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How do consumer insights give CPG companies a competitive advantage?
Competition in the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) and Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) industry has become extremely complex. So has the data and consumer goods insights that can give Consumer Goods companies their competitive edge. Some have described navigating competition in the CPG industry today as akin to mixed martial arts. Twenty years ago, the game would have resembled the more predictable rules and strategies of a professional tennis match. Nowadays, FMCG companies must harness the power of complex data and knowledge management to produce actionable consumer insights that drive competitive decision making. Here are three ways effective use of CPG consumer insights can help organizations deliver a competitive edge now and into the future.
3 ways CPG firms use consumer insights to deliver a competitive advantage
1. By driving spot-on personalized marketing to the consumer.
Traditionally, CPG companies took a one-size-fits-all approach to their products and customers, targeting the masses with little engagement and relationship building. Now small disruptors easily puncture this strategy with direct-to-consumer marketing and sales channels. To compete, FMCG companies use insights for a more granular understanding of the customer. When leveraged well, CPG consumer insights uncover a 360-degree view of the customer, so insights teams can empower winning customer-centric decisions across categories, products, and segments. That means speaking to customers through their favorite channels, addressing their current needs, and conserving their brand loyalty to keep them in your corner.
2. By helping predict future consumer behavior so they can stay ahead of the game.
Experts at McKinsey have stated that predicting your customer-of-the-future is critical for CPG companies to stay competitive as the world emerges from the pandemic. One key learning Consumer Goods firms will take away from the unpredictability of the last few years is the past is no longer necessarily a reliable predictor for future demand. To overcome this challenge, companies must aggregate and harness a wide range of CPG market data that tracks not only historical consumer goods trends but also economic variables like GDP and the consumer price index. Combine this with other CPG market variables like consumer sentiment, social listening, search trends, and category-specific data, and you’ve got a lot of information to deal with. The key for Consumer Goods companies to keep up with the competition is to quickly translate loads of CPG data into actionable insights for the entire enterprise—kind of like how Colgate transforms trends knowledge into actionable insights at scale.
3. By expediting agile decision making, so they see more frequent wins.
The first several months of the COVID-19 pandemic were dizzying for FMCG companies; they were forced to expedite decision-making from months to weeks, so they could meet drastically changing consumer needs. McKinsey argues CPG companies that permanently adopt this agile approach to decision making will inevitably be more competitive in the future. To that end, data and knowledge management capabilities are becoming a critical advantage for Consumer Goods companies because they can more easily leverage consumer behavior. When an enterprise “knows what it knows,” the business cuts out costly and time-consuming knowledge hunts and gets straight to valuable insights—the currency of decision making. With relevant, actionable consumer insights delivered to the business regularly, FMCG companies can empower frequent, agile decision making at scale.
How an insights engagement platform can help you leverage CPG consumer insights
A steady flow of timely CPG consumer insights is pivotal to Consumer Goods companies discovering and acting on opportunities for growth before their competitors do. But the reality is, most FMCG organizations don’t have the insights capability to capture CPG data and knowledge, develop insights, and reach the business at the pace of the market. Companies that invest early in an insights engagement platform will find they’re better positioned to quickly implement competitive insights-driven strategies. Because the thing is, if you want quick, powerful, and actionable CPG consumer insights to inform your business decisions, you need powerful insights infrastructure to facilitate it.
An insights platform can help you:
- Foster a consistent, clear view of your customer segments across your organization. With a single source of truth, your insights platform will help guide and align business teams to effectively meet consumer needs.
- Connect the dots between market and customer data for winning business decisions. When all your knowledge and market data sources live in one insights engagement platform, your teams can quickly triangulate insights for quality recommendations and decision making.
- Make quick decisions at the pace of rapidly changing local market dynamics and consumer expectations. An insights engagement platform enables relevant, noise-canceling insights curated and delivered directly to local teams and business units. Check out how the REWE Group delivers curated insights to the business with their Knowledge Hub insights platform.
- Democratize insights with self-service tools, so your business teams can get the answers they need when they need them. With AI-powered search that makes searching insights a breeze for business users, there are no more missing opportunities while you wait for answers to business questions. For example, Kellogg’s democratized insights with their next-gen insights platform as a solution to their scarce expert-to-stakeholder ratio.
The insights engagement solution you’ve been looking for:
Market Logic’s award-winning insights engagement platform helps leading CPG and FMCG organizations power insights-driven businesses that deliver rigorously to the needs of the market. If you’d like to see how our insights engagement platform works, don’t hesitate to send us a note here.
