Every business has customers, but how well they know their customers is another question. In a recent Harvard Business Review blog, Peter Merholz explains that many large companies lose that vital interaction with their customers as their business begins to grow.
“Business cannot exist without customers, so it’s sadly ironic that many, if not most, businesses, actually understand so little about them,” says Merholz. “In order to become customer experience-driven, you need to go beyond who your customers are, and understand what they do.”
While it may feel tempting to place your customers into simple, definable categories, Merholz urges companies to dig deeper and understand their customers as real people living in a messy, complicated world. What does that mean for your company? It means going beyond the high-level data and seeking to understand and appreciate your customer’s behavior and true motivation.
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Do customers want to ‘hire’ your product?
Through SIVO On Demand Talent or with SIVO custom qualitative research, our clients uncover the underlying motivations behind their customer’s unique behavior. With SIVO On Demand Talent, we have storytellers who mine existing research to bring our clients’ customers to life. And, we ensure the next phase of research fills a customer knowledge gap, extending our clients’ research budgets. With SIVO custom research, our clients tap into valuable customer insights through approaches like In-Store Intercepts, Shop-Alongs, and Ethnographic research, to gain clear, in-depth analysis of their customer in the context of their daily lives.
How well do you know your customer? Maybe it’s time to take a deeper look…
Contact us at Contact@SIVOInsights.com for more information and next steps.
To Know Thyself is the Beginning of All Wisdom [Aristotle]… and as it turns out, it’s also the beginning of your Brand Strategy
At SIVO Insights, we spend a lot of time helping our clients understand who their consumers are, what they need and why. It is just as important to help our clients understand the competitive context within which they operate, to understand where and how their brands can differentiate and create an ownable competitive advantage.
We work with our clients using a three-pronged approach to set a solid brand strategy:
A simple exercise that teams can use to consider and articulate the market that their brand best competes in, is the “Big Box, Little Box” Model.
In this model, teams define the market, or “Little Box” that they believe their brand currently operates in, and what benefits they distinctly deliver to that market. Next, the team considers a broader market definition, the “Big Box”, to understand who is in the brand’s expanded list of competitors and what benefits their product could distinctly deliver in that broader context. By doing this exercise, the team broadens their view of who they are truly competing with and where they can source volume. This helps teams reframe how they present their brand and its ownable benefits to the world. i.e., the brand positioning, which in turn, impacts future renovation, innovation, and communication efforts.
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Do customers want to ‘hire’ your product?
A team that manages a coffee brand might define their “Little Box” as the Coffee category. In that competitive context, the team will likely focus on functional coffee benefits such as richest flavor or best price, to compete with other coffee brands. But when they broadened their view of the competitive context to the “Big Box”, they might find that they are competing with the broader ‘caffeinated beverage’ market. In this context, the key benefits that the team may focus on to differentiate and compete with caffeinated sodas and energy drinks would be things like “warmth, comfort, and enabling your morning ritual.”
The big box, little box model allows teams to…
Discover who they are truly competing with
Reframe their brand strengths within the broader, and likely more accurate, competitive context
Identify which brand benefits are most ownable and distinctive vs. the competitive set
Reconsider who their target consumer is and how to position the brand to meet the needs of this larger consumer target group
Our experts can…
Facilitate a Big Box/Little Box exercise with your team
Execute a qualitative exploration to understand where your brand truly competes
Execute an Attitude and Usage (A&U) study to quantify which competitive products/categories are true competitors
Facilitate a workshop, using the learning above, to rethink and redefine brand strategy
Contact us at Contact@SIVOInsights.com for more information and next steps.
What is a Consumer Target
At the foundation of all great marketing initiatives is a complete and deep understanding of the consumer target. The consumer target is a specific and detailed description of the type of person who has needs or desires that you believe can be served or helped with your products or services. Truly identifying and understanding the consumer target can inspire creative and innovative thinking to help grow your brand through new products, marketing campaigns, or promotions that fulfill their needs and wants.
Segmenting the Market to Identify Your Consumer Target
Teams must be focused and clear about who their consumer target is and is not. This consumer does not represent everyone that purchases your product or service.
A typical first step to identifying your consumer target is to segment the market you operate in. Market or consumer segmentation is a market research approach that allows you to divide the universe of potential consumers into smaller groups or segments based on their characteristics. The segments are composed of consumers who will respond similarly to marketing strategies because they have shared demographics, needs, interests, values and/or locations. Once the market has been segmented, an assessment is required to understand which segment of consumers offer the most potential for growth, i.e., which group is most likely to find value and be motivated by your business proposition and respond to your initiatives, across the 4Ps of product, placement, pricing, and promotion.
