Fiona Stevenson, President and Co-Founder at The Idea Suite, shares some creative low (or no) cost ways to gather consumer insights when time and/or money are limited.
As a consumer-centric innovation agency, we strive to design every innovation project with consumers at the heart. That means that we’re always looking for creative and efficient ways to integrate consumer insight into each of the six steps in our design thinking process – dramatically increasing the odds of in-market success.
Consumer insights are, of course, essential to innovation. It’s a well-known fact that many of the world’s greatest innovations were born out of uncovering a consumer pain point, frustration, workaround or latent desire – and directly addressing it. When it comes to innovation, consumer dissatisfaction is a wonderful thing, as it opens up countless opportunities to listen, learn and improve.
However, the value of listening to your consumers goes beyond innovation and transcends every industry. In today’s fragmented and dynamic market, it is more important than ever to truly understand consumers’ needs, preferences, desires and habits – and how your product or service can or does meet each of these very different demands. Crucially, the speed at which these are evolving is growing ever more rapid, given the dynamic nature of the market in general. More than ever before, what was true for someone yesterday may not be true tomorrow – or even today. That’s why staying in touch with consumers needs to be a true top priority and constant point of effort.
With those challenges in mind, we often get asked about whether there are faster and more efficient methods to gather valuable consumer insights in such circumstances – especially for teams where there is still strong ambition to design with consumers at the heart, all year round. After all, while nothing can replace a rich and comprehensive consumer insight program, not all businesses have the money to invest in sophisticated research tools, particularly on a regular basis – and sometimes the need for speed on a particular project or challenge calls for a scrappier approach.
Here are 6 our favourite creative, low or no cost ways to gather insights:
Cheap and Cheerful Online Surveys: Platforms like Google Forms, SurveyMonkey, and Typeform make it easy to quickly design and distribute surveys to consumers. A concise, focused set of essential questions can yield very rich data – and usually requires a relatively low incentive (e.g., a discount, chance to win, or a small token of appreciation). Where possible, look for ways to actively seek input from your consumers immediately after they interact with your brand through impactful but inexpensive methods like follow-up emails, post-purchase surveys, etc.
Social Media Trawling: Pinterest, TikTok, Reddit, Instagram and other social media platforms can be a rich source of real-life opinions about your brand, product or service – and leveraging them only requires the time it takes to do a little social media surfing.
Online Reviews: Online reviews on platforms like Google, Amazon, Yelp, or your own web site can provide very honest insights into your customers' experiences. Look for recurring feedback themes – around key points of delight, dissatisfaction or friction.
Consumer relations reports: Especially for bigger companies, consumer relations reports capturing the feedback from consumer calls and emails are a rich, often untapped source of consumer pain points or, at times, inspiring testimonials. If you aren’t reading these on a monthly or quarterly basis, you may be missing the gold.
Friends and Family conversations: A sophisticated qualitative research study makes use of an extremely detailed survey to find consumers that meet very specific requirements and is then expertly moderated by someone with vast experience. But, when a more ‘80/20’ approach is required, a dramatically streamlined set of criteria can be developed to find suitable candidates in your personal network that may be willing to have a short conversation with you – free of charge or for a small token of thanks. A focused and thoughtful discussion guide filled with probing questions and conducted with 10-15 current or prospective consumers of your product or service won’t be able to offer as much learning as a full qualitative research project but can yield surprisingly useful insights all the same.
‘Lurking’ at the point of purchase: Typically, the closer you can get to the actual consumer experience, the better. Which is why hanging out at the point of purchase or point of consumption – for example in the aisle where your products are sold or at a restaurant where they’re consumed – can be a great use of time. It shouldn’t be disruptive (or something that you do for long stretches of time!) but visiting the aisle during your regular grocery shop and observing how consumers browse the shelves, for example, can help you observe behaviour that might not be offered by consumers in a typical research setting, and enrich your understanding of the brand, category and aisle.
In other words, gathering customer insights doesn’t have to be an expensive or long endeavour. Methods above – or others like them – can help businesses to gain valuable consumer perspectives, even when budgets are constrained.
That being said, while these methods allow you to gather insights much more quickly and easily than traditional methods, it’s vital to avoid shortcutting the documentation, analysis and synthesis phase of consumer research. No matter what research you conduct or how you conduct it, it’s essential to plan (or hire an agency to lead) a storytelling session to consolidate the learning and identify emerging patterns, and ultimately to turn what you heard and observed into the ‘what’ (rich insights), the ‘so what’ (conclusions), and the ‘now what’ (recommendations) that will make these exercises truly worthwhile.
If you ever want to bounce about designing a comprehensive or more scrappy research program, activating the insights already in your business, or turning the data you have into the ‘what’, the ‘so what’ and the ‘now what’ – don’t hesitate to get in touch at fiona@theideasuite.com. Happy learning!