The latest IIEX EU created and organised by GreenBook took place virtually between 14 and 15 of April. Across the demonstrations, discussions, and conversations, three interlinked themes struck a chord with the Behaviorally team and our contribution to the event, Iterating Designs Instantly with AI to Drive Brand and Shopper Growth, presented by Ruben Nazario (VP, Product Innovation) and Alex Batchelor (MD of EU & UK) (full presentation recording available at the end of this blog post).
These three key themes include:
- Embracing and Empowering Digital Tech
- Leveraging AI
- Pursuing Simplicity
Embracing and Empowering Digital Tech
Using tech is no longer alone a prerequisite of being innovative. Industry progression is rapidly accelerating, and we bear witness to organisations fully utilising and shaping digital advances to drive better contexts, observations, interactions, and understanding of consumer behaviour.
Tech is being harnessed and manipulated to drive valuable and tangible solutions. Once biased in its exploitation of quantitative insight gathering, advanced tools for more deep-dive, numerous demos showed how qualitative research is now enabling brand owners to get much closer to consumers and gather real, rich, underlying knowledge.
Leveraging AI
AI hasn’t just arrived; it is breaking down walls. The search for the holy grail of faster, cheaper, and better is being solved with the partnership of AI across the insights discipline. There are upstream data solutions that provide consumer-based knowledge to be paired with human gut feelings or hypotheses, the ability to listen to consumer conversations and extract truly implicit attitudes, as well as time-saving applications to identify and recruit those hard-to-reach respondents. It enables the ability to synthesize swathes of observational, verbal, quantitative and qualitative data, allowing brand owners to get to the crux of their questions and realisation of new insights they were unable to achieve efficiently before.
Pursuing Simplicity
Above all though, there is a push for much simpler and engaging experiences for respondents as well as the brand insights teams. Contextual solutions can be created seamlessly, mining data is just the touch of a button, data can be more easily manipulated to directly, and truly, answer our burning questions, whilst reporting becomes richer and more intuitive.
The biggest reward is that human thought and time are being better channelled into actioning change and leveraging new behaviour to drive brand growth.
These themes have been around before, but the acceleration of digital shopping and the growth of technology keeps pushing the envelope of what the insights industry can do. Here at Behaviorally, we are committed to a digital-first approach coupled with our behavioural framework and legacy of expertise in shopper marketing to help brands drive agile growth. Our mission is aligned with what we heard at IIEX EU and we look forward to helping our clients as their trusted partners and advisors.
THE AUTHOR
Grant Montague is the Vice President, Client Development for Behaviorally (Formerly PRS) in the UK. He likes nothing more than watching football and enjoying a decent British pint.
Connect with Grant on LinkedIn.
