Insight - c3centricity

7 Powerful Secrets Explaining How Successful CPG Brands Capture Consumer Loyalty

Posted on April 19, 2025April 19, 2025 by Denyse Drummond-Dunn

There can be no doubt that today’s buyers have evolved into sophisticated decision-makers who demand more than just quality products to achieve consumer loyalty.

As we navigate through 2025, the consumer landscape continues to shift at an unprecedented pace, challenging CPG brands to move beyond reactive strategies and embrace a truly consumer-centric approach.

With 86% of consumers now citing exceptional experience as their primary purchasing driver (McKinsey), brands must fundamentally rethink their engagement strategies to stay relevant. Yet many mid-sized CPG companies remain trapped in a cycle of reaction—constantly trying to catch up to consumer expectations rather than anticipating and shaping them.

This article explores the critical values driving today’s consumer loyalty and offers actionable strategies with recent, real-world examples to help your brand lead the market in 2025 and beyond.

If you would rather listen than read:

The 2025 Consumer Profile: Evolution of Values and Expectations

Each of these core values has intensified in importance, representing powerful opportunities to build lasting loyalty when addressed strategically.

1. Experience as the Ultimate Differentiator

The product-experience balance has definitively tipped, with memorable experiences now overshadowing product attributes in consumer decision-making. Recent research shows that 79% of consumers have abandoned brands after disappointing experiences despite satisfaction with the actual products (Forrester).

Oatly’s Immersive Retail Concept: Oatly launched experiential pop-up stores in major urban centers that combine product sampling with interactive digital installations showcasing the climate impact of plant-based choices. These spaces feature augmented reality elements allowing consumers to visualize their personal environmental impact when choosing plant-based alternatives. This multisensory approach has driven a 42% increase in brand advocacy among first-time visitors.

PepsiCo’s Personalized Flavor Lab: PepsiCo introduced a direct-to-consumer platform where customers can create custom flavor profiles for beverages and snacks based on their taste preferences and nutritional goals. These personalized products are delivered in subscription packages with content tailored to individual lifestyle interests. The initiative has secured an impressive 78% subscription renewal rate in its first year.

Proven Strategy: To win in today’s market, prioritize experience mapping across the entire consumer journey. Identify friction points and emotional opportunities at each touchpoint, then redesign these moments to create memorable, shareable experiences that transcend the product itself.

2. Radical Transparency as Table Stakes

Transparency has evolved from a differentiator to a fundamental expectation, with 92% of consumers now actively seeking information about ingredient sourcing, manufacturing practices, and corporate values before making purchases (Edelman Trust Barometer). The era of opaque business practices is firmly behind us.

Seventh Generation’s “Ingredient Stories” Initiative : Moving beyond simple ingredient lists, Seventh Generation launched digital passports for each product ingredient, allowing consumers to trace origins through blockchain verification and view environmental impact metrics in real-time. The traceable ingredients platform has driven a 34% increase in brand trust metrics among millennial and Gen Z consumers.

Impossible Foods’ Carbon Footprint Calculator : Impossible Foods integrated a dynamic carbon footprint calculator into its packaging using QR technology. Consumers can scan products to view precise environmental impact data, including water … Click to continue reading

Insight, Innovation and Inclusive Leadership: The New Business Success Formula

Posted on February 8, 2025March 2, 2025 by Denyse Drummond-dunn

Organisations are facing unprecedented challenges in remaining competitive and maintaining business success in 2025.

The three fundamental pillars of sustained success are deep customer insights, meaningful innovation, and inclusive leadership.

Let’s explore why this powerful trinity is more relevant than ever in 2025 and how you can leverage it to grow your business.

Prefer to listen to the podcast? Click below.

Why These Three Pillars Matter Now More Than Ever

The numbers tell a compelling story.

McKinsey’s latest research reveals that companies effectively combining these three elements outperform their peers by an astounding 85% in sales growth and more than 25% in gross margin. But what makes this combination so powerful?

