Before we experienced a worldwide pandemic and the Great Resignation, employers knew how to keep and retain talent. The focus was on providing work-life balance, exciting roles, improved technology, and better onboarding and training. In this new age, people are requesting flexible work schedules and locations. A report by the Future Forum, a group within Slack Technologies Inc, found that “95% of employees want flexible schedules and 78% want flexible locations.”
While not having to stick to a fixed 9-5 schedule and the ability to work from anywhere can be helpful to workers, employers need to dig deeper to understand how this will play out. These new ways of working come with drawbacks that can sneak up and drag down employee satisfaction and morale.
Because the boundaries aren’t as firm as they once were. We used to have a built-in transition with the commute to and from work. Many of us no longer have that physical and mental transition that ends work time and starts home time.
comes from being online all day, in virtual meetings, without truly interacting or collaborating with people face-to-face. Gone are the spontaneous “water cooler chats” and the conference room banter that happens before and after meetings.
If you find yourself talking to your dog or cat throughout the day, you are not alone. Working from home can create feelings of loneliness and isolation, as people find themselves rarely needing to leave their home/work office. This can be especially true if you started a job during the pandemic and you have never met your co-workers or manager in-person.
Many companies are incorporating new approaches to support employees in adjusting to flexible schedules and locations, such as:
If you haven’t listened to your employees recently, now is the time. We can help you and your organization understand what employees REALLY want, and how to help them achieve the balance they crave in this new world we are navigating.
With SIVO’s Organizational Intelligence Solution, we dig deep via employee interviews and group discussions to understand the challenges and engagement of the workforce. We facilitate leaders in the development of strategies and solutions to help employees cope with the “side effects” that come with flexible work schedules and remote work environments.
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SIVO is thrilled to present The SIVO Insights Forum, an on-demand panel discussion with esteemed Insights executives. You’re invited to tune in here!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KX3aO1k61QE
The lively conversation focuses on “Bridging The Gap: Translating Insights Into Meaningful Business Results" with industry leaders:
Learn from world-class Insights leaders as they discuss:
Feel free to share with your team and reach out with any questions that spark as you watch!
About SIVO:
SIVO is a global insights and strategy firm specializing in understanding people and their needs and beliefs that drive behavior. We partner with world-class brands to answer key questions that fuel business growth and innovation.
By Natasha Weith
"The great end of knowledge is not knowledge, but action."
- Thomas Henry Huxley
This sentiment resonates deeply in the market research world, where the true value of consumer insights is not in their discovery but in putting them into practice. In fact, one of the defining characteristics of a consumer insight is that it “can be applied to the business in a way that drives growth.”
Too often, valuable market research findings remain confined to lengthy, boring research reports that end up sitting in a file cabinet, collecting dust, and failing to inspire meaningful business actions. At SIVO, we have been thinking a lot about how we and our client teams can make insights land in organizations, inspiring stakeholders to engage in our market research findings and seize the opportunities that we have uncovered. We came up with five strategies to do this.
Here’s how to get insights to land in your organization:
Involving key stakeholders throughout the research journey fosters a sense of ownership and ensures that the insights resonate with colleagues who will act on the insights. Conducting insights activation workshops allows teams to interactively explore findings, brainstorm applications and prioritize the action steps. We also believe “persona immersion sessions” help clients experience the perspectives of their consumers, building empathy and deepening their understanding and commitment to business actions that will serve their consumers.
In addition to engaging the team, securing support from leadership and identifying internal advocates is a great way to influence business outcomes with insights. Sometimes teams employ the “meeting before the meeting” with key leaders to create space for them to think through the implications and ensure linkage between the research findings and organizational priorities. With leadership already on board, the cross-functional teams can feel empowered to act on the findings.
Of course, transforming data into compelling narratives makes insights more relatable and memorable. Employing storytelling frameworks, such as the hero’s journey, can illustrate the consumer's struggle, highlight opportunities, and propose solutions. Utilizing metaphors, analogies, or visual aids like infographics, consumer video reels and photos, further enhances the stickiness of the research findings, ensuring they resonate with audiences. Modifying the report for different audiences can also help, for example, R&D may want a “data-heavy” version while the leadership team will likely want a 3 to 5 slide summary.
