Ear-to-the-market: The CEO must insist on customer insights

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Today’s CEOs have many things on their minds—technology, geo-politics, regulations, talent, sustainability and much more. Tepid consumption growth in the last few quarters makes it even more critical to put consumer centricity back on the CEO agenda.

The consumer is too important to be left only to a company’s marketing or research function. In the last few years, we have had increased data and information on consumers—on where, what, when and how they spend, save and shop—and that has led to greater visibility, efficiency and effectiveness in targeting consumers. This data-based approach is necessary but not sufficient for true insight generation.

That requires data analytics to be combined with on-ground consumer engagement, observation and trend-spotting. The imperative for leaders, therefore, is how to get consumer insight into strategy development and deployment, whether it is in terms of innovation, communication or activation, or even choices around the organization and operating model. We have identified six practical principles that can help in this journey.

Be clear on the key question: Are you trying to generate new insights or are you testing specific hypotheses? Both are useful in their own ways. But most of the times, teams focus only on the latter, and worse still, they tend to confuse the two. As a leader, it is important to ensure that there is clarity on key questions and how they help solve a business problem.