How to use consumer insights to build smarter ads and better products

Consumer behavior is shifting fast. Rising costs, convenience, and shortening attention spans impact the ways people discover products and what they buy. Add in values-driven behavior and the desire for instant gratification, and brands have a lot to balance. 

Consumer insights help successful brands balance those demands and stay relevant. 

In this article, we’ll explore consumer insights: what they are, how you can gather them and ways to use them for greater success.  

Consumer insights are more than demographics or raw data. They’re different from market research. Consumer insights explore why people behave the way they do.

You can distinguish between market research and consumer insights like this:

• Market research tells you what’s happening. 

• Consumer insights tell you why it’s happening.

This is an important distinction. Marcus Collins, author, professor, and former head of strategy at Wieden+Kennedy, New York, describes the difference between information and the intimacy of truly knowing your customers. In this HBR article, he shares an ethnographic research study between Wieden+Kennedy and McDonald's. The goal? Discover why certain people love the Golden Arches. 

His research helped the fast food giant understand their customers on an intimate level. They even uncovered a little-known practice of combining a Big Mac, Filet-O-Fish, and a McChicken together into a “Land, Air, and Sea Burger,” resulting in a “secret menu” to the delight of regular customers.

Fortunately, you don’t have to take on such a deep study to understand your customers better. 

Brands like McDonald’s, Starbucks, Nike, and others have developed workflows that embed consumer insights early and often with readily available tools. Such brands know that what worked last year may not work this year, and if they want to remain competitive, they have to stay current with their customers. 

If you’re wondering how you can get useful customer insights, you’re in luck. Whether you’re new to gathering this data or optimizing existing processes, here’s how to build smarter, faster feedback loops.

You can learn from your audience at every stage of growth. You don’t need a crystal ball or even a team of data scientists. Here’s how you can start building smarter consumer insights.

Start with where you are: 

1. Use third-party data

Every brand can tap into existing sources like:

• Online reviews - What do people love or complain about?

• Social listening platforms (e.g. Brandwatch, Sprinklr) - Where brands can track conversations, trends and sentiment in real time.

• Industry reports - McKinsey, Nielsen, Forrester and others can reveal macro shifts that can drop clues about where your customers are headed.

• Google Trends - How to discover what your audience is searching on Google.

• Retail media networks - Get shopper data from ad networks like Amazon, Walmart, Target or Instacart. 

⭐️ Benefits: These platforms offer real-time shopper behavior based on purchase history, like who’s buying Liquid Death on Thursdays. 

Consumer insights tools

Third-party data shares what people are saying or doing. Consumer insights tools help you understand why they do it. 

⭐️ Benefits: These platforms go below the surface of “what happened,” allowing you to test, learn, and make faster, data-backed decisions. 

Here are a few consumer insights tools to explore:

1. Zappi - Test ads, product concepts and even packaging early in development, so you can get quick feedback that helps you learn faster, as well as over time.

2. Qualtrics - Helps you run custom surveys and track sentiment.

3. YouGov Brand Index - Access to a large, permission-based panel and data on consumer attitudes and brand perception.

The right tools guide you from gut feeling to data-backed business decisions fast. As Zappi’s CMO Nataly Kelly writes in this Forbes article, the right tools help “CMOs operate within a universe of connected consumer insights.” They can use the data to show trends and aid in data storytelling.

Third-party tools are a great start. Yet, sometimes you need to go deeper with answers only your customers can provide. That’s where custom data comes in. 

2. Acquire custom data

Want insights tailored to your brand or your next launch? Run your own research with an external partner so you can have data to support your intuition.

A few ways to do that are: 

• Run surveys to understand your customers’ habits, preferences or obstacles.

• Hire an agency to run focus groups with real people.

• Buy or run custom studies from platforms like Zappi or YouGov.

• Apply digital behavior data from your site or app. This data gives a window into what people do. 

⭐️ Benefits: You outsource the complex work and get actionable insights built around your brand. 

Growth strategist Eddie Yoon is the author of Superconsumers: A Simple, Speedy, and Sustainable Path to Superior Growth. He discusses the value of Superconsumers on the HBR On Strategy podcast. 

In it, he defines Superconsumers as those who would pay double or triple the price for your products because they love them so much. 

Who are your Superconsumers, and how does understanding their behavior shape business growth? 

Custom data can help. But how do you get this data? You can handle it in-house if you have the skills and tools, or partner with external resources. Let’s explore. 

3. In-house methods

There are many ways brands can gather insights directly. 

• Send surveys to your email list 

• Interview current customers 

• Analyze site behavior with heatmaps 

• Review customer service transcripts

⭐️ Benefits: In-house research can be faster and cheaper, but it does require internal resources and expertise. 

You can blend in-house and external methods too. The bottom line is a goal of collecting clean, usable data through tools, panels, or external partners, so it can be turned into useful customer insights.

So you’ve got plenty of data. What’s next? Use that data to develop useful insights about your customers. With a little knowledge, consumer insights can guide creative, improve messaging, and make smarter product decisions. 

The role of consumer insights in advertising

Brands use consumer insights to shape winning ad campaigns by:.

1. Identify emotional drivers that resonate with your audience 

2. Develop clear messaging 

3. Test early before spending your media budget 

For example, PepsiCo partnered with Zappi's consumer insights platform to test and refine their winning Super Bowl ad concepts before committing to filming. This approach led to the Cheetos “Can’t Touch This,” Lay’s “Golden Memories” and Cheetos & Doritos “Flamin Hot” ads all voted by consumers in the top 5 2022 Super Bowl ads. 

The role of consumer insights in product development

Guessing is expensive. Imagine spending months or years developing a product that doesn’t sell. With modern technology, consumer insights can be part of your feedback loop. Test messaging, creative, and packaging early and optimize them so your next product launch is a success from the beginning. Here’s a few tips to consider:

1. Identify unmet needs

Great products aren’t born in boardrooms. They start with the customer. Starbucks recognized Gen Z’s penchant for iced beverages and energy drinks through consumer insights, so it blended the two for a winning offer. 

When searching for opportunities, ask yourself: What gaps exist in your market? 

2. Prioritize the right features 

Consumer insights determine which features tap into your customer’s emotions. In 2024, Nike ran a campaign entitled, “Stairs,” showing the aftermath of the post-marathon struggle to walk down stairs and other everyday activities. Competitive runners recognized the exhaustion they feel after pushing themselves, creating a connection between a real human insight and the brand.

3. Optimize pre-launch 

Even small changes can make a big difference. That’s what McDonald’s found when they built innovation into their testing process — underscoring the importance (and savings) that comes with getting a head start with real consumer insights. 

"For a new shake flavor, I analyze the drivers of interest & purchase in all the shakes we’ve tested before. I can see how consumers play those concepts back, & what they want us to do differently. There’s a lot I can do easily with the data set."

- Matt Cahill, Senior Director of Insights Activation, McDonald's

Consumer behavior never sits still. If your consumer insights aren’t keeping up, you’re falling behind. 

The most successful brands don’t guess at what their customers want. They test early and often, building a feedback loop of consumer insights that guides decision-making.