Acting on customer insight to secure the next growth advantage

With digital tools advancing, a globalised workforce, and customers more informed than ever, you’d think it would be easy for consumer brands to move at pace and respond to demand. Many, however, are still held back by fragmented insights, economic volatility, and inadequate governance. Growth is still achievable, but it is increasingly harder to find, unlock, and sustain.

Always-on, accurate, aggregated customer insight that drives tangible action and measurable impact is crucial for growth. This creates the clarity leaders need to make confident decisions and move ahead of the market. Here are four questions you should be asking to help turn customer insight into meaningful, sustained growth.

What are your plans to meet and exceed your customers’ expectations?

Unlocking opportunity starts with where growth is moving to; frictionless digital experiences that are increasingly just good hygiene for consumers. Customer interaction with your business needs to be designed with empathy, putting the consumer at the heart of decision making.

To ensure their digital experience met customer demands, we drove an expansion and growth initiative from initial start up for fitness brand Pvolve – overhauling their digital experience, product design, and clarifying their brand positioning. This resulted in their physical footprint doubling since our work with them began in 2025.

Meanwhile, consumers are no longer shopping for products, they’re shopping for outcomes. This rise of agentic commerce – where users discover and convert entirely through platforms such as Claude or ChatGPT – is creating increasingly efficient but remote users who don’t even need to interact with your branded presence to buy something. If you’re not showing up for them where they’re looking, you’ll miss out on these consumers.

When deciding what to do with customer insights, you must design for the agent experience as well as the human one. If you successfully live up to customer demand with more personalised touchpoints, you can ensure continued efficacy in the metrics your business prioritises, whether its discovery, conversion, share of voice, or brand equity.

Did you know your peers are getting better at acting on customer insight?

Markets won’t wait for perfect plans. The majority of organisations have now reached a point where identifying, articulating, and acting on customer insights is a key part of their decision-making process. And many organisations are also now using AI tools to improve performance and embed access to insights across teams. But with this investment must come a mindset shift. Those that break ahead aren’t just deploying new AI tools – they’re adapting to this change by rewiring their thinking, taking a new approach to decision-making, and acting decisively on the wider customer insight lens they now benefit from to drive growth.

How are you shifting to cater to customers’ responses to economic pressures?

Do you know what matters to your customer? What do they want from your product? And how much are they willing to pay for it? In a K-shaped economy, financial pressures are weighing on the minds of a growing number of people. Rising prices are creating cautious shoppers, with dollar stores seeing a growing customer base from households earning over $100,000 a year. This means the inherent value of your product is being redefined. For example, health and fitness remain a priority for many consumers, but it needs to come at a price that suits. That’s why we worked with Hydrow to expand their customer base beyond the premium segment, bringing their smart at home rowing machine to a larger pool of consumers, with a more affordable, easily shippable alternative.

For businesses, supply chains remain fragile and severely disrupted by a volatile economic climate, impacting the cost of doing business. Pret a Manger faced $26m in increased costs in the last twelve months due to food price inflation; they’re yet to pass this on to customers, but food-based businesses must somehow reconcile these costs.

Working hand in hand with non-profit Avocados From Mexico, we mitigated the impact of externalities, combatted supply chain risk, tailored a growth strategy, and generated a supply forecast. Our supply chain risk assessment identified potential disruptions, from trade agreements to extreme weather events, and we helped put this insight into practice by raising awareness and improving education – increasing their market share to 80 percent.

Are you ready to act on the right insight to unlock customer value?

Macro externalities have never been more unpredictable and this has a tangible impact on the sentiment and behaviours of your customers. With potential disintermediation through agentic commerce, the proximity to the customer and the ability to respond to their needs could continue to shrink. Growth will happen when leaders have the confidence to make the right decisions at the right time. To act decisively and at the right moment means recognising that these challenges require a continued, iterative understanding of the demand landscape for your products and services.

Working with a global ecommerce organisation, we deployed our Insights Genie to help multiple departments embed customer insight ownership in real-time, empowering them to take action on the data for tangible results – moving from annual data refreshes to daily data refreshes. This caused knock-on effects across the broader organisation, enabling them to optimise governance and processes to be truly customer-first. Even today, more than 70 percent of data teams say fragmented tools and misaligned processes limit their ability to turn data into action. By coordinating your data and tooling across your organisation, you ensure your customer insights provide their full value. Without this crucial step, their benefits go unrealised.

In today’s market, proximity to your buyers needs and clarity on their intent and sentiment is a growth advantage. Organisations that succeed will be the ones that can spot changes in behaviour and sentiment early, understand what matters most to them, and act with confidence to meet their evolving demands.