Before you can evaluate the impact of your consumer behavior and innovation initiatives, you need to define what you want to achieve and how you will measure it. What are the specific goals and objectives of your initiatives? How do they align with your overall business strategy and vision? What are the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you will use to track your progress and results? How will you collect and analyze the data? These are some of the questions that you need to answer to establish a clear and consistent framework for evaluation.
We believe in observing consumers in the wild to see what anomalies arise, which they always do if we don't plan them. Most breakthroughs in medicine, science, and business came about as an indirect result of accidental discoveries that were not planned or directly related to the assignment's original mission, objective, or target. Instead, they were something that unexpectedly revealed itself along the way. Therefore, organizations interested in innovation should give their explorers and scouts a broad territory to roam. Give them permission to stumble into accidental discoveries and unexpected finds they can bring back to headquarters. Exploring territories, instead of a specific, predetermined objective, is when we often find gold.
Depending on your objectives and metrics, you can choose from a variety of methods and tools to evaluate the impact of your consumer behavior and innovation initiatives. Surveys and interviews are useful for gathering feedback and insights from customers, employees, partners, and other stakeholders. Experiments and tests are great for validating and refining solutions, products, services, or processes. Additionally, analytics and dashboards can be used to monitor and visualize data to measure the impact of initiatives on business outcomes. Examples of surveys, experiments, and analytics include A/B testing, prototyping, piloting, user testing, web analytics, social media analytics, CRM systems, and BI tools. Ultimately, these methods can help measure customer satisfaction, loyalty, retention, referrals, needs, preferences, perceptions, expectations, behaviors, effectiveness, efficiency, usability, feasibility desirability of innovations as well as trends and patterns.
As mentioned above, our three decades of experience have shown us that formal interviews and surveys yield the least revelatory and useful information for uncovering the big insights we need to spark groundbreaking ideas. However, observing customers in the field and having casual conversations without the pressure of a notepad, clipboard, or camera almost always produces the best materials for us to identify problems and develop creative solutions.
Every day new important tools emerge for researchers to make their studies more effective and personalized for each demand. The researcher's new greatest allies are AI platforms, which can be a good starting point for searching for macro information and trends, subsequently validated by a professional and with human curation in the search for complementary data.
Once you have collected and analyzed your data, you need to compare your results and benchmarks to evaluate the impact of your consumer behavior and innovation initiatives. How did your initiatives perform against your objectives and metrics? How did they compare to your previous or expected results? How did they compare to your competitors or industry standards? These are some of the questions that you need to answer to assess the value and return on investment of your initiatives. You can also use this information to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of your initiatives and make adjustments or improvements accordingly.
At the outset of a new assignment or project endeavor, we strive to get our clients, their staff, customers, and competitors comfortable talking with us so casually and off the record that they'll say "things" they'd never say in a conference room or to their bosses. We want to hear about their organization's weaknesses, vulnerabilities, mishaps, and misfires because the big breakthroughs are most likely to happen within those areas they know intimately. Ideally, we want our clients to tell us what they consider a major, even impossible, achievement beyond what they or their competitors can do. We also want them to discuss other industries they admire to use as behavioral comparisons later. All of this requires the art of conversation.
The final step in evaluating the impact of your consumer behavior and innovation initiatives is to communicate your findings and recommendations to your stakeholders. You need to share your results, insights, and learnings with your customers, employees, partners, investors, and other relevant parties. You also need to provide actionable recommendations on how to sustain, scale, or optimize your initiatives. You can use various formats and channels to communicate your findings and recommendations, such as reports, presentations, infographics, videos, podcasts, blogs, newsletters, or social media posts.
Most leaders have strong opinions about how they see their business, customers, competitors, industry, and the world. This confidence makes them passionate and able to withstand the criticism of bold moves. But it also closes their eyes to see other perspectives that don't fit into their normal point of view, education, or training. These leaders will often select and bend data to say what they need it to say and discard data that doesn't support their worldview. For better or worse, many don't trust data. However, studying photos or videos of consumers in the field at their venues or other venues is hard to argue with. It's hard to argue with what you see consumers doing in the field, which is why we use so much photo documentation.
Evaluating the impact of your consumer behavior and innovation initiatives is not a one-time activity, but a continuous process. You need to learn from your data, feedback, and experiences and iterate on your initiatives accordingly. You also need to keep track of the changes and developments in your market, industry, and customer segments and adapt your initiatives accordingly. By learning and iterating, you can ensure that your initiatives are relevant, effective, and valuable for your business and your customers.
As a standard practice, we constantly observe, study, and document how consumers behave in the field. We make adjustments, test in the field again, and refine things. To help us in this effort, we teach our clients—from the top to the bottom of the organization— how they can also study this behavior without us being there, which helps create a culture of awareness and sensitivity to consumers.