The Power of Data Insights in Shaping Next-Gen CPG Products

The Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) industry is rapidly growing. The leading factor of growth for CPG brands is launching a new product, followed by the second leading growth factor, expanding into new customer segments.  

In today’s digital world, there are more alternative products available, with easier access to customer reviews, and new products always coming out. To keep pace, CPG companies must utilize the power of data insights for strategizing every stage of the product development process, from ideation to launch. 

To get ahead of the competition, advanced data insights are essential for conceptualizing, testing, and measuring CPG products and creative campaigns. Data insights have evolved, especially in the past few years, from simple statistics to advanced algorithms and machine learning.  

Understanding Data Insights in the CPG Industry 

Data insights for any industry, but especially the CPG industry, can provide organization’s a deeper understanding of their target market.  

By tracking data, you can answer important questions that you have for your target audience: 

1. Consumer Behavior: How do shoppers interact with your products in stores and online? What factors influence their purchasing decisions?

2. Market Trends: What are the latest trends in the CPG industry? What are your competitors doing? 

3. Predictive Analytics: By analyzing historical data and current trends, what can you predict about future consumer behavior and market demands? Data insights can be obtained from a multitude of sources, including: 

4. Social Media Analytics: Social media platforms are a goldmine of customer sentiment data. By analyzing social media conversations, you can gain valuable insights into consumer preferences, brand perception, and emerging trends. 

5. Customer Feedback: Pay close attention to what your customers are saying through surveys, focus groups, and customer service interactions. This direct feedback can provide invaluable insights into product satisfaction and areas for improvement. 

6. Purchase Data: Purchase data reveals buying patterns and can help you understand which products are selling well, where, and to whom.

The Intersection of Data Insights and Creative Strategy 

Data should be used to fuel and optimize human creativity. Here's how data insights can inform creative strategy in product development and marketing: 

1. Identifying unmet consumer needs: Data analysis can reveal hidden patterns in consumer behavior, helping you identify unmet needs and opportunities for product innovation.
   
   
2. Personalization: By leveraging data on consumer preferences and purchase history, you can personalize your marketing messages and product offerings to resonate with specific customer segments.
   
   
3. Optimizing product features: Insights can be used for data-driven decisions about product features, packaging design, and pricing strategies. A/B testing allows you to experiment with different variations and see which ones resonate most with your target audience. 

 
For instance, imagine a CPG company that manufactures breakfast cereals. Through market research, consumer trends, and data insights they discover a growing consumer interest in plant-based protein sources. Leveraging this data insight, the company could develop a new cereal that is high in protein or expand an existing cereal line incorporating plant-based ingredients.  

Building CPG Brand Awareness with Data Insights 

Market research and analyzing data insights is key to successful product development and driving brand awareness. By developing your key personas and defining your target audience, you can generate brand awareness with a strategy that directly resonates with our ideal customer profile. Data insights can be leveraged to optimize and measure the performance of your creative campaigns. Data empowers you to craft creative strategies that reach and engage your target audience. Here's how: 

• Stand out from the competitors: Develop data-driven strategies by examining competitor insights to explore new products, compare prices, improve channel performance, incorporate customer feedback, and more. 
  
  
• Create compelling content: By identifying personas and tracking customer preferences, behavior, and engagement you can develop personalized messaging to reach and engage with your core audience.  
  
  
• Optimize campaigns: Track and A/B test the performance of content, its design, message, placement, call to action by using data driven insights to improve key performance metrics and reach your goals. 

CPG companies must adopt a more targeted approach, leveraging data to reach the right consumers with the right message at the right time. 

Leveraging AI for Enhanced Creative Insights 

Artificial intelligence  is revolutionizing the way CPG companies extract and interpret data insights. Here's how AI can enhance creative insights: 

1. Improving Efficiency: AI algorithms can analyze vast amounts of data from diverse sources much faster and more efficiently than humans. 
   
   
2. Identifying hidden patterns: AI can detect subtle patterns and relationships in data that humans might overlook. This can lead to the discovery of new product opportunities and unexpected market trends.
   
   
3. Forecasting trends: AI can be used to forecast future consumer behavior and market trends. This allows CPG companies to develop products that are well-aligned with future consumer preferences.
   
   
4. Customizing strategies: Personalized campaigns generate an average of 8x the ROI in comparison to campaigns that do not use personalization, AI analytics can help discover opportunities and ways to customize content. All combined, AI can pull data, identify patterns, and track trends with predictive capabilities to create actionable suggestions and recommendations. 
   
