By Julie Rose
As your fiscal year is coming to a close, new questions and challenges can arise as you finalize spending on this year’s budget:
SIVO Insights On Demand Talent™ Can Help
SIVO’s On Demand Talent is a great solution for Insights Professionals and Teams facing the year-end crunch – with more initiatives than bandwidth to get it all done. We leverage our extensive pool of fractional Insights Talent, with years of experience and expertise, to help you achieve your business objectives.
We recommend three key steps for evaluating and making the case internally for hiring contract Insights talent.
As workforce talent continues to evolve, there is no shortage of options, including interns, short or long-term contractors, contract-to-hire, or direct hire. Below, we highlight the advantages of On Demand Contract Talent vs. a Full-Time Hire:
Prove the Need for Incremental Resources
Some of our clients have struggled to make the case to their leaders for permanent incremental headcount. Instead, they started with SIVO’s On Demand Talent to show value to the business. This step helped them demonstrate the benefit of having additional resources. Let SIVO help you get the additional headcount you need in 2024.
Get Expert Consumer Insights with SIVO
We have started ODT engagements in as fast as one week. To discuss your needs and how we can match the talent with the best expertise for quick solutions in your organization, visit SIVO On Demand Talent or email Contact@SIVOInsights.com.
By Julie Rose
In today’s blog, we take a break from our standard format and have a little fun imagining a utopian future for market research. Jump with us to 2029, will you? We think you’ll like it!
We’ve jumped in the time machine and 2029 is a new era for market research. Picture this: AI has taken the mundane, repetitive tasks off our hands, freeing insight professionals to focus on creatively connecting insights, telling compelling stories, formulating strategies, and influencing business decisions. Gone are the days of designing surveys from scratch, laboriously cleaning data, and spending weeks on synthesis. The research role has evolved into something greater—part strategist, part AI conductor, and part visionary. Welcome to the golden age of insights.
Synthetic Personas: A New Era of Consumer Insight
In 2029, traditional surveys are feeling as outdated as fax machines. AI-driven synthetic personas have completely changed the game. These AI-generated personas are lifelike, modeled using real consumer data and machine learning, simulating consumer behaviors, preferences, and even emotions with remarkable accuracy. They behave, react, and even feel like real people—without requiring self-reported data or human subjects.
The scalability is mind-blowing. Imagine running thousands of personalized conversations and “what-if” scenarios simultaneously, testing hypotheses, and gathering nuanced feedback in real time.
Additionally, the days of complicated recruitment challenges are gone. Synthetic personas have made it possible to engage with hard-to-reach populations and conduct large-scale research without any privacy concerns.
Multimodal Inputs & Emotional AI: Understanding Consumers on a Deeper Level
Remember when we relied on surveys, focus groups, and social scraping to understand consumer sentiment? By 2029, those methods feel like relics from a distant past. Today, AI uses multimodal inputs like text, video, voice, and even biometric data to give us an authentic view of consumer attitudes, beliefs, and emotions.
For example, emotional recognition tools track subtle cues like facial expressions, vocal tones, and physiological responses in real time. When testing a product or promotional materials, AI can measure a consumer's heart rate and stress levels, bridging the gap between what people say and what they truly feel. This deeper understanding enables brands to craft emotionally resonant products, services, and communications that genuinely connect with their audiences.
Synthetic Data: Privacy-Proof and Scalable Insights
Data privacy concerns used to be a major issue in research, but not anymore. By 2029, synthetic data—artificially generated datasets that mimic real-world data—has become a staple in marketing research. This allows us to test hypotheses, simulate consumer behaviors, and run detailed "what-if" scenarios on a large scale, all without compromising privacy as the analyses do not access any personal (human) data.
Unlike the randomly generated or hallucinated data that was an issue in the past, synthetic data is now created using sophisticated machine learning algorithms that extrapolate patterns from real data to generate highly accurate, privacy-safe datasets. This isn’t new—researchers have always synthesized data—but AI now makes it faster, more accurate, and scalable. As more data is collected and validated, synthetic data models in 2029 are more precise, enabling deeper insights while respecting privacy regulations.