To constantly remind teams that their primary role is to serve the consumer and make informed decisions on their behalf, CI teams can proactively “surround” teams with insights. For instance, you can develop and distribute "insight of the week" micro-learning moments through platforms like Slack or MS Teams, to keep teams regularly informed. Additionally, developing consumer reality-check posters for both physical and virtual office spaces can serve as constant visual reminders of the consumer's perspective. Incorporating gamification elements, such as quizzes and contests into standing meetings can further reinforce learning by engaging teams in a dynamic and interactive manner.
These days, CI teams can leverage AI to help with stakeholder engagement in research data and findings. For example, AI-powered dashboards are increasingly available for real-time tracking and scenario planning. Additionally, giving stakeholders access to AI chat tools that query both proprietary research data and public data sources help deliver answers to in-the-moment consumer questions and can increase engagement.
By implementing these five strategies, Insights professionals can bridge the gap between just delivering data and driving organizational change, ensuring that the insights we identify serve as a catalyst for informed decision-making and business growth.
Let’s keep pushing to effectively impact your business together!
SIVO, Inc. is a market research and strategy firm specializing in helping businesses understand people. We partner with world-class brands to answer key questions and identify opportunities that unlock business growth. Our team of insights market research professionals are masters at designing custom research plans, executing with excellence, identifying strategic insights and then helping client teams translate those insights into action. Our On Demand Talent solution places fractional insights experts into client companies to temporarily fill open roles, complete projects or expand team capabilities.
Contact us at Contact@SIVOInsights.com or visit SIVOInsights.com to schedule a Research or On Demand Talent discovery call so we can help you make an impact!
by Kerry Juhl
Consumer Personas are a great tool for bringing your consumer target to life for your organization, to inspire growth ideas, new brand experiences and product innovation. It is a representation of your target segment based on a combination of quantitative and qualitative data. It summarizes your consumers’ lifestyle, values, needs, challenges, and preferences, so that it can be easily shared and digested across the organization.
At a high level, here is SIVO’s guide on how to build consumer personas:
Building your Consumer Personas
Key information that should be considered when building consumer personas includes:
Check out these other SIVO blogs on consumer targets and consumer segmentation, to better understand the inputs and context for consumer personas.
Making Consumer Personas Interesting
The goal is to bring the consumer to life in an interesting and inspirational way. This information needs to be interesting and easy to read so that it gets internalized by the organization. Here are a few tips:
Keep it Brief: A good persona should be 1 to 3 pages in length. Ideally, there would be a 1-page summary and if needed, 1 to 2 follow-up pages with actionable details and insights.
Use Visuals: A persona should be visually interesting. Use photos, graphics, or infographics to bring the consumer persona to life and make them feel more tangible and relatable to your team.
Use Narratives and Quotes: Storytelling is an important part of building your persona. Use the data to create a short 1-paragraph narrative that describes the consumer persona – who they are, what they need, and their underlying motivations.
Include a Key Consumer Insight: It is important to include a one-sentence insight that describes the underlying motivation that would make them potentially interested in buying your product or service.
With the data summarized and visualized into clear and succinct personas, it is easy to understand and empathize with your consumer target, i.e., the segment of consumers that will inspire your growth ideas, marketing communications, promotions, distribution plans and new product innovation. Your team can now tailor brand messaging, content, and product offerings to align with the needs and preferences of key consumer targets. It is also easy to socialize the learning across the organization and agency partners in an efficient and effective way.
Maintaining Relevance of Consumer Personas
Consumer personas are foundational marketing and insights deliverables that will inspire your teams’ growth ideas and guide your agency partners for years. For this reason, you need to invest in ongoing maintenance to ensure continued relevance to your organization. Depending on the volatility and competitive dynamics within your market, you will want to:
The success of your consumer persona profiles depends on the quality of your research, the depth of your understanding and getting it to land within your organization and with agency partners. Regularly leveraging the personas while also iterating and improving upon them will help you stay in tune with your consumers and maintain a competitive advantage in the market.
Your Source for Expert Customer Insights
At SIVO Inc., we are dedicated to helping our clients understand their consumer targets by designing and executing consumer segmentations, following up with qualitative research and building consumer personas. We can then facilitate activation sessions with your team to develop action plans and strategies that leverage these insights.
Reach out to us at Contact@SIVOInsights.com or go to SIVOInsights.com today to schedule a discovery call and connect!
In today’s fast-paced world of AI-powered dashboards, real-time metrics, and instant feedback loops, businesses are flooded with data. But despite this access to information, many teams are still struggling to truly understand their consumers.