Deep Customer Insights Power Business Success

Insight is the cornerstone of every successful strategy.

The key difference between successful and struggling companies? Top performers turn data into actionable intelligence that drives decision-making at all levels.

McKinsey reports that companies using customer insights for decision-making are 60% more likely to achieve above-market growth rates!

The true value of insights comes when they bridge the gap between raw data and real-world application, allowing businesses to anticipate consumer needs, optimize operations, and refine strategies.

Gone are the days when gut feelings drove business decisions. Modern market leaders demonstrate the transformative power of customer insights:

– One standout example is Spotify’s “Wrapped” campaign. In 2023, Spotify used not just user listening data but an understanding of the emotional drivers behind their customers’ listening habits—self-reflection and social sharing. By tapping into this human desire, Spotify’s campaign led to over 30 billion streams, showcasing the power of customer insights in driving engagement and brand loyalty.

– Nike’s adaptive clothing line, developed through extensive consultation with disabled athletes, opened entirely new market segments

– P&G’s open innovation platform has revolutionized their product development process by incorporating external perspectives

But it’s not just consumer-facing data that drives success.

Internal business insights—such as employee feedback, operational inefficiencies, and market trends—are equally crucial.

Companies that develop a culture of continuous insight-gathering and sharing can make smarter, more informed decisions at all levels.

Does your Insight Development Process need an upgrade? Click below and check out our two-hour online masterclass for marketers and market researchers.

Innovation: The Competitive Edge Amplifier of Business Success

Recent PwC research shows that 61% of CEOs view innovation as their top priority for achieving long-term growth.

But here’s what’s fascinating: successful innovation in 2025 looks vastly different from what we’ve seen before.

Innovation is not just about creating groundbreaking products or services; it’s about creating solutions that drive long-term value.

BCG’s latest report revealed that top innovators share three core practices:

Maintaining investment in innovation even during downturns
Leveraging advanced technologies like AI to drive innovation
Aligning innovation with sustainability goals alongside profitability

Microsoft offers a powerful example of how innovation can drive meaningful change. Instead of treating AI as a standalone technology, Microsoft integrated AI tools into their product suite to enhance real user productivity.

The result? A 40% increase in … Click to continue reading

A Comprehensive Guide to Overcoming the Most Common Data Integration Challenges

Posted on June 24, 2024March 10, 2025 by Denyse Drummond-Dunn

Insight development is based on gathering information, then data integration and analysis. However, organisations often find this challenging due to multiple sources, formats and time scales. Do you?

Many companies struggle to benefit from all their data and information because they don’t know how to turn it into insight, or their insights remain interesting but not actionable. There are many reasons for this.

From data quality issues to technological limitations and resistance to change, organisations must navigate a complex landscape to unlock the full potential of their data.

This comprehensive guide delves into the ten most common challenges in insight development, offering detailed analysis and strategies to overcome each obstacle, ensuring your organization can harness data for strategic advantage.

If you prefer to listen rather than read:

Marketing Deep Dives by Denyse · Actionable Insights: Overcoming Data Integration Challenges – 2

What an Actionable Insight Really is

I get so frustrated when people refer to numbers, data, or the findings from research projects as insights. None of these are!

In addition, developing actionable insights from a single survey is rare.

The reason is that insight development, getting to that “aha” moment that everyone immediately understands and wonders why no one thought of before, needs a 360 perspective of the challenge or opportunity under investigation and uses information from multiple sources.

There are many definitions of insight, but the one that I use, and that resonates with my clients, is a statement that impacts the attitudes or behaviours of current or potential customers/shoppers of a brand or category based on a human truth that results in an emotional response.

