The importance of insight-driven design

We live in the era of big data, where huge volumes of information are collected about people, and presented to them, every day. When designing a new product or brand, this data can be used to inform the creative decisions that are taken.
At Sainsbury Design, we believe that all great design work is founded on real insights into target audiences, rather than on general trends. Without meaningful data, there is a risk that design work could miss the mark in terms of your message to your audience.

Understanding what individual consumers want and expect from your brand means more than just mining traditional datasets for trends. Rather, it’s about gaining an appreciation of the thoughts and feelings of real people.
To bridge this gap, Sainsbury Design has joined forces with specialist consumer insights firm Opinion Solutions to offer optional extra value-added services that can deliver vital insights and drive the design process.

Using the Opinion Solutions platform allows us to create strategically sound, insight-driven marketing campaigns. It enhances our ability to reach contemporary consumers in places and at times when they are most receptive to sharing their opinions and sentiments. We can now engage with consumers in the online spaces (such as social media) where today’s consumers spend their time and share their ideas.
The increasing adoption of smart devices by people at all economic levels in society underscores the growing importance of the SEM scale as an alternative to using LSM. This Socio-Economic Measure provides a much more accurate picture of the way South Africans live now – including the fact that they spend much more time online, and that their aspirations extend well beyond owning appliances.

Being able to rapidly and accurately gather insights into the opinions of your target audience allows us to test prototypes more quickly, and adopt an agile approach to launching new brands and products. This almost instantaneous collection of focused data helps us deliver insight-driven design, and can potentially reduce overall costs and the time it takes to bring new designs to market.
Examples include testing new pack formats or alternative brand names. Planning a campaign or promotion? Sainsbury Design can test various elements to determine the one that consumers will be most likely to respond to and embrace.

Insights gained from direct contact with real consumers combine both qualitative and quantitative data and give you a concrete basis on which to make decisions – and which can be used to determine the best possible design solutions.

Using renders to start conversations about product impact on shelf
Reaching consumers in-the-moment on communication platforms they are familiar with and choose to use is much more cost-effective and rapid solution to gathering insights when compared to traditional approaches such as paper-based, telephonic or focus groups.

Research programmes can be designed to focus on precisely the aspects of your business you wish to concentrate on. Asking consumers to express their opinions in a way which they will instinctively trust and feel comfortable with will unlock insights that aren’t biased by the questions themselves. In other words, you acquire true insights rather than hearing what consumers think you might want to hear.

All research findings are shared in feedback sessions – we adopt a collaborative approach to determining the best way forward for your brand and your proposed marketing campaigns. Using insight-driven design removes risk and uncertainty from launches – because your target consumers have already had an opportunity to express their opinions, you know what they feel before you ask them to buy.
Plus, as their insights have already been considered, you can go ahead with confidence, knowing that your brand has been designed with your target audience not just in mind, but involved.