How listening to customers can benefit the bottom line
By Kerry Juhl
42% of companies don’t listen to their customers (Hubspot)
85% of products fail when companies don’t talk to consumers (Forbes)
Up to 73% of company data goes unused for analytics (Inc.)
Do you see a pattern here? When companies don’t take the time to understand people and what drives their behavior, they miss out on the very thing that could fuel business growth and innovation. According to Rob Holland, CEO of research technology platform Feedback Loop, companies are not speaking with consumers regularly enough because “they don’t have researchers or they don’t have resources to gather and speak with a group of targeted consumers quickly.” The solution to this problem can be found in three words: Fractional Insights Professionals.
What are Fractional Insights Professionals?
A fractional employee is part of an emerging employment model where an individual offers a niche or advanced experience to an employer and is hired for a fraction of the work week, month or year. Fractional Insights Professionals are temporary employees that specialize in designing and executing market research and identifying and applying consumer/customer insights to guide business decisions and identify opportunities for growth.
Knowledge is Power
When companies neglect to take time to understand the wants and needs of their customers, it is like driving a car with a blindfold on. It can be challenging to stay on course, and you can easily swerve in the wrong direction. The art and science of obtaining consumer insights can provide businesses with an in-depth look at how consumers think, feel, behave, and make choices. Having this valuable knowledge can steer companies on how to improve their businesses, better engage with customers and stay ahead of the competition. According to Microsoft, organizations that leverage their customer behaviors to generate insights outperform their competitors by 85% in sales growth.
Fractional Insights Professionals to the Rescue
When departments do not have market researchers on staff or when employees do not have the time or expertise to execute market research projects and apply the learning to the business, fractional insights professionals can be the solution to ensure your business is not driving blind.
SIVO Fractional Research Capabilities
SIVO On Demand Talent team includes an extensive pool of Fractional Insights Professionals with years of experience and expertise across an array of industries such as CPG, healthcare, finance, technology, apparel and retail. You can rely on SIVO’s team of experts to collect high-quality data, provide an accurate interpretation of that data, and offer guidance on how to best utilize the insights learned. From managing a portion of a research project to full-service research design through insight application, SIVO helps clients make data-driven decisions and identify opportunities for growth.
We’d love to talk to you about how partnering with SIVO can eliminate guesswork and help your company drive positive results. Please contact us at Contact@SIVOInsights.com or request a discovery call from our website at SIVOInsights.com.
By Cindy Blackstock
We’ve all hired someone to complete a task or a job for us. For example, if your lawn needs to be mowed – you can hire someone to mow it. Seems simple, doesn’t it? But have you ever asked that question about the products or services you work with? Do you know what “job” your customers need done, that is causing them to “hire” your product or service?
Customer needs are often less clear than ‘your lawn needs to be mowed.’ Identifying customer needs or “jobs to be done” is an intentional exercise where we must listen, observe and expertly question customers to uncover.
Jobs Theory reframes our relationship with customers, making them the center of our focus. While conventional marketing tends to focus on brand and product benefits, Jobs Theory doesn't look internally at products and services but instead, looks externally, to expose the functional, social, and emotional jobs that explain why customers make the choices they do.
People don’t simply buy products or services; they bring them into their lives to fulfill a need. We call this need the ‘job’ they are trying to get done. When we discover why customers want to ‘hire’ products or services, we develop a customer-centric view, allowing brand teams to become empathetic to their customers' needs and wants.
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A good Jobs to be Done Map becomes a framework that helps marketers figure out how to improve their products or innovate by developing new products and services in their industry or category, i.e., ‘where to play.’ It can be leveraged beyond a single initiative. It maps all the jobs that customers have for a particular occasion. For example, a Snacking JTBD Map includes all the jobs that customers have for the snacking occasion. A Financial Investment JTBD Map, includes all the jobs that customers have for investing their money. It lives on in your organization as a place to continually go back to for inspiration and focus. It provides:
Inspiration and guardrails for brand positioning, marketing messages, product innovation and renovation
A framework for capturing, defining, categorizing, and prioritizing customer needs
A common language and focus for the cross-functional team
There are several factors that influence customer behavior, including:
At SIVO, we help our clients uncover their customers’ jobs for a wide range of application opportunities. We design customized research that leads to a fully developed Jobs to be Done Map. Our approach focuses on uncovering the subconscious drivers of customer decision-making by understanding the underlying needs and true motivations.