At first glance, this may seem like quite a mouthful, so to simplify retention, I refer to it as ABCDE:

A = Attitudes and Actions

B = Brand or Category

C = Customer, consumer, client or shopper

D = Deep human truth

E = Emotional response

To fast-track your understanding, here are some great examples of the insights behind some of the best-known brands:

Heineken Jillz: I want to drink alcohol on a night out, but I don’t like beer and wine is too variable in quality.
Kraft Philadelphia: Food is delicious, but I don’t want to eat too much fat (butter versus cream cheese).
DTC Diamonds: I want to stand out (shine), but as a modern woman, I also want to be seen as gentle and feminine.
Unilever Dove: I want to be admired for my beauty on the inside, not for what I look like on the outside.
AXE (Lynx in UK): I (young men) want to attract as many beautiful and sexy women as possible.
Haribo Starmix: There’s a child inside every adult.
Dulux sample paint pots: I love to decorate my home, but I don’t want to look stupid by choosing the wrong colour.

You’ll notice that most are written in the first person as if the target audience is speaking. This makes it much easier to understand and resonate with the reader without much effort … Click to continue reading

Five Brilliant Ideas to Boost your Insight Development

Posted on August 15, 2021March 11, 2025 by Denyse Drummond-Dunn

Insights are the pot of gold that many businesses dream of but rarely find. Why is that? Are you one of them? If so then I have some practical ideas on how you can get much, much better at insight development.

#1. Insights rarely come from a single market research study

Management often thinks that insight is “just another word for market research”. I remember one of my previous CEOs saying exactly that to me just before he addressed the whole market research and insight global team at our annual conference. I’m sure you can imagine what a panic I was in as he walked up to the mike!
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Insights are demanding to develop and are rarely, if ever, developed from a single piece of market research. Each market research project is designed to gather information in order to answer one or more questions. Whilst it may enable a business to make a more informed decision based upon the objectives, insight development is quite a different process.

Insight development involves integrating, analysing and synthesising all the data and information you have about a category or segment user. Then summarising it into knowledge and turning that knowledge into understanding. Only then are you ready to develop an insight.

All brands should have (at least) one insight on which its image, personality and Big Idea (for communications) are built. For example

AXE (Lynx in UK): (young) men want to attract as many beautiful and sexy women as possible. This is one of their newer ads, where the seduction is a little less in your face and more subtle – but still there.

Haribo Starmix: There’s a child inside every adult. This “Kid’s Voices” campaign has been running for years and manages to surprise and delight with each new episode. Which is your favourite? Please add a comment below.

Dulux sample paint pots: I love to decorate my home, but I don’t want to look stupid by choosing the wrong colour. Although these are now a standard offer for many paint brands, Dulux were the first to understand the problem facing potential home decorators.

Insight development will provide the basis on which you will define the actions that are needed to change the attitudes and / or behaviour of your target audience. It also provides a solid framework on which to build your Big Idea for your communications’ strategy.

So there you have them, the five ideas and numerous examples that will help you to develop better insights more easily.

Although you probably already have your own process for creating them, I know from experience how hard it can be to find insights from all the information you gather.

I hope this short article has assisted you in your search for those “golden nuggets”. Do … Click to continue reading

Try a New Perspective on Business Intelligence: How to get More Impact & Answers

Posted on April 7, 2014March 2, 2025 by Alan Hale

Last week I presented at the first Swiss Business Intelligence Day. It was an inspiring conference to attend, with world-class keynote speakers opening the day. They included Professor Stephane Garelli from IMD, Philippe Nieuwbourg from Decideo and Hans Hultgren from Genesee Academy.

After such an illustrious start, you can imagine that I was more than a little nervous to present my very non-IT perspective of business intelligence. However, the presentation did seem to go down well, so I want to share with you some of the ideas I talked about. Not surprisingly, with my passion for customer centricity and always with the end-user in mind, I took quite a different perspective from that of the majority of IT experts who were present.

BI should Collaborate More

With the explosion of data sources and the continuous flow of information into a company, managing data will become a priority for everyone.

