The Future of AI-Enabled Insights – An Interview with John Mutterperl

Brands’ approach to consumer intelligence has undergone a transformation.

From new initiatives to better understand audiences to marketing and product innovation, global consumer brands have an opportunity to drive faster, more successful innovation and become closer and more relevant to consumers through the use of data and real-time insights.

Linkfluence sought to understand this transformation and its impact on consumer intelligence as a whole. In late 2020, the company performed a survey of consumer insights professionals from a variety of industries. The survey aimed to understand the key changes, priorities, and future plans of consumer insights professionals impacted by new trending AI-enabled technologies, and changing economic, social, and health landscape.

Here you can find a more in-depth take on the survey and its results.

SURVEY RESULTS OVERVIEW

To help shed some light on these insights, Linkfluence held a live Q&A with industry guru John Mutterperl – Campari’s Head of Insights. Here’s what he said:

 

Q: How did the new technologies for CI impact your goals in the last year? Anything that surprised you?

The biggest surprise for me was the rapid– and self-proving– shift towards agile, “DIY” insights, from increasing leveraging of social listening platforms to on-line polling and concept testing, to, even, self-curated qualitative via online research. Combined these new and digital-centric insights resources allowed us to stay close to our consumers, which we otherwise would not have been able to do due to COVID restrictions

 

Q: Overall, what are some of the biggest surprises from the survey results?

I was not so much surprised as pleased to see the go-forward elevation of Social Listening and Intelligence. The collective Insights community recognizes this approach as foundational and essential to gearing our businesses for competition in the post-COVID world.

 

Q: Based on the survey results, what are some of the biggest challenges for consumer insights professionals in 2021 and beyond?

Related to what is referenced above, squaring the reality– and closing the gap– of where our organizations are today with Social Intelligence adoption + business integration, to where we want and need to be. This challenge is not so much a technological one as a behavioral and cultural one.

 

Q: Roughly 46% of respondents in the survey said that social listening and intelligence will be the most critical to democratizing insights at their organization. Do you agree with this? Why or why not?

I agree strongly with this sentiment. Social listening is quantitative, visual, and visceral. It can be accessed and understood by all, with simple clicks, anytime, anywhere. It also provides an immediate looking glass for how the broad market is thinking, speaking and responding to our brand personas, platforms and activations. It speaks the truth– with no hiding.

 

Q: Over 53% of respondents said that Social listening and intelligence are the most critical to improving customer centricity in the future. Why do you think this is? What does it mean to you to be a customer-centric organization?

Social listening provides an immediate “finger on the pulse” for what our consumers are thinking and talking about NOW, in terms of culture, our brands, and how the two intersect. To the extent that we can get this formula and relationship “right” our brands will win.

 

Q: Which social intelligence use cases do you see being the most important for consumer brands in 2021 and beyond?

It’s hard now to look too far into the future, but, I think that the immediate use case opportunity for brands with social intelligence is to how to understand what / which of the consumer behaviour and preference shifts that developed during the COVID period of the last year will stick, to what extent, and “why”.

 

Q: When asked how advanced their use of social intelligence was at their organization, only 20% noted that they felt they were in an advanced stage. Does this surprise you? What does an advanced stage of social intelligence mean for you?

No, I am not surprised by the collective low evaluation of Social Intelligence usage across the survey participants. As mentioned above, any new (relatively speaking) platform and tool requires organizational behavioural and cultural shifts to become embedded. Usually, this requires a firm stamp of endorsement and advocacy from the CEO and/or the CMO. To me, an advanced stage of social intelligence suggests two things: 1) social intel integration– of some kind– into brand and business performance scorecarding; 2) regular and frequent usage/fluency among a significant portion of a company’s marketing team

 

Q: When asked which of the following tools would be most critical to implementing their organization’s digital transformation initiatives in the future, over 55% noted that transformation would be led by social listening and intelligence. Why do you think this is?

Businesses need to meet their consumers/customers where they are at. Increasingly, this is online– both where they are buying, AND where they are discussing, evaluating, considering what to buy. Social listening for brands is like the lottery: you need to be “in it” (listening to it) to win it!

 

The trends for the insight industry are clear: consumer brands are striving to employ real-time customer-centric strategies and tools to stay ahead. Top brands realize the importance of driving faster and more successful innovation through the use of data and real-time insights, but have work to do to ensure these insights are available without requiring programming, are relevant to the entire marketing organization, and are prescriptive and actionable.

Advice for your brand to end up on top? Invest in social intelligence to achieve customer-centricity. To do this, find a platform that provides the insights you need in a DIY setup that’s backed with a robust support system. This will be needed to reach cultural buy-in throughout the organization.

In John’s words, be open-minded, flexible, and interactive. Be experimental. Try things soon, often and early to find the best tools for your organization to put your business at an advantage before others catch-on.

 

For more information on this survey, please refer to the results here.

About John Mutterperl

John leads insights at Campari. John is a results-driven, insights, brand marketing, strategy and consulting leader, with a 20-plus year focus in the spirits industry and overall beverage/alcohol space.