The ultimate guide to consumer insights

This article derives from a Q+A at the Product Marketing Summit, Seattle in 2022. For more exclusive content, visit your member dashboard.

“The customer knows best.”

👆 A well-established expression for many companies – and for good reason. Ultimately, your customer is going to buy your product based on what they want and are looking for – not what you think will sell well.

Gathering these consumer insights is your opportunity to tailor your products – and how you market them – to their personalized needs, hopefully then bringing in those coveted sales.

But how can you do this successfully?

In this article, Aileen McGraw, Senior Product Marketing Manager at GoFundMe outlines the guiding principles of gathering consumer insights, focusing specifically on:

• What are consumer insights?
• B2B vs B2C consumer insights
• Quantitative vs qualitative data in consumer insights
• How to gather consumer insights
• The most valuable tools for gathering consumer insights

What are consumer insights?

Q: How would you describe consumer insights, and what role do you play in that practice?

A: I think consumer insights is deceptively simple. It’s all about understanding your (and I’m stressing that word for a reason) customer and using that information to drive greater business impact. I think of the product marketer’s role within that as making a path to understanding our customers.

An insight is a combination of a few things. First of all, there are facts. Many of us have access in our roles to a lot of quantitative data, behavioral data, facts on the ground, market data, and data about our competitors.

Those are facts, and they can hint at decisions, but you’ll be left wondering what all those numbers mean unless you can combine them with recommendations.