The Internal Business Case for Continuous Consumer Understanding

The case in one page

Every week, your business makes decisions about consumers without hearing from them, and it is far from alone. When the Economist Intelligence Unit and PwC surveyed 1,135 executives, 58% said intuition, experience and the advice of colleagues were the main basis for their big decisions, while barely a third had relied primarily on data and analytics the last time they made one. [1]

Consumer research rarely fills that gap, because it is commissioned one project at a time and a project takes longer than a decision does. The findings arrive correct but too late, and more often nobody commissions the study in the first place, since everyone already knows how long it will take.

Always-on consumer understanding closes the gap. Conversations with real consumers run as soon as a decision needs them, every study adds to a single searchable library that makes the next one more valuable, and the consumer's voice reaches the people making the call while there is still a call to make.

Canva has already made this shift. Its research team, which had been doing less research because its tools kept slowing it down, now treats research as a reflex, and Canva's brand team in Germany runs studies of its own to the research lead's standards. HeliosX launched in 48 hours by answering its launch question from a study it had run months earlier.

We recommend adopting Conveo as the organization's consumer understanding infrastructure, beginning with a pilot on one decision the business is stuck on today.

The full business case covers the cost of the current approach, the evidence from Canva and HeliosX, the objections a budget committee raises, and a pilot your leadership can measure.