In Part 2 of our Jobs series, we will share the keys to success for Jobs to be Done mapping along with some examples of how it comes to life. Until then, please reach out to discuss how we can help you to get your brand, product, or service hired.
Reach out to the SIVO team at Contact@SIVOInsights.com to discuss how we can develop a Jobs to be Done Map for your organization.
by Cindy Blackstock
At SIVO, our team of insights experts have honed their skills over many years of market research and the lessons gained along the way now prove to be invaluable. We have learned that insights are just useless facts unless they can be applied to the business in a way that drives action among our client teams and growth on their businesses. So, in the spirit of sharing useful content and a bit of our “secret sauce” with our valued clients and partners, here are 5 Keys for Turning Consumer Insights into Action.
Start with the End in Mind
As market researchers in search of consumer insights, the SIVO team must understand how the results will possibly be used, what actions will be taken by our clients and how our clients intend to influence and have impact in their organization using our research. When we are equipped with the business objective and the actions that might stem from the results, we become clear on the research objectives and design. We all know that best consumer insights experts can envision how the research results need to come to life before starting the research. When we do this, we avoid two big pitfalls in research – first, the fatal one, missing a key question and second, the sloppy one, asking questions that don’t need to be answered or are already known.
Conduct a “Get Smart” Session
By facilitating a “Get Smart” Session with the client team, SIVO can mine existing information and surface institutional knowledge. There are 3 key reasons for the session:
Plan for Quality Input to Get Quality Output
It has been said that the quality of the output is only as good as the quality of the input. This is very true when designing market research. SIVO experts start with detailed learning plans to outline how the business objectives translate to the learning objectives and market research approach. This is where we align with the client team by defining things like sample composition and size, key measures, and of course, the action standards. Action standards outline the “if/then” scenarios for research outcomes and the follow-up actions. For example, if the results indicate X, then the action to be taken is Y. Documenting the action standards, before the research is executed, forces both the SIVO and client teams to think through the possible actions for each hypothesized outcome.
Report the Key Findings (and, all the rest too!)
Some client teams want an at-a-glance Executive Summary of results that they can quickly act upon, and others want all the details for a more thorough understanding before taking action. SIVO provides both, either in one report or in two separate deliverables. We must be clear on the delivery of the topline summary versus the full report with the detailed findings (supporting data, quotes, video clips, images, etc.) for future reference.
Make Clear Recommendations
It’s critical to turn data into insights and insights into actions. Too often professionals in the insights industry are hesitant to make bold recommendations on potential actions to take. However, client teams are looking for more than data and insights. They need courageous recommendations that inform their decisions. To drive action, SIVO puts a stake in the ground! It is, however, important to point out that recommendations are an educated opinion or point-of-view, based on the insights and findings of the research. Clients will then use research recommendations, in conjunction with other external factors, to guide or inform their actions and decisions. The best way to be confident about the recommendations is to circle back to Step 1! Start with the end in mind!
Contact the SIVO team at Contact@SIVOInsights.com or reach out to me directly at Cindy.Blackstock@SIVOInsights.com to help you uncover insights that inform your future decisions and actions!
As 2026 planning season approaches, most leaders are focused on big decisions: where to invest, how to grow, and which bets to place. But the strongest strategies don’t begin with goals, they begin with your consumers.
In fact, the annual planning season is the perfect time to pressure-test assumptions. Before you finalize budgets or commit to growth strategies, it pays to refresh your understanding of today’s consumer landscape. What’s changed? What’s emerging? And what gaps in understanding could derail your decisions?
This post outlines how to approach annual planning through the lens of consumer truth, so you can build smarter, more aligned strategies. Let’s dive in!
For many organizations, planning still begins with internal goal-setting: revenue and profit targets, innovation and growth priorities, and cost cutting. And high-performing teams know that successful strategy isn’t just about setting ambition, it’s about aligning that ambition to current market conditions.
Consumer behavior is one of the most dynamic variables in that equation, and often, one of the most overlooked. Market assumptions that were true a year ago may no longer apply. Purchasing patterns, motivations, and category expectations can shift quickly, especially in volatile economic environments like the current one. And if your plan doesn’t reflect those changes, it’s much more likely to underperform.
