Achieving Better Personalization Through Market Research

The topic of personalization is nothing new when it comes to marketing and advertising efforts. However, the world of personalization is constantly evolving and it applies to more than just our brand communications but creation of personalized products and an customer experience.

We frequently argue becoming more audience-centric in your business strategy helps create better personalization—among other benefits. At the very least, it also helps you overcome the challenges of achieving personalization and improve the results of your efforts.

Why Personalization Is Hard

Personalization is all about improving customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. The way it goes about doing so is by improving interactions with consumers by targeting them with the right product and message in the right channel, with the right timing. But gathering all of the information needed for personalization and ensuring it’s accurate can be next to impossible. Optimization of personalized products, services, or communications can and should begin earlier in the process to help offset a knowledge gap or to make the most of the resources spent identifying and understanding audiences and obtaining information on how to activate them.

With the current data privacy landscape, rules governing data collection, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), are posing new challenges for organizations in a variety of ways. When it comes to personalization, new privacy regulations will make it difficult to gather the data needed to impact the customer journey. Brands will have to find solutions that gather robust sets of consumer data without infringing on these new privacy policies.

There are new regulations regarding data privacy and always new strategies and solutions to increase the accuracy and impact of personalization efforts. One of the most challenging aspects to implementing a personalization strategy is figuring out what tools to use from the seemingly endless marketing analytics and customer relationship management platforms. Turning to market research for help can make it a far easier and simpler process.

How Market Research Can Help

Personalization doesn’t have to be so hard—market research is meant to help. The next generation of agile market research can help brands obtain information relevant to personalization much sooner, specifically, by combining survey data and big data—or the what and the why. This information can provide valuable support for a brand’s personalization efforts by combining multiple sources of data, in an agile way.

By combining big data with survey data we can gain a deeper understanding of our audience specific to a product concept, for example. This improves the efficiency of moving from a strategy to activation and accelerates our timeline by providing insights on the target audience that can be used past product development.

To see an example of how that would work, download the research report below. You’ll see how a consumer electronics brand gathered the information they needed on their new product innovation to achieve better personalization.