How 3 Leading CPG and Food & Beverage Brands Are Rethinking Consumer Insights

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The COVID-19 crisis has informed everyday activities for pretty much everyone this year, and will continue to do so perhaps through 2021. Commerce is no exception, and with changes to spending habits reaching revolutionary proportions, the consumer insights industry has had to make adjustments of its own.

“When we all realized that it’s not going to be just a two-week lockdown, but it’s going to be for a longer point, we said, ‘What’s next?’” said Kim Spaid, Head of Consumer Insights for Joint Ventures at The Kraft Heinz Company, during a recent GreenBook and Suzy panel, “How PepsiCo, Kraft Heinz and Unilever Are Shaping the Future of Research.” Spaid added that initially her team “grappled” with questions as to whether or not it was appropriate to have conversations about moving forward with business — not as usual — and if consumers were ready to engage in discourse with them about shopping. 

“What we found was that we could,” she said.

Her consumer insights squad began hatching what Spaid called “agile solutions,” or “easy ways” they could effectively, mindfully pivot.

Brands must be lighter on their feet, echoed Elliot Roazen of the Unilever Growth Marketing team. He believes the pandemic violently reminded brands that not only was change afoot, but had been occurring for quite some time. Still, “the speed at which consumer preferences and behaviors have changed now is a completely different animal than it was before,” he said. 

Citing the recent IBM U.S. Retail Index study, which showed that the pandemic has accelerated the consumer’s shift to e-commerce by five years, Roazen added: “Maybe we had become comfortable before because the rate of change was a bit slower, as the thinking was these CPG companies were addressing change adequately.”

That’s clearly no longer the case.

In response, Spaid said that because The Kraft Heinz Company calls itself “consumer-obsessed,” the organization has gone out of its way — even more so lately — to democratize insights, which she called “critical” to what they do.

“That means a lot of things,” she continued. “It certainly can mean [utilizing] tools, like a Suzy, [and] it can also mean, ‘How do I excite my team? How do I get them immersed?’”

Spaid’s team enjoys consumer insights field trips, when they invade a store to learn about customer experiences. In follow-up meetings, when Spaid hears those stories purposefully retold, “that’s a huge win.”

“I feel like if you know people, then you can communicate with them, you can innovate for them; you don’t necessarily have to be spoon-fed everything because you know them as people,” Spaid said. Combining Suzy insights with storytelling helps her team pull that off.

Nick Graham, VP of Insights & Analytics at PepsiCo, said it’s easy for consumer insights folk to drown themselves in data. What he finds helpful is when his portfolio team synthesizes relevant data into themes.

“People’s reaction to hygiene,” Graham offered as one example. “How shoppers are feeling about the holidays,” might be another, he said. Such an approach to data, he adds, makes it “just a bit easier to comprehend than this constant set of numbers.”

Suzy’s been doing just that throughout the pandemic, surveying consumers about specific topics and collecting CPG data insights, such as how they’re spending in this complicated back-to-school season or how they’re reimagining their homes to make them even more comfortable during lockdown.

“You want to arm the marketer with as much data and consumer insights as possible,” Roazen said. “If you’re going to be making decisions on the fly, with the speed and the demands that we’re seeing that people have currently … it’s so much more helpful if you as a marketer wield that information.”

Thus, with every move right now proving an experimental one, data is a brand’s brightest beacon, guiding them through the darkness of such uncertainty.

For much more information and insights, you can view the entire webinar, “How PepsiCo, Kraft Heinz and Unilever Are Shaping the Future of Research,” at Suzy.com.