If you just looked at the sheer volume of mentions in marketing and business publications, you’d think that consumer insights are all about data science and analytics. Talk of Big Data abounds. (Never mind that Big Data was crowned the “Most Confusing Tech Buzzword of the Decade” so far according to The Global Language Monitor.)
While Big Data has grown in capabilities and influence, another equally important revolution is happening for new product innovation and brand evolution. Social media type platforms are being used beyond analytics as a tool for consumer engagement and co-creation. Social Co-creation focuses you on future possibilities, building off the past as appropriate. Big Data and Social Co-creation are both driven by the growing use of social media platforms like Facebook, but they play different roles in driving market decision-making.
Big Data Helps You Gain Initial Consumer Insights
Big Data informs decision-making. According to Quirks, Big Data is essentially the integration of high volume, high velocity information streams that are being mined for insights. The most common Big Data sources include internal customer knowledge databases, sales transaction data, outside demographic information, and public social media content. There's a host of uses for the data, including customer segmentation, customer experience management, media effectiveness measurement, product forecasting and trend identification. In the wheel of marketing, Big Data gets you from data to insights. It may help you identify potential changes in marketing programs or generate new product platforms. But are you getting a full, rich picture? How do you optimize those ideas? And how do you get from insights to strategies to plans?
Social Platforms Take You to the Next Level
Social Co-creation research seeks new information – the kind of content that consumers aren’t already discussing on Facebook or Twitter. It harnesses one-on-one customer engagement in social media forums or online insight communities (like Digsite) to focus the discussion on specific questions or topics of interest. Social Co-creation can start with Big Data insights — such as identified customer segments, trends or other problem/opportunity areas – and then allow you to go beyond that existing data.
Social Co-creation helps you develop new product concepts, create advertising ideas, and optimize products, services or communication. For example, a large food company created a small private insight community to understand the needs of Millennials, which had been identified as an underserved segment. Over a period of two months, a group of Millennial consumers shared their product experiences and identified what they liked and disliked. These same consumers discussed how other companies were better meeting their needs, and generated ideas for how to improve the product and in-store experience. Consumers even had the opportunity to vote on their favorite solutions. Based on the results, the company not only had new product concepts, they had concrete consumer stories to share with retail customers to help aid in buy-in.
Big Data and Social Co-creation have the potential to replace many traditional research methods like brand tracking, focus groups and surveys.
Are you using Big Data or doing Social Co-creation? Tell us how this is changing the way you do research.
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