Succeeding in today’s constantly evolving consumer landscape starts with being able to move quickly and use data to make the best decisions. This is why more and more organizations are taking an agile approach to just about everything from innovation, to marketing, to research and customer experience design. In this post, we will explore the skills you need to cultivate in your consumer insights teams to support agile development.

Budget planning plays a critical role in ensuring consumer insights are embedded into key initiatives and campaigns. Without enough money on hand, researchers have a harder time getting the data they need in time to make consumer driven decisions.

Thanks to mobile devices, social media, and e-commerce platforms, we all know how seamless the modern digital experience can be—to the point we’ve grown to expect that’s how they should be. In the financial services industry, startups like Acorns, Robinhood, Betterment, and Wealthfront have emerged as digital-first operations. These companies are built from the ground up to focus on stronger customer experience (CX). That starts with being easier to use, intuitive, reliable, and helpful. But true magic came by building new, innovative experiences that deliver even more value.

Jeff Bezos recently proclaimed that market research isn’t really helpful. In his letter to Amazon shareholders, he denounced the merits of market research—which surprised many given the company’s reliance on data-informed decision making. From my perspective, he is spectacularly wrong; even if there are nuggets of truth in his commentary. While Bezos’ sentiment may have a little bit of truth in it—the bulk of your customers can’t imagine products that haven’t yet been invented—market research still plays a critically important role at successful organizations, including Amazon.

As companies apply agile approaches to marketing and new product development, customer centricity has become even more critical improving customer experiences, building new products, and delivering relevant marketing communications. 

Most marketing, innovation and customer experience teams are being tasked with delivering more frequent and faster consumer insights. They are applying agile methodologies to the development of new products, services and marketing touch points. Success requires a mix of new technology to bring agile consumer learning capabilities in-house, as well as specialized outsourced research services to help boost company flexibility and fill in gaps with internal capabilities.  But how do you find a research provider that can truly deliver on the promise of agile?