Why consumer insights aren’t just for large companies

Welcome to Ryan’s Rant, my weekly newsletter aimed at helping companies drive customer-centric growth.

In The Consumer Insights Revolution , we wrote about how Stefan and Kate led a massive transformation of PepsiCo to make consumer insights the company’s competitive advantage.?

What a big company like PepsiCo has on its side for an initiative like this is its scale. They spend a lot of money on marketing and a lot of money on data to understand how to do better marketing. There’s value in all of that data they’re generating across markets and business units.?

But they are also cursed by their infrastructure. They have a lot of legacy systems and processes that take time to overhaul. They have all those different markets and business units to wrangle.??

Making any kind of change in that environment is a huge challenge. It is certainly possible, as PepsiCo proved, but it is a big project.?

That’s why I love to see smaller businesses bet on consumer centricity from the start.?

What smaller companies have on their side

Smaller businesses don’t have all that infrastructure to overhaul. They can start from scratch to create a consumer insights function that sets up the company for growth.?

They don’t have the budgets of a PepsiCo, but they can move quicker. They don’t have legacy tools to audit. They don’t have internal processes that were built around those tools and data. They can start fresh.?

They probably don’t even need to sell the vision of consumer centricity. The business likely began with the idea of meeting an unmet customer need. And so leadership is often very receptive to anything that will help them stay customer centric.

Consumer centricity as a superpower

So if you're in a small company and you have a customer-centric C-suite, you can build infrastructure from the jump that has you listening to customer calls, doing user testing and understanding what resonates with customers holistically from the ground up.

I think about what I heard from Ivan Arrington at Burt’s Bees : The founders of Burt’s Bees initially did consumer research at flea markets by just walking around and talking to people.?

I think about what Lauren Governale from hims and hers told me about how the co-founder brought her in to establish an insights function when the business was only two years old and had around 100 employees.?

These founders are passionate about consumer insights — so there’s so much potential to set up a connected insights ecosystem that really fuels their growth.?

We see it with SoFi, who did just that. I just met with Jean-Michel Hoffman, VP of Brand at SoFi , last week and was struck again by how great this story is. SoFi is a financial institution that was founded in 2011. It was built on the principle of putting its members first, and (because it’s only existed since 2011) it’s been fueled by technology from day one. So CMO Lauren Stafford-Webb could enable her marketing team to leverage consumer data? — even without an insights team.?

It’s the type of thing that any small company can do. With a maniacal focus on the consumer and an intentional focus on scaling your learning, a small company can truly fuel growth through consumer centricity.??

In case you missed it

I had JM and Lauren on my podcast a few years back, but the story is still as relevant as ever. I recommend the episode to any of the smaller companies out there, or even larger companies that want to be inspired by the scrappiness of small companies!?