The Big Data market, which more than doubled last two years, is forecast to triple in the next four, according to Statista. BI will have to exp and its perspective, work with more varied sources of information and exp and its client base.

In the past BI was inward looking. It ran data-mining exercises, reviewed corporate performance, developed reports and occasionally dashboards. It was, and still is in many organisations, mostly concerned with operational efficiencies, cost-cutting and benchmarking.

The above plot is my own, simplified view of how BI fits into data management within most organisations today. The other three quadrants are:

Competitive intelligence (CI) uses external competitor knowledge to support internal decision-making. Although BI is sometimes considered to be synonymous with CI because they both support decision-making, there are differences. BI uses technologies, processes, and applications to analyze mostly internal, structured data. CI gathers, analyzes and disseminates information with a topical focus on company competitors.
Investor Relations (IR) uses internal data to get external people, such as shareholders, the media or the government, to support and protect the company and its views.
Market Research (MR) on the other h and is mostly outward looking. It studies customers’ behaviours & attitudes, measures images & satisfaction, and tries to underst and feelings & opinions. That information is then used, primarily by marketing, to develop actions and communications for these same customers.

The four quadrants, even today, usually work in isolation, but that will have to change with this new data-rich environment in which we are working.

BI is Ripe for Change

According to a recent (Jan 2014) Forbes article, BI is at a tipping point. It will need to work in new ways because:

it will be using both structured and unstructured data
there will be a consolidation of suppliers
the internet of things will send more and more information between both products and companies.
thanks to technology, data scientists will spend more time on information management & less time on data preparation. At present it is estimated that they spend 80% of their time on data

… Click to continue reading

Does your Organisation Really Need a Market Research Department? And in the Future?

Posted on October 11, 2013March 11, 2025 by Alan Hale

There’s been a lot of talk recently about New Marketing; how communication is now all about engagement, how the consumer is boss and such like.

But there has been very little said about a New Market Research Department! If you’re concerned by this situation, whether you work in marketing, market research or a completely different area, then read on for some thoughts on how this situation can and must change.

Earlier this year I wrote about the future of market research / insight departments and what researchers need to do within their organisation to improve their image and perceived value. This week I want to take a wider look at the profession in general.

Current Perception of Market Research

According to Wikipedia, Marketing is “The process of communicating the value of a product or service to customers, for the purpose of selling the product or service. It is a critical business function for attracting customers” The definition of Market Research is “Any organized effort to gather information about markets or customers. It is a very important component of business strategy”.

What is interesting in comparing these two definitions is the difference in appreciation of the value to business of the two. Marketing is said to be a “critical function”, whereas Market Research is said to be “very important”. Perhaps this is why Market Research Departments continue to be hammered, their budgets are constantly under pressure and their value to the business is questioned.

Well, things are about to change, or at least there is an opportunity for this, if researchers take up the incredible chance offered to them in today’s world of information (over?) abundance. You can’t continue to do the same old same old when marketing, and more importantly the consumer, is clearly on the move.

What Business gets from Market Research

I think that one of the biggest problems that Market Research has (continues to have) is that Marketing and Management in general, find it too complex. What is often delivered from market research, BY researchers, tends to be numbers and findings, not underst anding, insight and recommendations.

We no longer need market research to share the numbers and information today. More and more often, these are coming automatically into companies from an ever-growing number of sources, and a lot of it is even in real-time, something market research results never were! Think sensors on products, GPS on smart phones, retail purchases with debit / credit / loyalty cards, social media interactions …. DataShaka recently wrote in their The Lab an interesting perspective on data management and information sources which you might want to check out.

That’s a lot of data; indeed Aaron Zornes, chief research officer of The MDM Institute, was recently quoted in Information Management as saying that “a typical large company with (has) 14,000 or so databases on average”. And most of that data will be just sitting around in IT storage systems, rarely reviewed and even … Click to continue reading

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