By Kerry Juhl
Fast changing marketplace dynamics and consumer behavior tied to the recessionary economy are putting businesses at a crossroads. Teams need to quickly assess their priorities and pivot to new revenue and profit growth strategies. But in times of upheaval, the activities of teams can take over and they run the risk of confusing activity for progress. The alignment gained by pausing and reflecting as a team can keep the momentum going on key priorities while letting go of the rest.
An important step amidst a consumer learning initiative is to reflect, assess, and decide on next steps. It can happen in-person or virtually and can take as little as 60-90 minutes of the team’s valuable time. For this critical step in the journey, an outside, unbiased facilitator can be your most powerful tool.
There is no better time than now to consider these top 5 benefits of engaging a professional facilitator:
1. Unbiased Professional
A trained facilitator brings the valuable benefit of being an objective leader who can listen to all points of view, not vested in a particular position or outcome. This creates the conditions for a more open dialogue and opportunity to see possibilities that otherwise may be missed.
2. Participate in the Discussion
Ask yourself where you can add the most value. Should you try to participate and facilitate or focus 100% on participating with your team? Engaging a trained facilitator does a couple of things. It sends a message that this work is important. It also allows you, the owner, to invest your energy into the discussion while allowing an expert facilitator to customize the process and tools around your needs and objectives.
3. Full Engagement
Critical to success is hearing from everyone in the group. This can be tricky, particularly if there are strong (or silent) opinions and voices, and now you are not in the same room! Facilitators are skilled at navigating the group dynamics and engaging all participants into the discussion to ensure each voice is heard. They also know how to keep the ideas flowing when the group might get stuck.
4. Stretch Thinking
One of the most valuable benefits of a trained facilitator is the ability to stretch the group’s thinking. They are experts at quickly capturing ideas, summarizing, asking the right questions to build on ideas, connecting the dots between ideas, and pushing participants to think outside the box.
5. Drive to Solutions
With a process designed to meet the objective, the facilitator continually uses techniques to ensure a successful outcome with clear next steps, accountability and buy-in from the group.
Through the stages of Immersion, Interaction and Ideation, we help our clients gain empathy and develop the strategies and alignment needed to boost momentum and forward progress toward the team’s goal. Please contact Kerry.Juhl@SIVOInsights.com to learn how we can customize an approach with the right professional facilitator to meet your needs. We have a team of seasoned professionals who are passionate about working with like-minded clients and would love to talk to you!
By Leslie Turner – VP, On Demand Talent
Over the past few years, we’ve had the privilege of working with organizations navigating all kinds of change: leadership transitions, unexpected surges in demand, shifting priorities, and the ever-present pressure to do more with less. One consistent theme has emerged: fractional insights talent can be a game-changer.
Not because it replaces full-time researchers. But because it complements them.
We’ve seen fractional researchers step into high-impact roles with speed, empathy, and precision. Whether they are brought in to lead key innovation or brand strategy initiatives, provide Insights leadership or optimize DIY platforms, they can play a key role in helping teams maintain momentum during critical transitions. And they’ve done it all while working alongside internal teams, to stretch their influence and impact.
Fractional insights professionals are seasoned researchers who embed into teams on a flexible, project-based basis. They’re not just temporary workers but strategic partners, who understand the demands of the business. Often former heads of insights or highly experienced research consultants, they bring deep research expertise across methodologies, industries and tools. They work part-time or on-demand, but their contributions are anything but temporary.
"Fractional leadership is the next evolution of the independent contractor economy"
– Sara Daw, Fast Company, July 11, 2025
Marketing research teams are under pressure, with tighter budgets and timelines often competing with higher expectations. It can be hard to anticipate what the next year may bring, and sometimes you just need support now. Fractional talent helps bridge the gap by offering:
They’re especially valuable when your team is trying to scale insights without compromising depth or rigor. We’ve seen them turn raw data into executive-ready outputs, design unbiased surveys, and bring fresh thinking from outside your category, all while working within your existing tools and workflows.
If you’re considering fractional support, here are a few things we’ve learned that help set the stage for success:
Fractional talent isn’t a work-around, it’s a strategic lever. It allows research teams to stay agile, deepen their insights, and build internal capabilities without overextending resources.
Full-time researchers are the backbone of any insights team. Fractional talent simply helps them go further, faster. If your team is thinking about how to balance speed and depth, fractional talent might be the answer.
For further insight into the value of fractional talent and how it could support your team, please reach out. We're always happy to share what we’ve learned, explore your team’s needs, or just talk shop about the future of insights!
Across industries, brands attempt to access and leverage data to unlock stronger sales and business growth. Your team can bring a wealth of experience and expertise to initiatives, but getting feedback from the people who engage with the product produces better outcomes. Below, we’ll answer the questions: what are consumer insights? Why are consumer insights important? And What is the best way to get consumer insights for my business?
