Guest Article | Nichola Quail - Founder and CEO, Insights Exchange
Nichola Quail is a wonderful friend to RX and we have been delighted to work alongside her on many occasions. Her team have uncovered the most exceptional insights to help retailers, around the world, understand the opportunities that lay often in plain view.
Every now and then, something new and exciting comes along… yes - even in shopper research!
You may have heard about Virtual Audiences via synthetic or augmented data, but not quite sure what it means for you or your retail business?
To put it simply, Virtual Audiences are representative groups of individuals generated through sophisticated artificial intelligence algorithms. These audiences ‘mimic’ real-world consumer behaviours, demographics, and psychographics, enabling companies to make strategic decisions for their business. It is like having your ‘customer in the room next door’ when thinking about a new product launch, testing a campaign or idea.
Example of process to obtain your personalised insights. © YABBLE
This innovative new approach offers many advantages for businesses seeking deeper insights into their target markets, including concept testing, product development, and marketing strategy refinement.
Instead of depending solely on surveys or human participants, generative AI acts as a stand-in for human feedback, ‘pulling’ data from multiple sources and synthesising this data to create the virtual audiences or personas.
For example, if you are a company specialising in women’s fashion accessories, generative AI will find any relevant news articles, customer reviews, technical trade papers, retail sites that pertain to your specific questions. AI will collate and summarise this data into tangible insights at a push of a button.
Example of an AI generated persona.
© Insights Exchange
Key Benefits of Using Virtual Audiences:
Speed and Efficiency: Virtual audiences provide insights fast! In a matter of hours or days you can have market intel on your category or how consumers are behaving.
Flexibility and Customisation: Virtual audiences can be easily tailored to specific demographics, interests, and behaviours, allowing for highly targeted data and insights. It is possible to adjust parameters like age, gender, location, and purchasing habits to ensure the virtual audience accurately reflects your desired target market. This allows for more nuanced insights and personalised recommendations. Virtual audiences are particularly handy for small, hard to reach targets.
Benefits of using Virtual Audiences in the Retail Industry:
Personalise: Armed with data, retailers can personalise email marketing, social media ads, and even in-app messages, making them more likely to resonate with individual customers.
Increase engagement: By analysing past customer behaviour, retailers can anticipate future needs and preferences, enabling them to proactively engage customers with relevant offers and content.
Stay on top of trends: Data analysis can uncover emerging trends and customer preferences, allowing retailers to adjust their product offerings and merchandising strategies in real-time.
Save money! By understanding which products are likely to resonate with different customer segments, retailers can optimise inventory levels and avoid overstocking items that may not sell well.
Realign your strategy: Data-driven insights enable retailers to optimise marketing budgets by focusing on channels and campaigns that are most likely to yield results.
Marketing use cases:
Market and/or customer segmentations
Attitudes to brands
Market explorations (i.e expanding to new markets)
Discovering new trends
Key watch outs: Keeping the human in the loop
Whilst Virtual Audiences are a game-changing new tool in the race to better understand your customer - like any AI tool it works best with human intervention. This ensures there are no hallucinations and you can sense check the outputs based on ‘what you know to be true’. This is why we recommend augmenting Virtual Audiences with real world, existing data. This could include:
Shopper insights
Customer research
Support tickets
Customer chat logs
CX Studies/ UX / Design Studies
Internal knowledge base or FAQs.
Product description or documentation
Market reports
i.e. Any type of text data not available publicly on the internet that can better inform your specific project.
Can I Tap Into Virtual Audiences On A More Frequent Basis?
You sure can! We can set up your virtual audience and then tailor this around your business needs:
Run additional and regular analysis on your data (i.e. ‘always-on brand trackers)
Ask your data questions
Download and visualise your insights
In the fast-paced retail landscape, the ability to adapt quickly to changing customer needs and market trends is crucial. Data-driven insights give retailers the agility to stay ahead of the curve. Interested to find out more about Virtual Audiences? Contact the team at Insights Exchange today for an obligation-free chat!
Nichola Quail is a Global Insights Strategist, Research Specialist and Founder and Director of Insights Exchange - a global market research company that works with enterprise and fast growth brands to deliver game-changing insights. She has worked with leading local and international brands including Xero, Densu, Bendon, Disney, Panasonic, NZ Post, Briscoes and Rebel Sport. Book a time to connect to Nichola and her team here.
“By leveraging the power of AI, virtual audiences allow for rapid, scalable, and cost-effective data collection and analysis,” Nichola Quail, Founder and CEO.
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