Creating Authentic Brands – A Moving Target of Brands and People

Creating Authentic Brands – A Moving Target of Brands and People

Aug 9, 2023

Creating Authentic Brands – A Moving Target of Brands and People

Jill, Justin, and I were chatting with a client the other day and they said something that stuck with me – we were talking about nothing in particular, but the client brought up advertisers and influencers and it was something akin to, “oh no, we need to come off as being authentic for this initiative, we can’t use influencers.”

Our team prides itself on staying on top of shifts in the consumer zeitgeist – these shifts in consumer mentality can and will happen every couple of years and we are indeed seeing a downward trend in influencer engagement, but with some caveats. First, it looks like Instagram influencers are the ones losing… influence. Gen Z and younger Millennials are instead turning towards TikTok for that personal connection that so many crave. Our assessment is that Instagram influencers took it a bit too far during the pandemic showcasing lavish lifestyles and displays of caring little for the environment (such as taking private jets). The average consumer realized these influencers were nothing like them – and many then moved on.

Enter TikTok. Its popularity skyrocketed during the pandemic – the appeal being that anyone could have a world stage platform to be funny, witty, insightful, and real. Adding to the allure was that you didn’t have to be famous to get the attention of everyone, you just had to know how to game the algorithm. Do it right, and then you were trending and your content in front of millions of people. All of these points swirl into an attractive user experience and fills that authentic void people search for.

 

Authenticity shifted and now brands are reacting. With America’s obsession of “will we/won’t we” recession talk, it makes sense that many global brands are reconsidering budgets for the year and taking a second look at what is essential and what is a nice to have. Authenticity matters to nearly every brand out there, but with consumer expectations shifting every few years, brands should remain vigilant about keeping up with the times. At Catapult Insights, we pride ourselves on our approach agnostic methodology to solving our clients’ issues. So, if you need modern strategies for building authentic connection with your customers, our team has a history of developing custom measures of authenticity across multiple industries and business types. We’ll put our brains to the test and come up with a custom solution that fits your business and industry and is attuned to the current environment. And if we keep our ear to the ground, we can look to the future for the next big shift together.  

 

Andre Barroso

DIRECTOR, INSIGHTS & INNOVATION
CATAPULT INSIGHTS

Embracing the Consumer Journey Through Empathy Building

Embracing the Consumer Journey Through Empathy Building

Jun 27, 2023

Embracing the Consumer Journey Through Empathy Building

One of the most common questions we hear clients ask is ‘what is the consumer journey for our category or brand?’. This often comes at a time when their brand is looking to drive significant growth and fuel innovation. They’re seeking to understand the steps of the journey as well as the underlying motivations and decision-making processes that lead consumers to choose (or not choose) their brand.

Over the years, we’ve often seen the consumer journey viewed as a series of steps, each one completed before the next, resulting in a purchase and taking a product home. The steps are considered to be almost transactional, and the result is often a flashy map that is only halfway actionable.

Marketers and product developers then look for experience or product gaps along the journey steps, and develop solutions to address them. Sometimes those solutions work and fill a functional need. Sometimes they don’t, and that is often because the gap they were aiming to fill stems from a higher order emotional need or experience the consumer is seeking. It’s tied to who they are as people – their experiences, lifestyles and stages, daily struggles, challenges, and goals. We believe that consumer needs cannot be fully met within their journeys without a circumspect understanding of the people, their goals, their emotions, their motivations as they traverse these journeys. 

But people are complex and unique so it can be challenging to peel back the surface layers to get to what’s really going on in their lives. It becomes even more challenging to identify themes across groups of complex and unique individuals, and then share that with an organization and have them truly embrace it. That’s where empathy building comes in, and we layer it throughout our consumer journey work.  

When we approach the consumer journey, we always start with understanding people at their core. We first dive into their lives to understand where they are today, what they value, their goals and challenges. Our approach draws on a number of increasingly introspective topics that engage System 2 thought about who consumers are at heart. This provides an invaluable contextual lens through which we then explore their experiences, goals and attitudes related to our client’s category and their decision-making processes. Check out an example of our past work here. 

Next, we look across the information we gathered to identify themes of higher order benefits, emotions, and goals. This information is used as the inputs into an analytical framework through which to better understand their decision making and journeys through your category. The output of this analysis ensures we’re digging down past the initial layers and documenting important learnings in the digestible form of benefits structures, empathy maps, and journey mapping couched in consumer context. 

The next key step is to help our clients and stakeholders build consumer empathy through storytelling and experiential learning before we ever show a category- or product-specific journey map. We will often use videos, personas, customer profiles or stories to help us get close to consumers. We know it is critical to first establish an understanding of who these people are, their goals, challenges, life stages, etc. Then we introduce the stages or flow of the journey, examining the decision-making points along the way and how that is influenced by who they are and their goals. 