Building Knowledge About Your Consumer Target
While segmentation is a great first step in identifying your consumer target, it is only the beginning. Every day you will be faced with making business decisions based on what you know about your consumer target and how you think they will respond to your actions. You should have basic knowledge covering five key areas:
Answering these questions requires a combination of sales data analyses, quantitative assessments such as, attitude and usage studies plus, qualitative, or observational techniques such as, in-depth interviews, in-store shop-alongs, and in-home ethnographic research to fully immerse in how your consumer target thinks, lives and shops. Oftentimes, this is referred to as developing the consumer target persona.
Building Consumer Empathy
The ultimate goal is to build empathy for and intuition about your consumer target. You need knowledge to understand what is in their head (how they think) and empathy to understand what is in their hearts (how they feel and their underlying motivations). Most of the time, you yourself are not the target consumers so you must spend time with them to truly understand their lives, values, beliefs, and behaviors. The goal should be to move through the following spectrum to be able to genuinely empathize with your consumer target.
How to Get to Empathy for Your Consumer Target
Building empathy is different from conducting a typical market research study. Market research is designed to answer specific business questions by getting feedback and perspective from consumers. For instance, you might conduct market research to understand how your product compares to the competition or what product varieties you should launch next.
An empathy trek is solely designed to gain better understanding of who your consumer target is. It is a listening and observation exercise, designed to help you “walk in their shoes” and “feel what they feel.” In an empathy trek, you’ll explore how your consumer target lives, what they value, believe and how they behave. By building consumer empathy, you will build your intuition about them, and are able to make business decisions on their behalf.
The Value of Truly Knowing Your Consumer Target
The value of building empathy for your consumer target is tremendous. Specifically, it can:
Your Source for Expert Consumer Insights
As you and your team learn more about your consumer, your marketing and innovation ideas will get more targeted at serving their needs, which will in turn, make them more successful. Ideally, you will be able to reach them at key moments of truth, physically or digitally with personalized content that improves the brand experience and loyalty.
At SIVO, we are dedicated to helping our clients identify and understand their consumer target’s perceptions, needs, beliefs, and behaviors. We create learning plans that will help you gain valuable insights by applying the right approaches to identify your market segments, consumer target persona and to build consumer empathy for you and your team.
Contact us via our website form or email us at Contact@SIVOInsights.com today to schedule a discovery call!
Wondering how to facilitate a strategic planning session? Strategic planning facilitation allows you to gain valuable insights from your organization, create a plan, and build strategies to achieve your goals. These exercises are a vital part of any organization's success, and with SIVO Organizational Intelligence, it has never been easier to create a strong foundation for your business. Explore the benefits of holding a strategic planning session within your team below.
First thing’s first, what is strategic planning? Strategic planning is a process used by organizations to set their short or long-term goals, determine their strengths and weaknesses, and create a blueprint to achieve those goals. It is an opportunity for leadership teams to align their vision, mission, and values and build the company's future plans and strategies. Strategic planning facilitation is the engine to the car that drives plans and strategies.
A strategic plan helps determine an organization's future, ensuring that all employees are working towards the same goals. It helps to prioritize resources and allocate them to areas that will bring the most value to the company. Additionally, it helps organizations identify areas for improvement, stay ahead of the competition, and make data-driven decisions.
So, we know what strategic planning is and we know why it matters -- but what is the best way to implement it? A best practice to gather and leverage insights is to have a third-party facilitator manage and facilitate your your strategic planning. This allows teams to participate in the planning discussion, rather than preparing for and guiding the discussion. Facilitators can also document the discussion as it happens, to focus teams on the topic and guide the discussion toward valuable outcomes.
Diving into this process is no small task. Luckily, with the help of a facilitator it becomes much more manageable because you have someone to handle the preparation, session facilitation, documentation and recap of the plan and outcomes. With an expert facilitator as your guide, you will leave your session with a Strategic Plan that will:
This is your opportunity to bring key leaders in the organization together to discuss the company's future. It helps to align everyone's goals and objectives, so everyone is working towards the same vision. Often, individual team members bring a unique perspective to the planning session. That’s why it’s important to discuss their expectations, the current and potential challenges and opportunities that each leader faces, as well as external market forces that may impact the strategic plan. Discussing these inputs during the session allows the team to address key issues and avoid pitfalls as the plan is being developed.
Strategic planning helps organizations identify areas for improvement and opportunities that will bring the most value to the company. These process-driven decisions can fall to the wayside without a dedicated space to identify internal and external opportunities and build plans to achieve them. . The planning process leads to increased effectiveness, efficiency and a better return on investment.
Strategic planning allows organizations to prioritize their resources, ensuring they are used in the most effective way possible, to achieve the company goals. Expert-led planning exercises can uncover redundancies and slowdowns within current processes. The strategic plan can help to increase efficiency by reprioritizing resources to align with key opportunities.
By having a clear roadmap for the future, leaders can make data-driven decisions that are in line with their goals and objectives. The strategic plan provides focus and clarity and it helps to reduce the risk of making poor decisions that could harm the organization in the long run.
