Walking the Tightrope Between Innovation and Customer Retention

Deep down, you know it’s not enough to simply gather consumer panel insights to help your business make its best decisions.

A hybrid approach to insights – whereby you run research to your customer base AND consumer panels – is what gives you a clear view of your whole market.

Without this, you only meet the needs of potential customers – alienating current, loyal, valuable customers. Or you only meet the needs of your current customers – ignoring and stifling new growth opportunities.

Who is Hybrid Research For?

Legacy Brands Looking for New Customers

Think about Jaguar. The king of legacy brands. Their reputation for quality and excellence is second-to-none.

But Jaguar is being lapped, repeatedly, by more innovative brands like BMW and Mercedes.

For one simple reason: BMW and Mercedes have made their cars and brands appealing to younger buyers with cash to spend, people who are likely to buy several new cars in the next few decades.

Can you say the same about Jaguar’s older-skewing customer base? No, and that’s dangerous for the brand’s survival.

Jaguar recently launched a refreshed brand and product that caused a huge stir. People said they’ve completely alienated their customers and would suffer in the market as a result. Whether that’s true remains to be seen, but their strategy for survival and growth has become clear: appeal to younger audiences, who are the luxury car buyers of the future.

Attest’s own data on Jaguar’s campaign echoes the general negative consensus. But it also shows one crucial detail: that people thinking about buying an EV – exactly the people Jaguar needs to target – had a positive reaction.

This is how legacy brands must think if they want to survive – weighing up the impact customer-acquisition strategies might have on your existing customer base and making informed decisions based on that. Without an understanding of the similarities and differences between your customers and target audiences, every decision is a step into the unknown – is that a risk you can afford to take?

Young Brands Looking to Expand Beyond Early Adopters

Hybrid research is also a tactic younger brands need to ensure longevity.

Imagine you’re an exciting new plant-based food brand. You’ve built up a dedicated, loyal customer base who are completely on board with what you offer. But to grow, you need to appeal to a wider audience, ideally without losing those essential early customers.

With a hybrid approach to research, you’ll understand whether your early customers became loyal for reasons that will appeal to the mass market or not. And you then have the knowledge you need to make the next steps to scale up.

Introducing Hybrid Research with Attest

It’s for these reasons that Attest has launched its powerful new own-audience research capability. Combining this with their established panel offering, Attest has become an industry-first hybrid research platform.

The innovation allows researchers to run surveys with current customers, future consumers or both together – and analyse the results side by side. It aims to increase the speed to insights and help researchers uncover hidden opportunities between both audiences.

Conducting hybrid research provides a more holistic view by identifying where the gaps are between a brand’s current and future customers. These insights can be instrumental in making high profile, strategic decisions and help to unlock growth.

Hybrid research will bring a deeper level of understanding to:

• Product development – Derisk product launches by assessing how they'll land with current and target customers.
• Campaign testing – Pinpoint how marketing campaigns move the needle for brand awareness and market share – and optimize ad spend with agile pulse checks.
• Category analysis – Spot new ways to boost expansion while keeping current customers on side.
• Brand perception – Make brand choices that attract new buyers and maintain current customers’ perception.

William Blakey-Peck, Marketing Insight Manager at Loqbox, said carrying out hybrid research with Attest had already proven valuable for the brand, which helps consumers build their credit scores:

“Hybrid research shows us the key differences between our existing audience and prospective members, letting us spot opportunity and de-risk those marketing moves that unlock new segments,” he said. “As a business focused on improving our members’ financial wellbeing, using hybrid research helps us demonstrate the incremental positive impact that Loqbox has for our members, helping them to access richer lives.”

The upgrade of Attest’s platform with hybrid research follows a raft of new innovations including multi-market research, monadic testing, AI summaries, and interactive storytelling features, which have already attracted global brands like Netflix, Uniqlo and Huel.

Head over to Attest’s to learn more about hybrid research, or contact an Attest team member.