Consumer preferences, categories and business models are all evolving incredibly quickly. Here’s how AI and HI are helping product and commercial teams keep up.
Today’s product, go to market, and revenue growth teams are tasked with successfully navigating some of the most complex and rapidly-changing consumer and market environments ever seen.
Consumer expectations are rising, brand loyalty is diminishing, and the pandemic has accelerated huge shifts in how, where, and when consumers buy. On top of all that, new business models are undermining established strategies, and global price inflation is having a huge impact on customers and businesses alike.
That’s a lot to try and stay on top of at once. To do so, teams need timely insights generated from huge, diverse data sets, contextualised to help support their specific strategic goals. It’s a tall order, and one that can only be fulfilled by intelligently applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Human Intelligence (HI) alongside one another.
Here are four ways that AI and HI are coming together to help brands navigate this incredibly challenging time, and get ahead of ongoing consumer and market shifts:
#1 Supporting and informing market expansion
When your current channels and territories become saturated, market expansion is a great way to fuel revenue growth. However, without the right strategy and insights, it can be at best a risky undertaking, and at worst a complete leap into the unknown.
When applied alongside one another, AI and HI can take a huge amount of time, effort, and risk out of market analysis. AI and digital tools can help handle the huge volume of information there is to sort through when evaluating markets and opportunities – spotting opportunity areas, estimating market size, and providing valuable insights into the target customer base.
From there, human experts can work to contextualise those insights, and use them to create informed market expansion strategies where businesses can clearly see how to make the most of those conditions and start driving growth at speed.
Together, the two are helping businesses explore and identify local partnership and co-branding opportunities, fully understand competitive and market dynamics, and even build sustainable, reusable go to market strategies.
#2 Better understanding evolving competitive landscapes
Competitor intelligence is a key part of any winning product or go to market strategy. But across crowded, fast-moving markets, maintaining a clear picture of what your competitors are doing – and how their actions are impacting you – isn’t easy.
To truly understand a competitive landscape today, there are a huge range of data sources to consider. And that’s where AI+HI becomes extremely useful. From constantly monitoring competitor activities to better understand their strategies, to tracking how consumers perceive brands, AI combined with HI makes mammoth analysis tasks manageable.
The speed and depth of insight delivered by AI models and capabilities crucially frees your experts up to focus on what they do best – acting on competitor insights and translating them into the right actions at the right time to differentiate your brand and drive loyalty.
#3 Getting to know consumers better – and anticipating their needs
Much like competitors, the consumer landscape is also changing at an incredibly rapid rate today. Fortunately, there’s a huge wealth of data available that can help organisations understand exactly what consumers want, and how their preferences are evolving – if they’re able to interpret and process it quickly.
By bringing consumer segmentation, preference, and behavioural data together, AI is enabling organisations to proactively adapt to how, where, when, and what consumers want to buy – and identify white spaces for growth and unmet needs in the process.
By delivering a steady stream of consumer insights from diverse internal and external sources, AI and digital tools are giving organisations complete consumer visibility and a near-real-time view of:
- Consumer passion and pain points
- Paths to purchase
- Consumer segmentation
- Consumer preferences
Together, those insights provide experts with everything they need to build data-driven marketing and product strategies – and adapt to new consumer needs before their competitors can. And this is where HI really plays an invaluable role – bringing in essential business knowledge in order to contextualise these insights from AI.
#4 Optimising market positioning and penetration
The final big way that AI and HI are helping teams conquer today’s rapidly-changing market and consumer landscape is in how well they can bring consumer, competitor, and market insights together to create a full view of category conditions and performance.
By combining AI-generated and HI-contextualised insights from across those three areas, teams can get a 360-degree view of their categories, and start to answer some big questions, including:
- How does our product compare against others across the category?
- How are new entrants impacting our market share and strategy?
- Where are the biggest opportunities for growth and white space development across the category?
- Which adjacent categories and segments are growing – and why?
- What pain points are consumers across our categories facing – and how can we best support them?
Equipped with answers to those questions, teams will have everything they need to not just keep up with the rapid pace of change they face today, but actively drive growth across their category and lead its future.
Boost your Consumer and Market Intelligence with The Smart Cube
The Smart Cube has been combining AI and digital capabilities with deep market, category and consumer research to help businesses build and execute winning growth strategies for many years. Read more about this here.
To learn more about our Consumer and Market Insight solution and discover how it could help your team regain control and drive growth in today’s rapidly-shifting commercial landscape, visit our website today.