First thing’s first, what are consumer insights? Consumer insights are the underlying motivations or needs that make a consumer behave a certain way. Insights professionals work to understand consumer attitudes, requirements, desires and behaviors to uncover insights that can then guide brand building, portfolio and marketing communications efforts. Many organizations gather data from their consumers, but the real depth of insight comes in asking the right questions and getting the full picture from consumers. Insights gleaned from studying and connecting with your consumers can inform nearly every aspect of your business’ path to growth.
So, how do you get consumer insights? Businesses can get consumer insights in several ways. The correct method for your team depends largely the business question, as well as the industry and market you serve. For example, organizations may capture qualitative data via focus groups, in-depth interviews, and user immersions to identify the nuances in consumer values and opinions.
Meanwhile, quantitative data like path-to-purchase, product testing, and volumetric forecasting can help teams validate consumer interest and behaviors and build confidence in decision-making and actions. Consumer insights experts can gather this information in a number of ways. See some of the most effective consumer insight solutions and techniques below:
Qualitative Consumer Insights
Ethnographies
In-Depth Interviews
Focus Groups
Shopalongs
Shopper Intercepts
Mobile Missions
Online Bulletin Boards
Fishbowls
Agile Sprints
Rapid Refinement
Communication Checks
User Immersions
In-Home Usage
Interactive User Experience
Jobs to Be Done
Quantitative Consumer Insights
Segmentation
Attitude and Usage
Path-to-Purchase
Tracking Testing / Screening
Brand Positioning
Brand Architecture
Product Testing
Creative Testing
Opinion Polling
Now that we know what they are, why are consumer insights important? Essentially, consumer insights remove some of the speculation from your business decisions and actions. It provides actionable answers to what consumers think about your brand, your category, and your products or services. Once you receive those insights, you can take it and run. It’s the fuel that ignites new product or service innovation and optimization, brand experiences and communications. At a higher level, it gives your business access to an entirely new perspective within your consumer market. Consumer insights give you a more holistic understanding of the consumer target audience you want to connect with, allowing you to gain a competitive edge within your industry.
So, why is consumer insight important? There are several reasons growing brands invest in these solutions to drive growth and gain a competitive edge. See why more and more businesses focus on obtaining consumer insights for their strategies below:
The best business strategies have data-backed insights behind them. Consumer insights allow you to identify a “why” to inform and support your business initiatives. The same goes for your brand.
Understanding what people truly believe about your brand can transform marketing strategies. Today, it is important to know who your customers are, what they do, what they value, and why it matters. The best way to answer those questions is to identify your consumers and start a dialogue to better understand them. This dialogue and the insights that come from it allows your business to bring more value to the people you serve. It all leads to better customer experiences and a stronger return on investment.
Every product or service has areas for improvement. Who are the best people to provide that feedback? The individuals who purchase and use them. Getting honest opinions on your current portfolio helps you identify the best places for optimization. You can spot holes in the market and create solutions that fill consumers' unmet needs. Some of the best product ideas and business innovation can come straight from your customers.
It all starts with empathy. Providing enhanced, consumer-focused products and services can only benefit brand loyalty. Brands need to continuously check in with their customers to ensure they have positive brand experiences and identify new ways to delight them. As mentioned above, your products/services can consistently improve to meet the needs of your customer base. Ultimately, this all works toward a stronger relationship with your audience to gain ongoing loyalty. That goes a long way when they are choosing between brands.
How can consumer insights fuel your marketing campaign? Speaking directly to your target audience members creates more nuance and specificity in your consumer-first marketing campaigns. Every engagement in your advertising and beyond should prioritize your consumer. Understanding their values and preferences deeply allows you to speak to them more directly and effectively. If you’re on the journey of building your brand or audience-based marketing (AMB) strategy, these insights provide a path toward successful campaigns that move the needle and influence consumer behavior.
What is your customer’s experience with your brand? Are there features that they like or dislike? Sometimes small things go unseen by marketers, but small details can leave a lasting impression on consumers. Whether it’s digital user journeys, messaging, or customer service conversations, it’s invaluable to hear, understand and react to what people think when they engage with your brand, products, and representatives.
If your organization is wondering how to get consumer insights, the best path is through a specialized consumer insights company. SIVO is a global insights and strategy firm specializing in understanding people and their needs and beliefs that drive behavior. We partner with brands to answer key questions that guide strategies and fuel growth. First, we schedule a discovery meeting, where we ask your stakeholders and subject matter experts key questions about your business and needs. Then, we design a custom research approach that aligns with those requirements. From the data gathered, we identify key insights that inform your decisions and drive business growth. Our experts act as your ongoing partner, helping you access your consumers and interpret the research every step of the way.
