Insight communities are ‘agile,’ and ‘agile’ is just another way of saying ‘fast.’ Right? Wrong.
We’re actually talking about insight that genuinely flexes to meet needs and circumstances, that enables proper iteration, and that doesn’t only happen during the account team’s working hours. Agile has always been, and continues to be, at the heart of online research communities.
M&S Food team decided to enhance the business’s insight capabilities by using a community to maximise regular contact with customers and complement their existing rich behavioural analysis. The community enables jumping on trends while they’re still emerging, rapid response to customer needs, and getting to market more quickly with something they can be confident will deliver a clear, immediate business impact.
It also delivers financial agility: it enables M&S Food to carry out more projects for their budget and consequently, support a broader range of stakeholders with more depth of insight.
In the throes of a cost of living crisis, it’s tempting to assume that retailers are adopting protectionist strategies: slowing down their innovation, and saving their money rather than investing it. For M&S Food that’s never been up for debate: M&S Food has long focused on understanding and optimising the customer experience, it can now do that with agile input from a community of 40,000 responsive customers.