Agent-to-Agent Collaboration: Adapted Research Management
Perhaps the most revolutionary change in 2029 is how AI helps market research teams manage entire research projects. The team has built and now manages digital agents—AI programs designed to mimic human decision-making—to handle the repetitive aspects of a research project. The team sets business and research objectives and high-level questions. From there, digital agents collaborate with one another to execute tasks, analyze data, and refine insights. These agents work tirelessly in the background, leaving the team free to focus on more creative and strategic aspects, like storytelling, providing actionable recommendations linked to the business context, and building client relationships.
This isn’t about replacing humans; it’s about empowering them. By automating the basic operational tasks, AI gives us more time to dream big and think creatively.
Driving Action & Outcomes: AI-Enhanced Storytelling
In 2029, AI is an essential partner in crafting compelling narratives from raw data. Gone are the days of manually structuring reports or laboring over visualizations. Today, AI systems instantly outline story arcs, recommend the best supporting data, and generate tailored presentations depending on the audience. With the guiding hand of Content Strategists, AI delivers high-level insights to C-Suite audiences and produces more detailed reports for technical teams.
The most exciting development? AI-powered immersive presentations. Using augmented and virtual reality, Research Strategists (with the support of Content Strategists) guide stakeholders through dynamic, interactive experiences, allowing them to explore insights in a hands-on way. This revolutionizes the presentation experience, making it more engaging and impactful than the static reports of the past. The result? Stakeholders leave every presentation engaged, informed, and ready to act.
Humane AI: A Future of Ethical, Mindful Collaboration
Back in 2024, many feared AI—worried about bias, transparency, and job security. But by 2029, those concerns have faded. Rigorous regulations ensure that AI systems are ethical, transparent, and fair. Continuous audits minimize bias and guarantee that AI tools uphold the highest standards of integrity.
Rather than replacing us, AI complements our skills. Researchers who embraced AI early on have found themselves thriving. Together, humans and AI form a powerful partnership, pushing the boundaries of what market research can achieve.
The Researcher’s Elevated Role: Creative, Strategic Visionaries
In 2029, our favorite part of being a researcher is the freedom to focus on what we love most: strategy, insights, and relationship-building. AI handles tedious, repetitive tasks, giving us the space to drive business impact in ways we never thought possible.
The role of the researcher has evolved. We’re no longer data processors or survey designers—we’re storytellers, strategists, and visionaries. AI enhances our work, allowing us to uncover insights faster, more accurately, and with greater depth than ever before.
Are You Ready for the Future?
The future of market research isn’t coming - it’s already here and getting better every day. At SIVO, we’re embracing this transformation with open arms, empowering our team and clients to thrive in this exciting new era. Together, we can unlock the full potential of AI and create a better, brighter future for our industry.
Are you ready to join us on this journey? Let’s build the future together. Contact us at Contact@SIVOInsights.com or visit SIVOInsights.com to schedule a discovery today.
As fall season begins and planning cycles ramp up, most brand teams are juggling budgets, media calendars, and launch timelines. But there’s one question that quietly determines how effective all of that work will be next year:
Ever since your brand was established, your consumers have moved through shifting economic pressures, cultural tensions, new product entrants, and evolving expectations in your category. If your brand positioning hasn’t been revisited with fresh consumer insight, you’re likely planning 2027 with an outdated map.
Q4 is the ideal time to reset.
A clear, differentiated brand positioning is the foundation of an effective marketing strategy because it forces the team to define who the brand serves, what primary benefit it delivers, why it can credibly deliver that benefit, and how it stands apart from key competitors.
Without that clarity, campaigns become fragmented, messaging drifts, and teams default to generic claims that could belong to any brand in the category.
As a reminder, a classic, disciplined positioning statement (your differentiating benefit) looks like:
For (consumer target), Brand is the only (product type) that provides (key benefit), because Brand has (reason to believe 1), (reason to believe 2), and (reason to believe 3).
For example, Peleton’s positioning statement looks something like this:
For people looking to stay motivated with their in-home workout routines, Peloton is the connected fitness platform that delivers an energizing studio experience, with premium equipment, live and on-demand classes, motivating instructors, and personalized progress tracking.
The past few years have reshaped what “value” means in many categories. Consumers are re-evaluating trade-offs between price, quality, health, and convenience; looking for brands that reflect their emotional needs and life stage; paying closer attention to how brands show up on issues like sustainability, wellbeing, and social impact; and comparing more options more quickly across digital and physical channels.