Remaining competitive in your industry requires consistent reevaluation and reimagination. From identifying issues in current workflows, to hearing ideas from team members, to researching emerging trends in your industry and related industries -- there are so many opportunities to enhance your organization and get ahead. This information is used as inputs into the planning session, to help you build a strategic plan that addresses key issues and capitalizes on the best opportunities to grow the business and gain market share.
When employees understand the company's plans and strategies, they are more likely to be engaged and motivated to contribute to the organization's success. Chances are, they also have valuable thoughts on areas for opportunity and improvement. That’s why it can be very valuable to include employee insights in the strategic planning process. It can unlock game-changing opportunities that company leaders may have overlooked. Plus, gathering employee feedback can improve company culture and create a positive work environment by improving employee morale.
Strategic planning provides a roadmap for the future, ensuring that everyone in the organization is working towards the same goals. This helps to ensure that the organization remains on track and empowered to achieve its long-term objectives. SIVO’s Organizational Intelligence provides the tools to create a rock-solid plan for your business, so you can execute, and get ahead.
SIVO Organizational Intelligence is a trusted partner for organizations looking to leverage strategic planning. In our strategic planning sessions, SIVO's expert facilitators listen and probe to understand your organization’s needs and goals. Then, we help you develop a comprehensive plan with strategies to grow your business and win in the marketplace.
By working with SIVO, your team can leverage experts with 20 years of experience, across industries and company sizes, in organizational development and strategic planning facilitation. Our strategy and market research firm creates custom solutions that meet the unique needs of our clients.
Could your business benefit from our insights and expertise? Get in touch with our Organizational Intelligence team to schedule a discovery call. SIVO will develop a custom Organizational Intelligence solution that aligns with your needs so you can get ahead.
By Natasha Weith
Innovation is often seen as a creative pursuit—a way for businesses to stay ahead, differentiate, and drive growth. But for many companies, the innovation process feels uncertain. How do you know if an idea will resonate in the market? Will consumers adopt a new product, behavior, or service? How do you distinguish between a promising concept and a costly misstep?
Most innovation initiatives are guided by internal vision, expert intuition, and trend analysis—all valuable inputs. But in a rapidly shifting consumer landscape, these elements alone aren’t enough.
Too many innovations fail—not because they weren’t good ideas, but because they weren’t validated in the real world before launch. The key to success? Embedding consumer input via market research into every stage of innovation instead of treating it as a final checkpoint.
Companies often assume they “know” their market. Here’s where innovation efforts commonly go wrong:
The result? Companies invest millions in ideas that sound good internally but fail to gain traction.
Consumers don’t just react to new offerings—they make trade-offs based on convenience, price, and habit. A product might be superior on paper, but that doesn’t mean consumers will switch.
To succeed, businesses must:
Without these insights, even a groundbreaking innovation can flop.
The most successful companies don’t just test ideas—they build them alongside the target consumer using agile, iterative research. However, even companies that invest in research get it wrong when they:
✖︎ Use Research as a One-Time final checkpoint – Instead of a continuous input, insights are only used for last-minute validation.
✖︎ Seek Confirmation Instead of Challenge – Teams look for data to support their pre-existing beliefs instead of stress-testing their assumptions.
✖︎ Over-Rely on Stated Consumer Intent – What consumers say they’ll do and what they actually do aren’t always the same.
✖︎ Fail to Connect Insights to Execution – Research reports sit in PowerPoints instead of shaping strategy and launch plans in real-time.
That’s where agile market research comes in. And let’s be clear: Agile research isn’t just about speed – it’s about making sure insights are integrated into the development process and at every decision point. Here’s how:
By embedding agile insights, companies create faster, more successful go-to-market strategies—without unnecessary spend.
It’s easy to get excited about a breakthrough idea. But without rigorous, real-time consumer input, even the most promising innovations can fail.
The best companies don’t just test innovations—they co-develop them with their consumer target. They ensure research isn’t a last-minute formality but a continuous input that sharpens ideas and launch plans and accelerates success.
As you think about your next big move—whether launching a new product, repositioning a brand, or identifying a growth opportunity—ask yourself:
If you’re not fully confident in the answers, it’s time to rethink how market research fits into your innovation strategy.
At SIVO, we help businesses turn market research into a competitive advantage. Whether you're validating early-stage concepts, refining go-to-market strategies, or optimizing post-launch success, we ensure that insights fuel smarter, faster decision-making at every stage of the process.
Our senior insights professionals specialize in agile, in-context research that goes beyond validation to actively shape breakthrough innovations. And with On-Demand Talent, we provide fractional research experts to scale your capabilities—without long-term hiring commitments.
Want to sharpen your innovation strategy? Contact us at Contact@SIVOInsights.com or visit SIVOInsights.com to learn more.
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
