Amid market volatility, brands need accurate data on emerging consumer trends

Matt Britton, Founder and CEO, Suzy

While businesses spent $85 billion on market research in 2023, truly understanding consumers has never been more complex or difficult.

For starters, consumer decisions are being shaped and reshaped at lightning speed by rapidly changing cultural trends, much of it driven by social media.

This creates a challenge for brands to not only keep up with the latest preferences of their customers, but to forecast how those trends will evolve over time – an ability that is vital to staying relevant and competitive in the weeks, months and years to come.

Then factor in all the recent market volatility – from post-pandemic shortages of goods to inflation and recessions – and the challenge of pinpointing consumer preferences and patterns becomes even more daunting.

As brands face this increasingly turbulent marketplace, they are desperately searching for transformative digital tools that deliver up-to-the-minute data on consumers.

Enter AI.

Leveraging new insights and technology

"Understanding emerging trends isn’t just about staying current; it’s about driving business growth in an era where the pace of change is faster than ever,” says Matt Britton, Founder and CEO of Suzy. “Brands that proactively identify and adapt to shifts in consumer behaviour are the ones that will not only get ahead of the game, but will also set the rules for it."

When Suzy launched in 2018, it majorly disrupted the consumer research category by bringing agile, quick insights to brands. This was thanks to its customer survey app, Crowdtap, and its combining of quantitative and qualitative data into a single platform.

Now Suzy is disrupting the category all over again by infusing its platform with AI-powered features that will empower brands to use data in compelling, game-changing ways. Plus, Suzy has a number of new products that are leading the way in innovation to help their customers drive growth and stay ahead of the curve.

With the integration of AI into mainstream culture, Suzy saw an opportunity to solve additional challenges that their customers were facing. It became clear that traditional research solutions were struggling to tell brands exactly how and when changes in the world might impact their businesses, so Suzy set about designing a new product, Signals, that could quickly translate shifts in consumer preferences into actionable insights.

Signals takes a variety of third-party data sources (earnings reports, syndicated research and more), feeds them into an AI-based large language model (LLM), and surfaces hyper-relevant market signals and insights into things such as consumer trends or market shifts. Suzy clients can see it all on the Signals dashboard and then easily conduct deeper research on what those signals mean for their business.

Researchers spend vast amounts of time looking for shifts in consumer preferences, and then finding ways to convert this into useful data. Signals automates much of this process, allowing companies to be proactive – not just reactive – and stay ahead of the curve.

Tracking consumer perceptions and behaviour over time

Suzy, which has access to owned audiences in the US, as well as global panels, has another product, Trackers, to complement Signals. Trackers telescopes in on consumer preferences as they shift over time. It does this by tracking brand health, category behaviour, product impact and campaign effectiveness, enabling brands to launch products that fully align with consumer desires at any moment.

One leading food and beverage retailer was struggling to optimise the flavour profiles of its flagship product line. It used Trackers to monitor evolving tastes and preferences, segment that data by region to create region-specific products, and then collect immediate feedback on sample products. This allowed for rapid adjustments before full-scale production, meaning the eventual result was guaranteed a hungry audience.

Such tools provide a way to meet head-on the challenges brands face as a result of the increasing pace of change in the world.

Staying ahead of the bots

Insights into consumer behaviour are only useful if they’re of high quality. A major problem businesses face is the spread of AI-generated survey bots across online market research panels. As increasingly smarter bots have evolved, it’s become even more difficult to detect them and preserve the authenticity of survey data. If bots skew research results, brands can be sent off in the wrong direction.

So Suzy developed Biotic, a patent-pending bot detection technology that’s designed to analyse the survey respondent’s end-to-end journey, detect bots and remove them from the data. Thanks to Biotic, Suzy can ensure that clients get genuine, human results and actionable insights.

Help is at hand

With social media only continuing to increase its impact across every demographic and global markets facing powerful disruptions for the foreseeable future, companies will continue to search for new and better ways to understand their dynamic consumers and track their rapidly shifting preferences.

"Suzy’s products – Signals, Trackers, and Biotic – are essential because they directly address the challenges our customers face in an unpredictable market” Britton says. “In an industry where staying relevant requires constant innovation, Suzy’s solutions provide the clarity and confidence our clients need to make decisions that drive lasting success."

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