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Consumer and Market Insights

Get proactive, actionable insights from internal and external data sources to identify growth opportunities and develop winning category strategies for consumer goods

Consumer and Market Insights at a glance:

  • A 360-degree view of the opportunities and challenges facing your business by integrating internal, external and third-party data.  
  • Expertly curated insights on markets, categories, competitors and consumers – to help your commercial and marketing teams make better strategic decisions. 
  • Robust, unbiased, contextualised insights and analysis tailored for categories at different levels of maturity. 
  • Pre-built templates and custom tools to help you build world-class category growth strategies quickly and easily. 
  • Proactive alerts on new and relevant developments in your categories and markets to help you unlock areas of growth and innovation. 
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Develop successful category strategies with intelligence you can trust

Identifying ‘where to play’ and ‘how to win’ to drive successful growth strategies has always been complex. But with new business models and products, increasing price pressures, and changing customer behaviours to keep up with, continuously monitoring developments across your market has never been more important.   

To devise and execute robust revenue growth strategies, companies need to:

  • Identify white spaces and emerging opportunities to innovate and launch new products that deliver sustainable growth

  • Understand changing consumer behaviours and listen carefully to deliver exactly what they’re looking for

  • Keep pace with competitors and carefully monitor activity across adjacent categories and markets

  • Translate major trends and events into actionable innovation strategies that drive value in their categories. 

  • Improve planning and collaboration with channel and distribution partners by using timely, accurate insights and recommendations.

  • Optimise market positioning and penetration to drive sustainable growth in increasingly unpredictable conditions. 

  • Understand evolving business needs and ensure category strategies and approaches are aligned with market demand. 

We combine AI and HI to give you a 360-degree view of the opportunities and challenges facing your business...

We blend leading AI models and analytics capabilities and expertly-curated third-party data sets with deep market intelligence and category expertise, to help you identify the right growth opportunities and develop winning category strategies. With The Smart Cube’s Consumer and Market Insights solution, you can select capabilities and insights across four modular elements:

  • Market Expansion
    Market Expansion

    Get timely, strategic insights and overviews of markets and geographies – helping you select potential partners, identify local opportunities, understand new legal and regulatory landscapes, and build winning go to market strategies.

  • Product Category Analysis
    Product Category Analysis

    Develop a holistic understanding of your categories through in-depth assessment and analysis of emerging trends, key drivers and inhibitors, the competitive landscape, and consumer habits and behaviours.

  • Competitor Intelligence
    Competitor Intelligence

    Take a deep dive into your competitors’ key strengths and weaknesses, learn more about how they’re perceived and performing, and discover key gaps that can help differentiate your brand.

  • Consumer Insights
    Consumer Insights

    Stay up to date with consumer trends, needs, and purchase behaviours with social media sentiment analysis, U&A insights, NPS tracking, bespoke surveys and more, to identify focus areas and formulate effective marketing strategies. 

How your business benefits

With Consumer and Market Insights from The Smart Cube, you can:

  • Use robust, unbiased and contextualised insights to build successful category strategies that boost sales and drive sustainable growth.
  • Uncover untapped growth opportunities with ongoing insights from disparate data sets, including syndicated sources and patent filings, that highlight unexplored synergies, opportunities and risks.
  • Mitigate risk and identify strategic priorities with greater visibility of everything from consumer attitudes and competitor activities, to socio-economic change and regulatory developments.
  • Stay ahead of the competition with timely decisions translated from proactive intelligence and forward-looking insights.
  • Free your talent from laborious research tasks and give them more time to engage with stakeholders and execute category strategies based on proven, timely insights.
  • Leverage a combination of internal and external data to gain the most in-depth view of opportunities and developments across products, categories and markets.
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How we work with you

Whether you want to develop an end-to-end decision support engine for your category growth or explore specific modules within it, we combine AI and HI to build the ideal solution for your organisation. Here’s how:

Step 1

We conduct interviews with key stakeholders, hold workshops and carry out data diagnostics to understand your current practices and identify unmet insight needs and challenges.

Step 2

We then define goals and establish success criteria, before designing a solution structure best suited to your business.

Step 3

We develop a strategic vision and execution roadmap, and create the infrastructure and intelligence wireframes aligned to your business requirements.

Step 4

We collaborate with key business partners to contextualise and deploy frameworks along with re-usable assets that enable “outcome-oriented” insights.

