Radiant Insights July

Big Data May Be Great, but Interviews Give You Hidden Insights. 

Easily accessible analytics for digital campaigns, website traffic, and ad responses give many marketers the false impression that they know who their customers are and what they want. Well, these kinds of results do show trends and provide much-needed insights into what’s working but what does the consumer really think?

Believe it or not, in the early 2000’s Lego was struggling, sales tanked and they were moving towards potential bankruptcy. They kept trying to make legos bigger, simpler and easier to use, thinking that the current instant gratification generation could not engage with more complicated sets, as shown by their purchaser data analysis. 

Lego Saw Something They Missed in the Data About Customers  

The Wall Street Journal article reports that when Lego did individual interviews and connected directly with kids they found out something remarkably different. Based on at-home visits and one-to-one interviews they discovered kids gravitated towards more complicated and complex Lego sets based on a wide variety of themes. They changed their designs and today Lego is the largest toy manufacturer in the world. 

You can’t discover things from data alone. It’s essential to do qualitative research that provides deep insights and discoveries about customer behavior and values. Find out more here.

Connectivity, Work and Reinventing the Customer Experience 

Global Business Trends in Marketing Post-Pandemic

The pandemic has been the biggest single experiment in a century to see what happens when you shut down whole systems of connectivity in the world for a year or more. Who wins and who fails out of this? How do large-scale businesses dependent on customer interaction survive? What happens to the small players in retail and hospitality? 

Yes, tons of retailers closed throughout the US and the world and yet new types of retail and food-to-go concepts have taken off, with more new startups in virtually every category from restaurants to airlines. This great re-sorting is occurring because of technology.

As we exit the closed-down world we’re now seeing the aftermath. Vast improvements in technologies have enabled greater connectivity and securely managed information flows, helping organizations overcome the constraints of distance and isolation. The pandemic—which triggered the biggest experiment in remote working at scale—has shown that it is indeed possible to collaborate well at a distance.

Meanwhile, growing fragmentation and changing consumer preferences have made moving decision-making authority to the edge not just possible, but necessary.

Accenture survey on these trends here.

Yes, Axe Throwing is Coming Back Strong Post-Pandemic!

This is Experience Retail– the New Consumer Trend

What to do when you come out of isolation from a pandemic? Well, go out for a date and go axe throwing. You may have missed it: axe throwing is a growing retail concept that’s spreading throughout the country. This idea emerged around 2018, mostly in the South, and has spread like crazy across the country. Even Berkeley, California has its own axe-throwing spot – AxeVentures. This seemingly strange pastime actually is a growing trend filling empty retail spaces that have been hard to fill and taking the concept of “experience retail” to another level. The real question I have is, can you bring your own axe?  

Watch some axe throwing here.