   
5. Developing products: Data helps provide key insights into markets for new products, assess the level of competition and market saturation. Additionally these insights can be used to strategize new or updated product launches and campaigns to maximize brand awareness for CPG products.  

Suits is not a new show, it originally aired over a decade ago but since being recently added to Netflix and Peacock, the show gained a lot of attention, with over 57.7 billion minutes of viewing time. E.L.F Cosmetics hopped on the trend by using Suit actors and the general premise of the show for their 2024 Super Bowl Commercial.  

Cost-Effective Strategies for Utilizing Data Insights 

For the CPG industry, over 40% of promotions do not deliver the desired results, which is why data insights and testing are so critical.  

The misconception is that investing in data analytics is costly, however, actually implementing a data-driven approach doesn't necessarily mean using a massive budget.  

Here are some cost-effective strategies for utilizing data insights: 

1. Start small and scale gradually: Begin by focusing on a specific business challenge and leverage free or low-cost data analytics tools. As you gain experience and budget increases, you can start to use paid and more advanced tools. 
   
   
2. Leverage tools you already have: Social media has built in analytics tracking, Google has a suite of free analytics tracking tools, and other technology solutions you use, such as your email marketing tool, may also have data insights available. 
   
   
3. Continuously track performance: By investing or enhancing your data analytics to track performance and conversions, you may actually be able to save money that may be wasted on an  underperforming channel. 
   
   
4. Routinely and creatively test: While there are many innovative, advanced data analytics tools on the market, you can still track analytics through traditional methods. Small test groups or customer surveys can provide meaningful insights to help you improve your strategies in a cost effective way. 

Implementing Data-Driven Creative Insights in Product Development 

76% of CPG product innovations come to a halt within the first two years post launch, which is exactly why data is essential for any successful product launch. 

A foundational product development strategy will typically use data for: 

• Market segmentation: Finding a gap in the market and where you can provide a solution to meet the needs and demand of that segment.
  
  
• Defining your ideal customer persona: Identifying who is most affected by the problem your product is solving and honing in on a core group of target audiences. 
  
  
• Positioning your product: Determining where you fit within the market, what your products value propositions, and differentiators in comparison to your competitors in the space. 
  
  
• Forming your go to market strategy: Devising how you will develop your product, how will you generate interest and attract your target audience, and how you will launch, advertise, market, and sell your product.  

 Explain how real-time data can lead to agile product development processes, allowing for rapid iteration based on consumer feedback. 

Enhancing Customer Experiences Through Insights 

By using channel analytics, customer’s previous purchases, browsing history, combined with thorough market research – you can develop custom personalized experiences from customized marketing messages to individualized product offerings.  

A prime example of this is the collaboration between NYX Cosmetics and Snapchat. Snapchat has over 406 million daily active users, 750 million monthly active users, and 250 million of those users engage with augmented reality on a daily basis. The platform’s active audience continues to increase every year with an average of 12%. 

 Advertisements on Snapchat can actively reach 634.8 million users. 51.4% of Snapchat’s user base is female and users ages 13 to 34 make up the largest share of the Snapchat advertising audience.  

NYX Cosmetics saw an overlap between their audience base and Snapchat users. NYX customers are typically between the ages of 18 and 34 years old. While NYX has already held a massive social media audience on Instagram with 14 million followers, the brand wanted to expand their brand awareness and reach new audiences. 

NYX’s Instagram strategy was to experiment with various types of content which  improved their engagement by 33%. To take their digital presence experimentation one step further, they utilized a new channel and created a Snapchat augmented reality (AR) and AI powered experience. 

NYX Cosmetic’s interactive Snapchat Lens creates an engaging experience for users to explore a variety of makeup tips, trends, and looks with the ability to save their favorite looks and customize them to be organized and easy to find.  

The advanced Lens feature creates AR looks based on the aesthetic, mood, occasion, or color palette specially for the user so each look is unique and no two people have the same look. The filter will also show users what products are being used to create the looks and how to recreate them. The Lens encourages repeat use as the more the feature is utilized, the more personalized the looks will become.  

By leveraging the data insights between Snapchat’s and NYX’s similar audiences and consumer trends, the two companies were able to create an experience that fosters customer loyalty and engagement.  

Conclusion 

With various channels and key performance metrics, harnessing the transformative power of data insights will enhance creative strategies to improve brand awareness for CPG products. 

To maintain steady growth, consumer relevance and customer retention it is essential for CPG brands to continuously leverage data insights to strategically and effectively develop creative campaigns and products. Dragonfly AI can help you get there with data validated creative testing.