Step 5

We provide both ongoing intelligence, as well as support your key strategic initiatives arising from internal plans, or external market-based triggers.

Step 6

We establish a clear roadmap for future activities and a continuous review of alternative approaches.

Why choose The Smart Cube

When you choose Consumer and Market Insights from The Smart Cube, you always get:

A solution tailored to your needs : We work with you to design and deploy a solution that combines AI and HI in a way that makes the most of your existing assets, complements your team, and helps you achieve your strategic goals.


Access to diverse data sources and expertise: Through our world-class resource base – including a global network of 11,000+ external SMEs, subscribed databases and an extensive library of knowledge assets – we obtain clean, consolidated and current information to empower internal teams with powerful insights.


Holistic integrated intelligence: We integrate predictive analytics with external market intelligence, consumer trends, innovations and potential disruptions, to create a holistic view of your category.


Objective and data-driven insights: We provide independent and fact-based analysis without any prejudice or inherent bias, to provide outcome-driven insights and recommendations that you can use to make the right decisions for your business. 


Relevant advice and recommendations: When you need expert support, our specialist teams will provide bespoke category insights, market intelligence and informed recommendations, to address your specific business challenges.


Consumer and Market Insights in action

Helping a leading sugar manufacturer to develop and execute a successful new product launch strategy

  • THE CHALLENGE

    The client was planning the launch of a new brown sugar product in a European market. The business wanted to understand the market potential for the new product, desirable product features, and the optimum price, in order to inform a successful launch.

  • OUR APPROACH

    The Smart Cube specialists designed and fielded a quantitative consumer research study, targeting regular consumers of brown sugar.
    We analysed survey data using SPSS to determine purchase drivers, brand perception and loyalty, and calculated customer leakage at each stage of the buying journey. Leveraging techniques such as Price Sensitivity Meter and Conjoint Analysis, we calculated the optimum product price and estimated desirable features; and developed a simulator to model market share based on different product scenarios.

  • VALUE DELIVERED

    The client received an exhaustive consumer purchase journey report, intelligence on key competitors that posed a threat to the new product, and market share forecasts. Our insights and simulator tool enabled the client to plan and execute a successful launch of its new product, with the right features and at the optimum price point.

Targeted market insights support Toast Ale to drive category growth and geographic expansion

  • THE CHALLENGE

    Toast Ale wanted to explore how to expand its environmentally-conscious brewing methodology across geographies and brewing companies.

    The client engaged The Smart Cube to identify potential market and growth opportunities, and where its operational model could have the biggest impact on reducing global bread wastage.

  • OUR APPROACH

    The Smart Cube’s specialists undertook:

    – Market analysis across the US and Europe to identify where beer consumption and bread wastage were consistently high

    – Gross margin analysis to better understand how Toast’s brewing method stacked up against traditional options in terms of costs and financial viability

    – Brand value analysis to estimate the social value of Toast’s mission, using the CSR strategies, financial spend and brand impact of global alcohol companies.

  • VALUE DELIVERED

    Our research and analysis provided actionable insights to inform the client’s expansion goals, with key highlights including:

    – Identification of markets where Toast’s model could be adopted by breweries

    – Toast’s brewing operations were running at a very similar gross margin to competitors, and its ethical mission greatly enhanced overall brand value

    – Similar breweries could switch to Toast’s production model with low impact on profitability.

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Ongoing intelligence and regular category tracking drives $5mn increase in market share for US CPG client

  • THE CHALLENGE

    The increasing trend of ‘healthy’ claims and products was impacting sales of some of the clients’ key SKUs including jams, jellies and fruit-based beverages.

    The company sought an insights partner to deliver regular tracking of its top categories from an external market perspective, to help drive category growth.

  • OUR APPROACH

    The Smart Cube identified the top 10 category groups based on sales and significance of ‘healthy’ as a key attribute. We initiated reviews for categories including juices, smoothies and teas, leveraging intelligence sources from social media and Google trends, to patent data and consumer research.

    Our specialists delivered monthly category reports which comprised sales trends, seasonality impacts, penetration and frequency etc; category-level opportunities and risks; and a Prioritisation Matrix for innovation to guide new product launches.

  • VALUE DELIVERED

    Using our insights and recommendations, the client was able to improve its market share in 4 out of the top 10 category groups in the US, and exceeded its annual sales target for 4 out of 6 product launches.

    This resulted in an overall increase in market share worth over $5mn.