Why? Because understanding doesn’t come from data points alone. It comes from empathy – the ability to see the world through your consumers’ eyes.
Empathy is not just a soft skill. In a business context, empathy for your consumer is a strategic asset. And when used intentionally, it becomes a competitive differentiator that can unlock sharper decisions, faster innovation, and stronger brand resonance.
Empathy in a business context goes beyond surface understanding: It’s the process of cognitively and emotionally connecting with your consumers’ experiences, motivations, and needs.
Consumer empathy allows teams to:
And most importantly: it allows your team to move beyond assumptions and act with confidence.
What we see most notably, with the rise of AI, more and more executive teams are pushing for faster, leaner decision-making. But without a connection to real-world consumer behavior, speed risks becoming shallow, and very costly. From an insights perspective, developing empathy within organizations and training teams isn’t a nice-to-have or a luxury – it’s a necessity.
And these are just some examples. Empathy fuels smarter decisions at every level of the business, in all departments.
Whether you’re a CMO rethinking brand positioning or an Insights Director building your learning plans, here are some key tools to bring empathy into strategy:
Spending time in your consumers’ real environments (their homes, their workplace, neighborhood stores, their daily routines, even in their cars) allows you to uncover insights that would never surface in a focus group or controlled environment. Watch for routines, artifacts, interactions, and decision-making moments. What feels normal to them might be revealing for your team.
Ethnographic interviews are perfect to use when exploring new segments, refining product strategy, or understanding how a category fits into everyday life.
Understanding how people actually make choices at shelf (or online) tells you more than any survey can. What stops them? What persuades them? How do they navigate the retail space? How does your product show up relative to your competitors? Shop-Alongs and Path to Purchase Observations are perfect when optimizing in-store experience, packaging, or online conversion strategy.
These immersive, multi-day learning experiences are designed to help teams step into the shoes of their consumers – literally. Whether it’s joining farmers on their land or shadowing a parent on a morning routine, empathy treks bring brand teams (and senior leaders) closer to the emotional context that drives decisions. It’s a common tool to aligning cross-functional teams, inspiring innovation, or uncovering core brand truths.
Mobile mission software, accessed through smart phones, gives you visibility into your consumers’ world in real time or over time. From what they eat and wear to how they talk about brands, these tools capture lived experiences in context, without disrupting them. Digital diaries are perfect for when businesses are looking to understand rituals, routines, and the evolving emotional process of the consumer journey.
Empathy doesn’t end with the research. In fact, it’s only the beginning, and companies should strive to embed it in their day-to-day businesses. But how? That’s where tools like Insight Activation Sessions come in, to help teams translate empathy into action by reframing findings as strategic questions, idea starters, or business moves. A perfect move to embedding insights into planning cycles or cross-functional decision-making, for long-term results.
At SIVO, we love helping clients across industries uncover powerful insights through empathy-driven methods. Here are just a few examples of past cases:
A leading electronics retailer struggled to connect with their consumers – their messaging felt clinical and cold. By stepping into the real lives of their target market, in their own homes, we uncovered the emotional language that truly resonated. The result? Clear direction on positioning and communication strategies – and a renewed path to success in a challenging category.
A global beverage brand was losing relevance across key consumption occasions. Through immersive virtual ethnography, we helped them see how emotions, rituals, and motivations shaped beverage choice across six countries. This empathy-powered understanding led to sharper messaging and inspired marketing activation across core segments.
An electronics brand expanding globally needed to understand what truly drives consumer decisions – but sales data alone weren’t cutting it. Through ethnographic interviews and in-store observations across multiple countries, we uncovered key journey moments that shaped how and why people buy. The insights directly informed their brand growth strategy.
A recreational vehicle company wanted to identify new opportunities for innovation and product improvement efforts – but needed to understand the deeper feelings associated with their utility vehicles. The SIVO and client team spent quality time with farmers and hunters on their properties, riding in their vehicles to see and feel how these vehicles integrated into their consumers’ lives, their farming businesses, and leisure time.
Empathy isn't just a buzzword or about "feeling good" – it's about making better decisions, for you, your company, and your consumers. When you understand the world your consumers live in, you can make decisions with more clarity, alignment, and confidence.
Ready to move from unaware to empathetic?
Let’s explore how empathy can drive better decisions across your company!
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
