Product Intelligence: How Data Drives Smarter Product Decisions

It’s every brand manager’s nightmare: a 20% decline in annual sales that threatens to erode $10 million in annual revenue and jeopardize your job.

Even if you do your due diligence and collect exorbitant amounts of data, it’s not a given that you’ll get the insights that really matter. Your product may have performed fantastically in a controlled lab setting, but when you bring kids and pets and the scramble to get out the door into the mix, suddenly everything’s topsy-turvy.

This is where product data intelligence comes in. When you’re asking the right questions and testing your products in the right setting, you stop spinning your wheels with superficial market research. You start understanding what customers actually need.

What is product intelligence?

Product intelligence goes beyond market and sales data to get to the bottom of why customers prefer one product over another. This encompasses every stage of the customer journey—from the first time someone spots your frozen tamale brand on the shelves to the day they decide to bring a half dozen boxes of them to Friendsgiving.

Sometimes you’re lucky enough to have customers telling you what they think directly. Other times, you need to make inferences from the data that’s available, combined with an understanding of people’s lives that you gather through ethnography.

Think of it like a Sherlock Holmes anecdote. A master of abductive reasoning, the legendary detective could string together multiple observations and “common sense” things he knew about the world to reach a highly probable, specific conclusion. For example, by observing multiple numbers likely scratched onto a pocket watch by a pawnbroker, Holmes posited that the watch’s owner had been see-sawing between prosperity and destitution throughout his life.

When you collect product intelligence data, you need to connect it with what you know about people’s daily lives in order to really understand what motivates people to keep buying your product or to look elsewhere. Sitting at the intersection of data, insights, and action, product intelligence combines user behavior analytics, market trends, and performance metrics to guide better decisions.

Depending on your specific market niche and goals, you may be looking for:

• Competitive product intelligence: Find out how your competitors’ products are performing relative to customers’ needs and expectations. Where are people feeling dissatisfied with a product? You might be able to do better with your offering.
• Behavioral product intelligence: See how your customers actually interact with your product, either through central location testing (CLI) or in-home usage testing (IHUT) with video diaries. This could reveal friction points/points of dissatisfaction that people might not explicitly tell you about.
• Attitudinal product intelligence: This is where your customers tell you directly what they think about your product and how it makes them feel. You can use a combination of surveys that ask people to rate their experience and in-depth interviews.
• Food product intelligence: How do people perceive the taste and texture of your product? Is there a weird aftertaste? Do people perceive it as a worthwhile healthier alternative to things that might taste slightly better simply because they’re loaded with sugar?

What are the best ways to glean product intelligence insights?

Product data intelligence methods are as diverse as the lives of people who love your products. This can make it challenging to stay focused on asking the right market research questions and getting insights you can act upon.

If your company were selling a software product, it would be much easier to measure how customers interact with it because it’s all digital and trackable. You’d be able to, for example, analyze feature usage, create customer heatmaps, and serve up in-app surveys. These aren’t things you can do with a box of cereal or a makeup kit.

When you’re selling CPG and retail goods, you have to get more creative in your data-gathering and use a combination of surveys, interviews, social listening (analyzing the feedback given in reviews and social media posts), and video diaries. You want to get as close as possible to the authentic consumer experience, including:

• How and when people use your product (user engagement)
• How people feel when they’re using your product (user experience)
• Where less-than-perfect experiences occur (friction points/pain points)

You’ll also want to segment your customers based on demographics, preferences, and behavior patterns. For example, when testing their products with Highlight, personal care brand Bare Hands zeroed in on “better-for-you” makeup users because these are the people most likely to purchase their natural nail care products.

How to turn product intelligence into decisions that boost sales

The tough thing about product data intelligence is figuring out how to stay open to unexpected insights without getting lost in the noise. You want to start with a concrete goal in mind to guide your insights towards action. These goals could be:

• Determining whether your product successfully clocks as “luxury” or “premium” and can therefore command a higher price point.
• Figuring out whether customers see your new concept as a legitimate extension of your existing product offering or something that doesn’t really fit.
• Taking in a number of food product intelligence data points, such as how the taste stacks up against competing products and whether health claims resonate with target customers.

It all comes back to getting authentic consumer insights. Highlight has a proven track record in helping companies translate product intelligence insights from real customers into sales-boosting product development decisions. Here are a few examples:

1. Natural chewing gum maker Simply Gum determined, after testing with Highlight, that people were more interested in its new product extension when said product was described as “fruit snacks” or “fruit bites” rather than as “gummies.”
2. Simply Gum also demonstrated that people would happily overlook its slightly inferior taste if the packaging made clear that its gum contained zero plastic, which the better-tasting chewing gums unfortunately have in their formulation.
3. Haitian food brand Papa Luc’s Provisions worked with Highlight to better understand consumer perceptions and validate whether people would be likely to purchase their hot sauce and specialty peanut butter in high-end grocery stores.

Everything has an opportunity cost in product development, so staying focused on a particular thing you can improve or change is key. However, you also want to be ready to receive information that surprises you, since this could point to something that might differentiate your product from other options.

A suite of technologies to serve as your trusty investigative sidekick

Even the most brilliant of detectives had help from those around them, even if it’s just for the sake of bouncing ideas off someone else. With Highlight, you’ll get a collection of product intelligence tools that help you effortlessly segment your data, uncover hidden patterns, and summarize the sentiment behind open-ended responses.

Research-grade AI makes it easier than ever to get an accurate summary of people’s thoughts about your product, preventing you from getting overwhelmed by the sheer volume of responses. Product testing is no longer a bottleneck with technologies designed to get you the data and answers you need within a fortnight.

The best part about Highlight’s platform? Testers are committed to providing nuanced, authentic responses to everything you’ve ever wanted to ask your target customers. Like Holmes’ eagle eye that takes in every detail and connects it to knowledge about the world, the Highlight testing community logs their most subtle impressions of your product and connects these to their own lifestyle, habits, and needs.

Moving beyond simple observation to get the real story

You might have plenty of sales data stemming from a retail presence, but simply knowing what sells and what doesn’t sell leaves you with incomplete information. Is it possible to dig into this data to understand why your products are flying off shelves or floundering? Not really. You need a type of product intelligence data that blends metrics with the customer’s needs and wants.

At Highlight, we’re committed to getting you the customer insights you need. Understanding that “why” requires looking beyond traditional business intelligence, which tracks broader organizational metrics, and also beyond market intelligence, which maps out macro trends.

Paying attention to data is easy. It’s combining this data with real customer experiences that gives you true Holmesian intelligence. Highlight can help you home in on the lived product experience—what your customers love and what they struggle with—so that you can turn observation into inference and inference into smart decisions.