In the end, we first develop a true empathetic understanding of consumers and then use it to view the consumer journey, comparing what is happening along their journey to the consumers’ ultimate goals, challenges, and life experiences. Asking ourselves at each step of the journey if our client’s brand is supporting the consumer’s ultimate goals and reducing their challenges with the CX and products they offer. From there, we identify where our client’s brand may be falling short and where they could level up even more to fulfill consumer needs and goals and reduce challenges. Those are the places in which we need to innovate to really stand out. 

While an empathy-driven understanding of the consumer journey requires a deeper dive into consumers, the ROI is there. If you ‘get’ your customers, they’ll feel it. You’ll end up meeting your customers where they need and want you to be, create an overall better experience for them, and build their loyalty over time.

 

Jill Miller

CO-FOUNDER
CATAPULT INSIGHTS

Catapult Insights Welcomes Andre Barroso

Catapult Insights Welcomes Andre Barroso

Jun 22, 2023

Catapult Insights Welcomes Andre Barroso

Catapult Insights is thrilled to announce that Andre Barroso has joined the team as Director, Insights & Innovation. Andre brings a wealth of experience in quantitative and qualitative research, with specialties in consumer journey, concept testing, and being a thoroughly delightful person. We are excited to share Andre’s wit, wisdom, and expertise in the retail, durable goods, QSR, and consumer products categories with our clients.

From Andre: “I am absolutely thrilled to join the Catapult Insights team and look forward to supporting our clients and continuing to help them answer their most challenging future-focused business questions through qualitative and quantitative research, and innovation. Understanding the underlying motivations and drivers of people has always been a passion of mine and I’m excited to join a team who keeps human understanding at the core of everything they do.”   

FIrst Anniversary

Please join us in welcoming Andre to the Catapult Insights team!

Read more about Andre on our Collaborate page. 

THE CATAPULT INSIGHTS TEAM

 

It’s Our Anniversary Celebration!

It’s Our Anniversary Celebration!

Jun 15, 2023

It’s Our Anniversary Celebration!

It’s hard to believe that just one year ago today we launched Catapult Insights. Here we are, 365 days later, celebrating our first anniversary.

This year has flown by and as we look back at the journey, we are feeling grateful for our clients, thankful for the opportunities we’ve had, and excited for what’s to come in year 2. We have been so fortunate to have a group of clients who believed in us enough to become our partners. When we started Catapult Insights we knew it was an idea and business worth pursuing, but we didn’t know quite yet the joy it would bring us to build a quickly growing business while also helping our clients succeed.

FIrst Anniversary

Cheers to a fantastic year 1 and to the adventures (and upcoming announcements) year 2 will bring!

THE CATAPULT INSIGHTS TEAM

 

Tales from the Road: Bias for Action

Tales from the Road: Bias for Action

Apr 18, 2023

Tales from the Road: Bias for Action

Something incredibly rewarding happened to me this month – I completed an elusive accomplishment that not many in my field have done. The one-week project. After getting a call from a client on Monday, I was on a plane by Friday, doing interviews Saturday, and report delivered Monday. But it gets better. The most rewarding part is that this client is taking immediate action based on our work and making changes which we will test again in just a few weeks.

As a consultant, there’s a great deal of pride and commitment that goes into the work. And every consultant’s career has ample examples of work they did with clients that ultimately stalled or radically changed direction before action could be taken. This is the exact opposite of that. We saw and diagnosed a need, and the client is diving head first into making things better. This client calls it “Bias for Action.” I call it “awesome.” 

One of the reasons I wanted to form Catapult Insights with Jill was to be as nimble as we are capable in executing work for our clients, and the events of last week are the perfect illustration. It’s something that hasn’t been possible in the past when we worked at large research firms. We’ve likened those firms to cruise ships – they have tons of bells and whistles, but moving fast is not what they do. Now that I’m aboard a racy speed boat I can jump in with Bias for Action and make meaningful changes today, and that’s just awesome.

Justin Sutton

CO-FOUNDER
CATAPULT INSIGHTS

Bias for Action

Home Improvement Pros feeling more stability after an uncertain 2022

Home Improvement Pros feeling more stability after an uncertain 2022

Feb 21, 2023

Home Improvement Pros feeling more stability after an uncertain 2022

2022 was a rollercoaster for the home improvement, home construction, and home sales industries. Watching all of the ups and downs left us wondering what home improvement professionals were thinking about their industry today and what they expected the future to bring.

With all of these questions swirling in our minds we decided to partner with online sample provider Full Circle Research mid-2022 to get a pulse on home improvement professionals in the US and what we found  was eye opening. Home improvement professionals were feeling the impact of inflation, supply chain issues and staffing shortages last year, and many expected those issues to continue to impact their revenue in the future.

Six months have passed since our last check in with home improvement professionals, so we felt it was time to get a pulse on what they were experiencing and thinking today. Once again, we partnered with Full Circle Research to survey this hard-to-reach audience and find out what was on their minds in 2023. Here’s what we found.

innovation

Inflation’s impact is expected to decrease. In 2022, 65% of pros expected their revenue to be impacted by inflation in the next year. Far fewer are saying that today – only 1 in 5 say they expect inflation to impact their revenue in 2023. Have pros successfully regulated the effects of inflation with updated expectations for margins, or is it perhaps that higher costs are successfully being passed down to the home owner?