Within that context, positioning can no longer rest solely on functional benefits, i.e., “what it is” or “what it does.” Strong brands are intentionally climbing the Brand Benefit Ladder:
Depending on your brand's maturity and competitive set, you may need to refresh your positioning at any level, from sharpening a functional claim to elevating toward more emotional or purpose-led territory. But you can’t make that decision in a vacuum.
That’s where disciplined, end-of-year consumer research become critical.
Q4 is a valuable time for positioning work because it bridges “what has happened” and “what’s next”:
By investing in brand positioning research now, you give your team the time they need to align on a refined or new positioning territory, translate it into clear messaging and activations and brief your agencies and internal partners in Q1 with a strong strategic foundation.
At SIVO, we’ve spent many years helping brand teams across industries develop and evaluate brand positionings that resonate with both consumers and internal stakeholders. Our approach combines proven frameworks with rigorous qualitative and quantitative research to ensure your positioning is both inspiring and grounded.
In Q4, that typically looks like a two-step process:
1. Qualitative Exploration: Refining the Story With Real Consumers
We start by exploring how consumers currently perceive your brand, your competitors, and the broader category. For example:
We can work side-by-side with you and your agency partners toevolve the statements as we learn, so you’re not waiting months for direction.
2. Quantitative Positioning Validation: Selecting the Strongest Position
Once we’ve refined a set of viable positioning routes qualitatively, we move into quantitative validation to identify the most motivating and distinctive option.
Using surveys and, where appropriate, real-world testing (such as digital ad experiments), the SIVO team will:
The result is not just “a good idea,” but a validatedstrategic choice: a positioning that is clear, unique, credible, and proven toconnect with your consumers across channels all year long, via campaigns,packaging, digital, shopper, innovation, and more.
If you’re already planning for 2027, this is the moment to build a positioning that truly reflects today’s consumer and tomorrow’s opportunity. Let the SIVO team help you develop and validate a brand positioning that communicates exactly how your brand wants to show up in the world, and why that matters to the people you serve!
How listening to customers can benefit the bottom line
By Kerry Juhl
42% of companies don’t listen to their customers (Hubspot)
85% of products fail when companies don’t talk to consumers (Forbes)
Up to 73% of company data goes unused for analytics (Inc.)
Do you see a pattern here? When companies don’t take the time to understand people and what drives their behavior, they miss out on the very thing that could fuel business growth and innovation. According to Rob Holland, CEO of research technology platform Feedback Loop, companies are not speaking with consumers regularly enough because “they don’t have researchers or they don’t have resources to gather and speak with a group of targeted consumers quickly.” The solution to this problem can be found in three words: Fractional Insights Professionals.
What are Fractional Insights Professionals?
A fractional employee is part of an emerging employment model where an individual offers a niche or advanced experience to an employer and is hired for a fraction of the work week, month or year. Fractional Insights Professionals are temporary employees that specialize in designing and executing market research and identifying and applying consumer/customer insights to guide business decisions and identify opportunities for growth.
Knowledge is Power
When companies neglect to take time to understand the wants and needs of their customers, it is like driving a car with a blindfold on. It can be challenging to stay on course, and you can easily swerve in the wrong direction. The art and science of obtaining consumer insights can provide businesses with an in-depth look at how consumers think, feel, behave, and make choices. Having this valuable knowledge can steer companies on how to improve their businesses, better engage with customers and stay ahead of the competition. According to Microsoft, organizations that leverage their customer behaviors to generate insights outperform their competitors by 85% in sales growth.
Fractional Insights Professionals to the Rescue
When departments do not have market researchers on staff or when employees do not have the time or expertise to execute market research projects and apply the learning to the business, fractional insights professionals can be the solution to ensure your business is not driving blind.
SIVO Fractional Research Capabilities
SIVO On Demand Talent team includes an extensive pool of Fractional Insights Professionals with years of experience and expertise across an array of industries such as CPG, healthcare, finance, technology, apparel and retail. You can rely on SIVO’s team of experts to collect high-quality data, provide an accurate interpretation of that data, and offer guidance on how to best utilize the insights learned. From managing a portion of a research project to full-service research design through insight application, SIVO helps clients make data-driven decisions and identify opportunities for growth.
We’d love to talk to you about how partnering with SIVO can eliminate guesswork and help your company drive positive results. Please contact us at Contact@SIVOInsights.com or request a discovery call from our website at SIVOInsights.com.
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!
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
