The changing face of audience insight – and what it means

The true power of audience insight is unleashed when it aligns an entire organization. 

When there’s a unified understanding of a market, key growth audiences and customers, magic happens. 

Most business leaders know this. They know that when you’ve got this clarity, decisions are made fast, strategy is simple and easily executed, and teams can be totally focused on what matters.

They know that putting the audience at the heart of a business drives success. 

But that’s often easier said than done.

As Bex, our Chief Product Officer, puts it: “the biggest challenge for businesses today is the complex landscape they have to compete within. Even a tiny brand is competing on a global stage. There’s so much disruption, and the market’s moving so much faster than it ever has been.” 

Businesses today need to move at the speed of their audiences – and that means having access to the right kind of insight, in the moment you need it. 

Why market research needed to change

We’ve said it before – market research as we know it has utterly failed.

The vast majority of the $90bn market research industry wasn’t built for this world. By the time you’ve briefed an agency, signed off your budget, run the fieldwork, waited for data processing, sat on briefing calls with analysts, got the key results, gone back with new questions – the world hasn’t just changed, it’s fundamentally different.  

Being able to act fast and really drive growth with the unified understanding we’re talking about takes a lot more than this.

This underpins everything we do – we build technology that’s redefining how companies operate, built on a solid bedrock of audience understanding.

The changing face of audience insight 

Constant data collection

For fast-moving businesses, time is everything. 

Getting the level of clarity you need, in the moment you need it, is the fundamental thing that needs changing.

When it comes to making that possible, a constant collection of consistent data across markets is crucial.

Our clients get instant access to both global and local insights with research that’s run continuously across 47 markets. That’s what they need to keep their finger on the pulse and make timely decisions. 

Scale and speed through technology

Our data collection process has been developed over the last decade and is focused on reducing the time from real world person to analyst. We ruthlessly focus on automating data cleaning, checking, weighting, re-coding and data publishing. This is hard – but vital to deliver consistent, massive scale data at pace. 

Reinventing the survey experience

Not enough people take part in market research. For businesses to get the answers they need, at the scale they need, this has to change.

We need more answers from more people, and a big barrier to that is the traditional experience of survey-taking.

They’re clunky, they’re not mobile-first and they’re built for researchers, not users. We set out  to change this by building a mobile-first survey experience that’s engaging, personalized and user-centric – because with highly-engaged respondents comes better quality answers.

Going platform-first 

The majority of our customers licence the GWI platform for their data analysis. This is how market research should be delivered – it gives them immediate access to the data they need, whenever they need it.

It’s also vital that this platform serves the needs of non-experts (people who need to make decisions based on their audiences, but aren’t researchers by trade). 

This is a crucial step for audience insight and market research to become central to every organization, and every department. Anyone, no matter what job title or seniority level, should be able to get clued into their audience fast. 

Organizational, not siloed 

Right now, for many organizations, good quality audience insight sits with one or two key teams. Distributing that knowledge across teams, especially with a global presence, isn’t easy – but it’s essential to keep everyone on the same page.

This was one of the biggest reasons we created dashboards that are easy to build, and even easier to share. 

Simple and frictionless sharing of insights is absolutely key to growing and scaling a business today, and it’s a foundational step in making data central to all teams.

Easy adoption

For audience insight to be properly embedded into an organization and strategies, it has to be easy to access. This is a key consideration for businesses going platform-first with their research; it needs to be easy for people to get up and running, and comfortable finding and using the data. 

We’re committed to taking the power of audience insight to everyone, and that means having a simple and accessible model; being able to self-onboard, starting with a free plan, and adding only what you need from there. 

This flexibility is why our customers span from single-person start-ups to the largest companies in the world. 

Shaping a better strategy in 2022

Data has never been more abundant, or critical to success in 2022. 

As audience insight becomes more democratized, more easily accessible, and more embedded in every team and business, getting your hands on the right data, at the right time, is the key. 

That’s what the new GWI is all about – with the right tools, anyone should be able to access good quality data, analyze their audience and make better decisions. 

Because the old way of doing things simply didn’t work.