Launching- HUMAN: Decoding Drivers
At Elevate Insights, we are passionate about humanizing data. Understanding your buyers as humans with distinct needs and motivations helps unlock growth in many ways. We find that it’s a win-win approach to sustainable and profitable growth. Consumer personas help improve existing products and retain core customers, identify innovation opportunities via underserved needs and segments; improve our advertising and in-app communication.
You may have large volume of transactional data but that alone provides little insight on the people behind the consumption. As companies grow, use-cases are rarely unidimensional and understanding key use-context and cohorts becomes key.
However, often even consumer research findings are superficial. Many a times consumers themselves are not aware of their “real” underlying motivators and triggers. Hence, simply reporting what they say is not enough. What did they really mean?
As insights practitioners, we often felt that we did not deeply understand our consumer, despite tons of research. Only large studies with big budgets and certain researchers helped bring alive the consumer. Typically, consumer immersions done by oneself were a more powerful to better understand the consumer. However, scattered immersions are not enough to cement into clear consumer personas that one could base organizational or product strategy on.
At Elevate Insights, we leveraged best practices from tools used by psychologists and ethnographers to create a practical tool can be used in normal depth interviews and Focus groups.
Our Human Tool has a few foundational principles:
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Go Beyond Demographics to Psychographics: First and foremost, the key is to understand the person and life motivations, and her interests beyond the demographics.
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Beyond personality archetyping to category specific personas: Most of us have a multi-dimensional personality. Further we play varied roles and that impacts our needs and goals of using a product category. Hence, in our experience, while generic consumer personality archetyping, may be a good starting point, it is simply not enough. When facets of a personality are tied together with specific needs and goals around our category, we get rich and actionable consumer personas. For example, understanding notions around beauty may be the relevant way to get to know a person when working on creating personas for skin care brands. However, when speaking to a parent around online tuition, it may be useful to get her views on importance of education and online vs offline mediums before understanding tuition products.
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Unearthing category drivers: Given our category specific approach to personification, apart from personas, the Human tools helps clarify key category drivers where demand is heterogenous. These dimensions can help uncover key segments and further identify underserved segments and hence innovation opportunities and equally highlight features or benefits that core cohorts really value and enable sharper products to improve consumer preference and retention.
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Core category needs vs hygiene needs: Typically, consumers value multiple features for any product. We have identified tools that allow us to discriminate sharply between features that are core vs peripheral. We are also able to highlight features which are a must-have but are perceived as hygiene.
Over the last year we have piloted and used the tool successfully across varied categories and business use-cases to make the consumer personas come alive.
Even as a full “Human” study can help you decode category drivers and get rich, mutually exclusive, and exhaustive segments and can provide rich in-depth consumer personas; we also have a “Lite” version which works as a plug and play version across any research such as on usage and attitude; product-market fit; triggers and barriers, post-launch evaluation or positioning work.
Interested in exploring “Human”. Connect with us at ruchira.jain@elevateinsights.in