Supply chain issues are expected to be far less concerning.  Half of pros in 2022 said they expected supply chain issues to impact their revenue in the next 12 months, that number dropped to just 8% in 2023. Are supply chain issues a thing of the past or have pros found work arounds that allow them to preserve their revenue streams?

Staffing issues aren’t expected in 2023. Only 7% of pros say they expect to have staffing issues in 2023, a significant drop from the one-third of pros who said they expect staffing issues in 2022. Are the number of projects beginning to level out, or are more skilled laborers returning to the trades?

The increased optimism we’re seeing among pros aligns with the shifts that the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index, a well-regarded economic indicator which measures the degree of optimism consumers feel about the economy and their own financial situation, has seen over the last year. The months of June and July were the lowest point for the index (current, future, and combined) in 2022, and now all 3 indexes are up indicating that consumers overall are more confident about the economy today and in the future than they were just 6 months ago.

Clearly the home improvement industry is continuing to shift, but what does this mean for durable goods brands and retailers?

Keep a consistent pulse on your customers. In just 6 months home improvement professionals went from expecting an uphill battle with inflation, supply chain, and staffing to feeling more secure with what the future may bring. The economy is shifting and people are feeling it which impacts their behaviors and expectations. During times of constant change it is critical to keep a pulse on what consumers are doing, thinking, and planning so your brand can be proactive in your marketing and business strategy.

Watch for over-supply in the market.  Like the supply chain, a backlog of home improvement projects may finally be unraveling to return to a more normalized baseline. This means durable goods manufacturers should be watchful of over-supplying the market — something that’s been on our minds since last year. Keeping a watchful eye on consumer spending behaviors and the Consumer Sentiment Index can help your brand keep pace with demand.

Keep tabs on interest rates and what the downstream effect might be for your business.  After a relentless climb last year, interest rates sit at just under double what they were a year ago.  High interest rates will likely depress home sales/buying as we move through 2023. People are staying put in the homes they’ve likely already invested some home improvement dollars into over the past 2 years when home improvement projects were booming. Given this, it stands to reason that demand for home improvement projects might slow down which potentially means less supply chain strain and less staffing needs for pros to keep up. Brands who stay relevant and innovate will be top of mind for consumers and pros and will likely be able to snag a large piece of that home improvement budget pie, even if it’s overall size could shrink.

Innovate. This one is important. As signs of an apparent recession loom, we can expect more wild swings in pro (and consumer) confidence. This whiplash is challenging to navigate and can have long-term effects on consumer behavior and what people care about most. Be the brand who builds consumer confidence and stays top of mind by continually innovating, even when economic times are uncertain. History shows us that brands that innovate during a recession can come out on top.  Focus on trends and evolving consumer needs, take risks, and work to take your brand and products into the future to meet consumers where they will be down the road.

Drop us a note at [email protected] if you’d like to learn more about what home improvement professionals are doing and expecting in 2023 and how your brand can shift your strategy to keep up.

 

Jill Miller

CO-FOUNDER
CATAPULT INSIGHTS

 

 About the Survey

To provide the greatest value to its clients, Catapult Insights invests in consistent consumer research, especially within hard-to-reach audiences. For this Professional Pulse Survey, Catapult Insights tapped online sample provider Full Circle Research, the industry leader for high-quality data, programming and hosting. This study was conducted from January 11 to 13, 2023, and captured insights from 303 home improvement professionals in trades across the industry spectrum. To learn more about the survey, contact Catapult Insights at [email protected]

About Full Circle Research

Named the 2021 Panel Company of the Year by The Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Awards (powered by Quirk’s), certified to ISO since 2014, GDPR-compliant and co-founder of the international ISO awareness campaign #QualityForAll, Full Circle leads the industry in online sample quality. The company’s award-winning survey experience HoNoR (Holistic Next-Level Research)® marries advanced tech, flexible community strategies, and industry-leading quality controls to deliver immediate access to proven-purest data, whether via its vibrant global panel or InstaConnect®, its premium programmatic solution that captures hardest-to-reach audiences. A staple on Inc. 5000’s Fastest-Growing Companies (2017-2022) and one of the highest-scoring businesses on Inc.’s 2022 Best Workplaces list, Full Circle’s foresight and agility are a direct result of a uniquely consultative approach delivered by diverse industry veterans. To learn more, visit iLoveFullCircle.com.

About Catapult Insights

Catapult Insights in an outcomes-focused insights and innovation consultancy that uses research as a foundational tool to help brands grow, evolve and future-proof their businesses. Catapult Insights creates customized creative solutions to tackle specific needs, adapting their approach to answer clients’ biggest questions.  Their robust suite of research methods and consulting approaches gives clients an accurate picture of people today: their needs, motivations and behaviors, as well as a predictable view into the future.

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