processes business leaders embraced during the pandemic have the longest legs.
“At the beginning, it seemed like everyone was trying to get insights on what was going on,” said Mickey Citarella, Brand Manager at ONE Brands. “Now I think it’s shifted to, ‘what are we going to do?’”
Given this approach, Citarella noted that consumer insights are going to remain “just as relevant, if not more, in 2021 than they were in 2020.” If a brand took any stock in the consumer response to the past year, he said they “need to take a step back, and listen first and then take action, versus, ‘OK, here’s our plan, let’s take action, we’ll listen later.’”
Vanessa McPhill, Senior Manager for Media and Insights at Garden of Life, said much of the virtual technology that so many learned to use this past year was a “blessing.”
She predicted it’ll stick around, and cited just one example of its many advantages: “We were able to bring in other departments who maybe did not prioritize or understand consumer insights,” she said. “Now they’re sitting in on our focus groups, they’re sitting in when we’re doing our methodology, they’re understanding why it’s important and how it can affect their part of the business.”
Such democratization of consumer insights has helped spur an increased number of partnerships, according to Phil DeConto, VP of Category Management and Shopper Insights at Ferrero. He sees leaders asking questions like, “How can we work very closely with our brand peers, with our sales peers, with our trade marketing peers to understand what are the things they need to know?” These discourses, he added, allow collaborators to “build out a learning plan together.”
“The more continuity [there is], the more likely we’re going to be able to get to an answer that will be usable,” DeConto continued, “and will represent that fact-based insight, that fact-based opportunity for that broader group.”
When it comes to data collection of consumer insights, Burgin said the virtual technology has made it “easier to attain” and it can now be gathered “at a much faster pace.” She also observed that “one of the beauties of the new methodologies out there, Suzy being one of them,” is within a short amount of time, data insights team members can ask consumers who were recently surveyed to elaborate on various points they made.
“You can go back and ask probing questions based on heat points that you found in the data,” Burgin added. “That element is significant for me.”
In past years, accruing such data was a more robust rigmarole of navigating communications with multiple parties, she said.
Similarly, McPhill conceded that she’s more focused on figuring out how the research she conducts can be “mutually beneficial” to “my consumer, my agencies, or my counterparts in other departments.”
Thanks in part to the more accessible methodologies she’s grown accustomed to the past year, “marketing research always has a seat at the table and it’s an equal seat to everyone else,” McPhill said. “We’re no longer chasing people to get them to understand our insights, they’re coming to us for it.”
With such democratized data now in vogue, it’ll be that much easier for brands to respond to the consumer. Some early insights into what brands can expect consumers to desire from them this year include, according to McPhill, “being held more accountable” and “prioritizing the consumer.”
DeConto emphasized brands must be more “proactive” as opposed to “reactive,” while Citarella said, in the wake of 2020 and all its challenges, they must “emphasize empathy” when it comes to talking to consumers and working with each other, in house, as well.
“Embrace the unknown,” Citarella also advised. “We don’t know what the future is going to be, so let’s be willing to accept that we’ll make some big bets and fail, but that’s OK because we’re trying new things.”