This consumer-centric understanding is foundational. It informs product decisions, pricing, messaging, innovation, and channel strategy. Without it, even well-intentioned plans can quickly drift out of sync with real consumer needs. Starting with the consumer also accelerates alignment. It gives cross-functional teams, from marketing to finance to sales, a shared understanding of where the business is heading and why. It moves planning conversations from opinion to evidence and from speculation to strategy.
If the case still isn’t clear, consider this: even well-resourced plans fail when they aren’t aligned with current consumer behavior. It’s often not about effort or execution, it’s about starting with the right inputs. Let’s look at a few examples:
Outdated consumer insights can lead to misdirected efforts, misaligned messaging, missed opportunities, and unnecessary risk. To illustrate what this looks like in practice, here are two common scenarios where strategy easily goes off track because the consumer context was never fully validated.
A company sets aggressive growth targets and decides to compete more directly with newer players in the category. They allocate budget toward developing a new product with features they believe will differentiate them. The plan gets approved. Timelines are set. Everyone is getting ready to mobilize fast and execute.
But the innovation was based on an internal assumption about what consumers wanted – not on recent consumer insight. In reality, consumers weren’t looking for more features. They were looking for simplicity, availability and value. The company spends $$$ getting the launch ready, but the product doesn’t gain any traction. The opportunity for a product refresh was real, but the execution missed the mark because actual buyers weren’t consulted.
Another company, facing margin pressure, looks for quick wins through cost reductions. They make the decision to cut a service element they believe is underutilized, based on operational data and internal team feedback.
What they didn’t realize is that this element was one of the few remaining differentiators in the eyes of their customers. It wasn’t used loudly, but it created trust and loyalty. Cutting it might save money in the short term, but it might erode value perception and reduce retention in the long term.
A brand team, focused on stabilizing performance, decides to stick with the same marketing and channel strategy that had worked well in the past. But in the background, both consumer behavior and category norms had shifted.
Competitors began simplifying their digital experience, consolidating touchpoints, and creating seamless mobile journeys. Meanwhile, this brand was still investing in a fragmented app strategy and outdated content flows. The team didn’t realize that expectations had changed. Consumers weren’t looking for more brand interaction, they were looking for convenience and control in one place. By the time results started to dip, the gap was already visible. A competitive audit or trend review could have flagged these shifts much earlier, giving the brand time to adapt before losing relevance.
These are not unusual cases. They reflect a planning process that moved forward before validating the reality on the ground. Other common issues include planning around outdated needs or occasions, targeting segments that have shifted or declined, or simply prioritizing the things that don’t matter to consumers anyways. None of these decisions are inherently flawed, but when they’re based on outdated or assumed insight, the risk of “planning in the wrong direction” increases.
The good news is you don’t always need to start from scratch. In many cases, the best approach is to audit what you already have, identify gaps, and decide what needs to be refreshed or revalidated.
Here are some key areas worth pressure-testing, before you commit to planning:
Many teams start with a Get Smart session. It’s a fast-turn immersion that pulls together everything you already know, from existing data to partner knowledge to internal POVs, and highlights what’s still missing. These sessions help surface blind spots, align teams, and set the foundation for what to explore further through new research or analysis, which will lay the foundation for a solid and strategic plan.
Insight work at this stage doesn’t need to be complex. It just needs to be focused, current, and relevant to the decisions you’re about to make.
The strongest strategic plans are built on a clear understanding of the consumer. When that understanding is current, relevant, and grounded in reality, teams make better decisions, faster, with less risk, and greater impact. At SIVO, we help businesses enter planning season with confidence:
Whether you need to revalidate consumer segments, understand emerging behaviors, or map new usage occasions, our team designs studies that answer the right questions at the right time. We work fast, focus on what matters to your business, and turn insight into clear recommendations for strategic use you can easily relate to in your annual plans.
Need to align insights and teams quickly? Our Get Smart sessions help you make sense of what you already know and highlight the gaps that matter most. These sessions help build internal alignment early and avoid late pivots, and are perfect as a foundation for your annual plans.
Already have an internal insights team, but planning season is stretching your resources? SIVO’s On Demand Talent gives you access to senior insights professionals who can plug into your team quickly. Whether you need a trends lead, moderator, or strategic storyteller, we match you with the right expert, without hiring delays and long-term commitments. The perfect flexbile insights approach to supercharge your insights team for the planning season!
Consumer truth is the foundation of smarter annual planning. Whether you're building that foundation or scaling your team to deliver it, we're here to help.
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