Ready to get meaningful consumer insights to unlock your next business and brand strategy? SIVO provides full-service custom consumer research and experiences for business across industries. Whether you need consumer insights, organizational intelligence, market and competitive intelligence, or on-demand talent, we empower organizations to get the most of their business, marketing, and brand building efforts to better achieve their goals. Contact SIVO today to get started.
By Anna Stoesz, SIVO Insights in partnership with Yogesh Chavda, Y2S Consulting
There is a moment most insights professionals have experienced.
A well-designed research study is presented to a leadership team. The work is solid. The story lands. Heads nod around the room. And then . . . nothing really happens.
Not because the work wasn’t good, but because the learning wasn’t there when the decisions needed to happen. Often when it’s time to decide where to invest, which ideas to back, or how to prioritize markets, people forget about the great learning and quietly drift back to intuition, internal politics or whatever worked last year.
Now we have added AI into the mix. With AI, we talk about auto‑coding open ends, auto‑summarizing interviews, and auto‑drafting reports. We celebrate the time savings; what used to take three weeks now takes three hours. That is certainly progress, but it is not the whole story.
The more exciting shift we’re seeing is that AI can now give us the building blocks to move from episodic research to real-time decision intelligence.
Instead of treating research as a series of projects, we can begin to work in a more continuous way. By monitoring signals, recognizing patterns, and updating our understanding as behavior shifts, we can see opportunities and risks emerge in something close to real time.
In other words, companies are starting to leverage insights from intelligence engines that sit much closer to where decisions are made.
Historically, this kind of decision intelligence was a luxury reserved for companies’ proprietary models and armies of consultants. While AI doesn’t magically answer strategy questions for us, it does make the classic questions of “where should we play” and ‘how will we win” practical for brands that don’t have blue‑chip consulting budgets.
To get there, we must stop thinking about AI as a faster report writer and start thinking in terms of real-time decision intelligence.
This change will also require a shift in how researchers work.
Intelligence engines are focused, AI‑accelerated and human‑guided systems designed to answer specific strategic questions in an ongoing way. In a mature setup, you might see engines that continuously map segments and demand spaces, surface and prioritize need states, and stress‑test ideas against multiple plausible futures. Each engine tackles one slice of the strategy puzzle and together, they form a practical, reusable decision system.
The pattern is always AI + HI (human intelligence), where the human‑led inputs of clear business questions, curated data, and activation meet an AI‑powered engine. The engines are purpose-built, specialized models tuned to a task with guardrails that only come with deep expertise.
To make this concrete, let’s look at a situation common to both B2B and B2C clients.
A mid‑size health and wellness brand had a segmentation built five years earlier. It was still the official truth, but everyone knew it no longer matched reality. New players had entered; behaviors had shifted; the market had fragmented. Both the marketing and innovation teams were eager for refreshed insights as they moved into the annual plans process, which was quickly approaching.
The team considered refreshing the work as originally designed but knew it would require high costs and months of fieldwork and analysis using traditional large-scale surveys and qualitative research that would mean delivering insights too late to act on.
They came to SIVO to understand how an AI intelligence engine might provide the insights they needed to help with real-time learning to support decision-making during the planning process.
We stood up two AI engines: a refreshed dynamic segmentation and a moments engine.
The segmentation engine ingested existing qualitative and quantitative data, ecommerce data, cultural signals, and continuously incorporated new publicly available data through LLMs. It used clustering to surface needs and motivations, reframing them as current demand spaces and segments rather than fixed “personas.”
Because the heavy lift is automated, we could refresh the view as behaviors shifted without launching a new segmentation.
Once we had a sense of the target audience and their needs, the moments engine was then layered on top. It mined deep LLM research, consumer reviews and behavioral data to surface and bring-to-life micro‑moments across the journey.
For this company, the moments turned “we think awareness is the issue” into something sharper:
The team was elated to get the insights during the planning process, when they were ready to build and act on them.
Any time we move AI closer to strategic decisions, the obvious concern is whether the insights are true or not. For this, three guardrails matter:
Traceability - Every output should be traceable to sources, assumptions, and methods. If you cannot show your work, it’s not insight.
Clear Guardrails - Be explicit about what’s in-scope and where extrapolation begins. Most misuses of AI come from over‑generalizing.
Human‑led design, validation and activation - Engines should feed human judgment, not replace it. The value is in how experts design the engines and how teams use the outputs to frame decision and actions.
Human-led validation of outputs and intuition based on actual consumer interaction is also top of mind throughout the process to ensure we have the right inputs and validation to match the level of risk and rigor of the decision.
