Before you can create a compelling brand, or successfully market your product or service, it's essential to know who your target consumers are and what they want, need, think and feel. Gained through quantitative and qualitative research, consumer insights can supercharge your messaging, helping you capture the attention of your target audience and sharpen your competitive edge.

Following are descriptions of three of the most common—and valuable—ways you can apply customer insights to your marketing and product development efforts:

Concept Development and Testing

It's axiomatic that any product or service designed without a real connection to the market will miss the mark. Conversely, there is incredible value in understanding the key emotional and functional benefits that drive consumer behavior before new concepts are brought to market. Thus, once you've gained insights into your market—through qualitative or quantitative research—you'll have the raw material for developing end products that truly satisfy your customer base.

Specifically, these insights can be used in workshops, brainstorming exercises and creative problem-solving; they can provide platforms around which designers, engineers, marketers, and developers can collaborate on generating new ideas. These ideas can then be tested to determine not only which ones have the greatest go-to-market potential, but also why consumers feel they way they do about your concepts.

Brand Positioning

A consumer insight can help you use language to shape consumer opinion and behavior and adapt your brand to the needs of your market. A research consultancy can be invaluable in helping you:

• Understand how to position your brand or product to resonate more powerfully with existing users and potential new users;

• Examine who your primary, secondary, and tertiary targets should be to maximize sales and product expansion;

Develop and test a broad range of messages based on the parameters set by actual customers;

• Apply quantitative methods to understand which specific messages have the strongest impact on each audience;

• Create a strategic roadmap for growing your brand.

Advertising Testing

Is your creative truly hitting the mark with consumers? Once your insights have driven a concept and a position for your brand, it is important to test how your message, and accompanying creative, are coming across to the people you need to reach. The emotional connection you establish with your audience is the key determinant of ad resonance and directly affects consumer behavior.

By working with a market research or customer insight company, you can understand and measure emotional reactions to concepts while also capturing the purchase intent and message recall metrics essential to effective ad testing.

Successful ads driven by customer insights will show themselves to both surpass quantitative benchmarks and elicit the emotional reactions.

Marketing that Speaks to Your Consumers

Consumer insights allow marketers to cut to the core of what matters to a consumer. With that established, you can properly develop, position, and test your product or service to address those wants and needs.

Executed on properly, true consumer insights can positively impact all elements of your marketing efforts.