Gut feeling drives too many marketing decisions in Ireland, says agency

If you want to get a deep sense of how your consumer brand is perceived, you can’t beat a survey.

iReach Insights has a panel of more than 40,000 consumers in Ireland, all set to tell it like it is. It also has the first and longest running online omnibus in the country, delivering 1,000 responses from a nationally representative group of adults.

Such omnibuses pool questions from multiple organisations, each of which pays for the privilege of a question or two. It’s why its research is of such interest to anyone marketing to an Irish audience, giving them a valuable alternative to what Oisin Byrne, iReach’s co-founder and chief executive, calls “gut feeling”.

Unfortunately, gut feeling drives too many marketing decisions here, he says. It’s why he set the business up 20 years ago and it’s still an issue today.

“The amount of business decisions made in Ireland through gut feel is still significant, even as our population has changed very dramatically in the last 20 years,” he says. “Even today a lot of brands are making gut feel decisions on ad campaigns, on creative, and on which media to use.”

In comparison, this isn’t the case for the company’s UK clients. “UK brands, especially in the consumer space, do literally nothing without consumer research,” he says.

The residual fear among brand managers here however is, for some reason, that consumers hate doing surveys. But the company’s panellists “really enjoy doing them,” he says.

Willingness to give feedback generally was something the company dug into in its most recent omnibus survey.

One of the questions it asked was, “Do you think companies should get feedback from customers more regularly than occasionally?” and 74 per cent of respondents said they would be very happy to give more regular feedback. “And that’s nationally representative by age, region, gender and socioeconomic groups,” Byrne says.

Extrapolated out, it means more than two million consumers are happy to provide information to brands, a resource that is woefully underappreciated, he says.

“And, going back to my gut feel point, we asked, ‘Do you think businesses rely too heavily on assumptions instead of real consumer feedback?’ and 86 per cent of adults believe that is the case.”

We already know from social media that consumers have strong opinions and a penchant for sharing them. But when the omnibus drilled deeper into consumer attitudes, it found that 92 per cent of consumers have a more positive perception of any brand that proactively asks for their feedback.

“The fear factor for many brands is that they feel they are sending out too many emails. We see this in particular in the retail sector.” However, consumers don’t agree. “Some 92 per cent say they will have a more positive perception of those brands that ask for feedback. That’s stronger than we ever would have expected.”

Leveraging that fact is vital, if only to stave off complacency. After all, one of the biggest fallacies brands fall victim to is that being a customer means being loyal. It doesn’t. “We have seen this in projects we have worked on recently, in financial services. Being a customer of a particular organisation doesn’t mean you are loyal to that brand,” says Byrne.

It’s why keeping in touch with your existing customer base is so vital and could be as simple as putting a survey into your newsletter. Just make sure it’s a two-way conversation.

As part of its own operations, iReach Insights runs what it calls iReach Conversations, which allows its survey-taking panellists – all 40,000 of them – to host discussion forums for ideas generation, suggesting fresh ways brands can get feedback. That might include quirky quizzes and fun polls, as a way to do things differently and keep people engaged.

But when consumers do provide such feedback, it’s vital that you acknowledge it, he says. It’s also not that difficult.

‘People versus AI is the wrong question. It’s people plus AI. That’s the opportunity’

—   Oisin Byrne, co-founder and chief executive of iReach Insights

“If someone is reaching out and giving ideas or feedback, show that you are acting on it. It’s not rocket science. Just put it in your newsletter, or go back to the people who took part in your survey and say, ‘thanks for that, we appreciate the feedback, we’re thinking of actioning some ideas and will come back to you when we are’,” says Byrne. “It’s a state of mind, not a technology issue. It’s very easy to do but it’s a simple trick that many brands are missing out on.”

There’s an opportunity cost to not responding to feedback, given that 90 per cent of consumers responding to iReach Insights’s omnibus survey said they are more likely to engage with campaigns or content that is built on their input.

“That’s engagement. That’s traction. And it can be turned into loyalty,” he says. “There are consumers right under your nose that you have access to. So engage with them and make sure they know you want to hear their voices.”

Unfortunately too many brands are “afraid to ask hard questions, because either they don’t want to know the answer or they’re not sure what the answer will be,” he says.

Rather than try to put out large, cumbersome surveys infrequently, brands are much better off doing smaller ones more regularly, he tells Winterlich, particularly as the pace of change in all markets accelerates.

It’s activity that can also help winkle out pockets of potential new customer segments, he says, pointing to a recent project which saw iReach Insights’s data unearth a consumer group – men with an interest in cooking – for a dairy product.

The feedback process is being made easier by new tools that provide iReach Insights clients with AI-embedded reporting, helping them to analyse data even more quickly and easily. It is also launching a new AI interviewer product, which will achieve qualitative surveys at scale.

“People versus AI is the wrong question. It’s people plus AI. That’s the opportunity,” he says.

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