Once the guardrails are in place, a new consultative playing field opens for insights professionals. The intelligence engines give researchers the ability to play at a more strategic level and not just inform decision-making but truly own the recommendations and “where to go next” conversations.
For earlier-career team members, intelligence engines put “where to play” framing at your fingertips. This makes it easier to step into these types of conversations sooner, whether that is structuring a problem, exploring options, or contributing to decisions in a more meaningful way.
For more experienced leaders, intelligence engines provide a way to continue consulting and building on prior work. They make it possible to explore multiple paths and scenarios, better understand trade-offs, and test how ideas hold up as conditions evolve.
That is the value of moving from episodic insights to real-time decision intelligence. AI intelligence engines enable you to deliver insights confidently, place well-timed bets, and act with precision when it matters most.
This may be a change for researchers who are not accustomed to delivering insight at the point of decision-making, but one with significant opportunity for greater organizational influence and impact.
by Brent Budke
In today’s economy and remote working environment, there is much discussion about the need for a fractional workforce. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce notes that fractional hiring began in the academic world but then expanded to small start-up businesses that were looking to fill skill gaps. Now it has become just as important in larger companies that can’t afford the loss in business momentum that often coincides with open positions.
What is a fractional employee?
Fractional employees (or what we refer to as SIVO On Demand Talent) are typically Professionals or Specialists with unique or advanced skillsets, that only work for a set number of hours per week and/or for a finite timeframe. This can be beneficial for the employer as the company only pays an hourly rate for the agreed-upon time per week that the Professional works. Engagements can be 10 to 40 hours per week for a specific timeframe, such as, 2 months, 6 months, or a year.
This type of engagement can also benefit the fractional professionals who prefer to only commit to working shorter time frames or prefer to divide their time across multiple employers. For instance, a fractional employee might work 2 days a week at one company and 2 days a week at another non-competing company to enjoy a 4-day workweek. Having specialized skills or valuable work experience tends to make fractional professionals attractive to employers who might not need or can’t afford a full time, permanent employee.
Today’s work environment makes this scenario even more attractive as companies have learned to function with employees working remotely, which gives them a broader pool of fractional professionals to choose from.
THREE KEY BENEFITS OF FRACTIONAL EMPLOYEES:
1. Maintain momentum without burning out current employees
We’ve all experienced the pain of doing your own job and covering for another team member who is taking a needed leave-of-absence or has left the company. It often creates a surge in workload for supervisors or for teammates when the business cannot afford to slow down or pause critical business initiatives. Open roles can cause remaining team members to be overworked or overwhelmed, leading to mistakes and eventual burn-out. Fractional or temporary employees can be a great solution to keep the business running, to cover temporary openings and to allow the normal hiring process to play out.
SIVO Note: Hiring fractional insights professionals is even easier if SIVO is already on your company’s “approved vendor” list. Our first step would be to meet with you to understand your business, key needs, and focus areas. From there, the SIVO On Demand Talent team will create a personalized approach to match the optimal talent to the business needs to ensure success.
2. Gain immediate expertise - No training necessary
It can take months to find, hire and train the talent you need to fill open roles. Hiring fractional employees can help you move forward quickly and right-size your talent, getting a person in place within a week or two vs the months needed for a typical hiring process. Additionally, the beauty of fractional on demand talent is that they have already been vetted and assessed for certain skill sets and expertise, so no training is needed. Lastly, experienced fractional professionals can bring a fresh perspective and new approaches to your team and projects.
SIVO Note: SIVO On Demand Talent team leverages our extensive pool of fractional insights professionals with years of experience and expertise across an array of industries such as, CPG, Healthcare, Financial, Technology, Apparel, and Retail. Whether you need an Insights Associate to execute research projects or an Insights Director to help teams develop strategy and design learning plans, we can match the right talent to your unique needs.
3. Save the company money by focusing on specific business needs
Because fractional employees are typically classified as contractors for the purposes of payroll and taxes, employers don’t have to deal with costs associated with the hiring process nor the costs of typical benefits, such as health insurance or 401k contributions. That saves the company time and money while still staffing teams with highly qualified professionals. Below is a high-level comparison for fractional Insights Talent vs Full-time Insights employees:
SIVO Note: The advantage of working with SIVO for fractional insights professionals is that our team has access to a full-service consumer insights agency for ad-hoc resources, tools, and consultation.
We’d love to talk to you about your needs and how we can match the right talent to quickly make an impact in your business. Please contact us at OnDemandTalent@SIVOInsights.com or visit our website at SIVOInsights.com.
SIVO Insights brings together research, talent, and intelligent technology to help organizations navigate complexity with confidence. Have a business challenge? Let's talk!
We bring together research, talent, and intelligent technology to help organizations navigate complexity with confidence
