Why Businesses Need Analytics and Insights Now More Than Ever

Right now, expert insights on your brand and customer strategies might just be the thing that puts you ahead of your competitors. In fact, with disruption, fierce competition, and information overload dominating nearly every industry, it can give you what you need to exceed customer expectations and stay relevant for consumers in the long-haul. Here’s why analytics and insights, especially right now, are so crucial.

That “new normal” we’re all sick of hearing about? We’re in the thick of it.

Life and business have changed in so many ways the last handful of years. To weather the storms, most companies have been leveraging data, analytics, and insights to gauge how their customers are evolving so they can pivot their messaging, products, and services based on those insights.

And things are still changing.

Companies can no longer assume that shakeups impacting them are a fluke or that there won’t be more rounds of disruption ahead. That means businesses and their leaders must learn to adapt in a state of constant change – and quickly. We call this Adaptive Resilience.

Companies who practice adaptive resilience have a mindset that the “new normal” is about trying and testing, hitting and missing, learning and adapting – and they’re more likely to use all the tools at their disposal to inform decision-making.

Fortunately, the techniques, tools, and talent available within the insights industry have never been more robust. This gives organizations the best possible opportunity to benefit in this moment and practice adaptive resilience 

Especially when used as an ongoing initiative (versus a one-off snapshot in time), marketing, brand, and customer insights equip businesses with the timely knowledge needed to be able to adapt and pivot when disruption occurs.

It seems there are constantly new entrants into market categories and unconventional players looking to gain share from others.

Understanding changing market dynamics and getting an early read on perceptions of disrupter companies can help you understand what you are up against and whether it warrants strategic action.

For example, right now, countless established brands – from bookstores to banks –  are facing competitive threats from big tech companies. Big tech is making serious moves in industries ranging from health insurance to healthcare, financial services, banking, and automotive (just to name a few). On top of that, the number of other digital-only providers flourishing cannot be overlooked when assessing the dynamically shifting competitive landscape.

This adds up to a critical challenge for established industry brands, but it can also present opportunities to re-evaluate and recommit to exceptional customer experience (CX).

In 2023, the U.S. saw the greatest business growth in history with 5.5 million new businesses being created.

(Source: U.S. Chamber of Commerce)

While brands can’t control emerging competitive threats, they can control their response to them – and how quickly they become aware of them. Customer and market insights can help by uncovering unmet customer needs, ways to enhance digital experiences, and opportunities to broaden services.

When it comes to customer experience, remember that you are competing for both market and mind share. People are constantly exposed to headlines on war, inflation, disease, political divides – you name it. With so much overwhelm, many are less willing to forgive poor experiences. However, they are also more likely to be wowed by experiences with brands that seek to alleviate those negative emotions.

As far back as 2015 all the way up to 2024, researchers found emotion to be the most important CX driver.

(Source: Forrester)

Therefore, it’s not only important to understand the emotional responses generated by your products, services, and experiences, but also to understand how those emotions may vary across different audience segments or generations. This holistic viewpoint can help you overcome the fierce competition to hold the attention (and loyalty) of your customers and consumers.

The speed and volume of information generated at any given moment continues to increase exponentially, creating a rapidly swinging pendulum of public perception.

The good news is companies have the benefit of capturing more information about their customers and emerging markets to better serve their needs in meaningful and relevant ways.

The need to rely on “how we used to do it” has become less critical (or relevant) with the wealth of new information available. Now, companies are able to quickly tap into data to understand what their customers want, where their brand has the strongest foothold, and where new market opportunities exist.

The bad news is, with so much information, it can be hard to decipher what’s useful and what isn’t. Swimming in a sea of data without the ability to identify the most valuable insights is a shortcut to strategic paralysis.

Often, information is housed in different, siloed areas within an organization. These information siloes can make it difficult to see the full story in the data. And one group may have information that would be highly valuable to another without even knowing it. This disconnect is a missed growth opportunity hiding in plain sight.

For example, traditionally, companies house employee experience (EX) with HR while CX lives in a separate part of the business. Often, the paths never cross.

However, unlocking connections between the two with advanced analytics can help harmonize the overall business experience and even give companies a competitive edge. The real value comes from finding the direct links – insights that only emerge when deploying an integrated customer-centric view. It’s like an infinity loop empowering and enhancing CX and EX simultaneously.

Having a deep understanding of the current customer needs, wants, and desires obtained through data and analytics can help an organization’s advertising, communications, and products/services cut through the noise to reach an information-overloaded consumer.

Thorough, proactive insights tracking is often a core component of highly profitable businesses. That’s because it helps businesses find and tell a compelling, customer-centric story gleaned from their vast amounts of data. More than that, it helps companies find what’s most meaningful in their data so it can be acted upon efficiently and strategically across the organization. In turn, those insights can provide a blueprint for communicating with customers about products and services so the message doesn’t get lost in all the noise.