Level Up Your Brand Strategy by Using Consumer Insights to Answer These 5 Questions

Without consumer insights, your marketing team is basically playing Battleship: lobbing new ideas into the market with little or no idea where they’ll land.  

Understanding what your customers want—based on real-world data—is the key to building a better brand strategy. According to McKinsey, consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies that use data-driven marketing can achieve a 3 to 5% increase in net sales. 

But research can be daunting. If you’re not sure where to get started, we’ve identified five questions that might help. When you focus your research on answering these, you’ll be on your way to a more effective brand strategy.  

1. When are people thinking of your products?  

When do your products naturally cross your consumers’ minds? Cereal purchasers might want a healthy way to start the morning—or a fast and easy post-dinner treat after a draining workday. Knowing when they reach for your products will help you design a brand strategy that reaches people where they are. And that brings us to our next question.   

2. Where are people when they use your products?  

If people are buying your breakfast bars to eat in the car on their morning commute, you’ll want to prioritize easy opening and crumb-free eating. If they’re eating a bar from the comfort of home, it may be wiser to prioritize an interesting label or healthy ingredients. You can use research insights to market your products differently based on where consumers use them most often.  

3. In what context are people thinking of your products?  

Hold on: don’t you already have the context if you know when and where people are reaching for your products? Not necessarily. Suppose you have a young professional couple ordering wine on a Friday afternoon. Are they excited about hosting a fancy dinner party over the weekend—or are they just looking forward to falling onto the couch with a delivery pizza and a nice bottle of Cab after an exhausting week? Pinpointing this context will help you better understand what messages or imagery would appeal most to your consumers. 

4. What are people looking for when they purchase your products?  

Let’s stay with our wine purchasers for a moment. Are they looking for something with a fun name and a quirky label that they can enjoy as they pass the bottle around the table? Do they want something that tastes delightful—or are they more in the market for inexpensive and tolerable? Understanding what experience consumers hope to have with your products can help you build a brand that resonates.  

5. What factors influence consumers’ use of your products? 

It’s easy to track sales data and learn when and where people are buying a product, but purchase data doesn’t tell the whole story. Wouldn’t you rather know when, where, how, and why people are using a product? With that information, you could influence consumers to increase their usage—and in turn, that will send them back to repurchase it more frequently.  

Meaningful Consumer Insights Require Both Qualitative and Quantitative Data 

Great questions are just the beginning—but how can you unlock authentic, honest answers to those questions? Like all of us, consumers have notoriously flawed memories when it comes to recalling the details of daily life and how exactly we use the products we do.  

So, don’t ask. Instead, pull up a front-row seat to the action with QualSights. 

QualSights captures data about in-home, in-the-moment product use, precisely when and where it happens. Our Product Consumption Intelligence (PCI) technology provides instantaneous data on how consumers use products, from how many times a day they reach for them to how many grams they dispense at a time. And our Mobile Qualitative Platform injects that data with meaning by enabling marketers to ask questions while consumers are using and purchasing products—not two weeks after the fact.  

Schedule a demonstration today and see how real-world consumer insights can help you level up your brand strategy.