Real-Time Research Brings Opportunities to Understand and Influence Consumer Behavior

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Reliance on new tactics and faster research became essential to company survival this year. A look at the research tools and techniques that brands like Unilever and Microsoft plan to lean in on in 2021.

For all the talk about how 2020 has upended life as we know it, to some degree the year has also proven that many behavioral norms could thrive indefinitely.

However, as Elliot Roazen, Growth Marketer at Unilever, said on a panel during Suzy’s inaugural digital summit, “You’d be crazy to think that nothing has changed the last couple months.” His comments came during a panel discussion with Katie Gross, Suzy’s Chief Customer Officer, and Geoffrey Colon, Head of Brand Studio at Microsoft Advertising. 

Roazen added: “Whatever tactics you were using in 2018 and 2019 probably need some work in 2020 and 2021.” He also urged brands to lean more profoundly on consumer insights innovations going forward.

New innovations that came to market in 2020 and are expected to grow in 2021

“One area is just how more people who maybe don’t come from a market research background can do market research,” Colon said. “The democratization of research, as we like to call it.”

He observed that brands don’t necessarily need people with “big data, machine-learning backgrounds involved in asking and answering more questions,” about a product’s viability in-market, for example. Instead, general curiosity can reign, with an eye toward a more inclusive audience. 

“You only get that when you basically involve more people [of varying backgrounds],” Colon said. “Once people aren’t afraid of doing something, and they can use a software as a service tool that allows them to do market research, it just spreads far and wide to a lot more people who never would have considered themselves as ‘in the field of market research.’”

Roazen said he believes more companies now recognize the agility and productivity that remote work and leveraged digital technology can help spur.

Leadership may not fly themselves or staffers off to conferences across the country as often as they did before, opting for attendance via video conference platform instead. And in place of “hiring out a fancy consumer research agency,” he said, with the aid of more accessible technology, relevant studies can be conducted within brand teams themselves. 

Shifting to real-time consumer insights, the future of market research 

“Brands need to increase the volume of learning points,” Roazen said. “You have to sit down and whiteboard a lot of the assumptions you have, and those assumptions have been split up into hundreds of opportunities for tests. It’s up to you to use tools that have rapid access to increase the volume of the tests that you’re doing.”

Colon said in response that media planners who buy advertising and marketing always need to understand how the consumers make spending choices and what factors shape them.

Real-time research and insights tools can help brands understand the changes that are happening on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

“No human is the same when it comes to a lot of their decision-making process, so we view Suzy not just as a way to validate a lot of our own data, but really to course-correct,” Colon said. Suzy helps Microsoft to answer such questions as “Is there an innate bias in our data?” and “Are we believing something that we really should validate?” he said. 

“Many times we found that we’ve been wrong on things and I think that’s good,” Colon continued. Finding such “errors” can only help a company move more swiftly toward truth, a solution, and the desired outcome.

For more information on ways brands can navigate the coming year, watch the Suzy Summit, State of the Consumer: 2021, at Suzy.com.