State of the industry Survey Usage Research
How Is Your Business Using Surveys?
We ran a survey on consumer insights (yes, surveys!) and product launches to hear what large companies are doing to understand their customers.
Insight Lime Analytics uses behavioral data & consumer insights to show tangible business opportunities to our clients.
We specialize in running both customer feedback surveys and market intelligence surveys, so we decided to run a survey on our own to better understand how larger companies were using surveys to better inform product development and launches.
The survey was conducted with a purchased audience, which is an excellent way to reach your target audience with more control over demographics (and if you don’t have a large audience of your own). There are many tools out there that can be used to source audiences that fit your target.
Some of the ones Insight Lime has experience with are:
The Survey Results
The survey targeted companies with at least $1 Million budgeted in annual marketing spend within industries that regularly create new products (physical or digital), such as fashion, food & beverage, software, and hotel/travel.
The main questions we were looking to answer were:
Do large companies use customer feedback surveys regularly?
If they do use customer feedback surveys, how useful do they find them?
We were able to answer those questions - and quite a few more.
Here are some of the main takeaways we had after analyzing the data
Takeaway #1
Marketing Gets the Most Credit - and Blame - For Product Launches
While survey respondents showed there was blame (and credit) to go around to every department, interestingly, it was the Product Department and Marketing Departments who received the most answers for both credit and blame.
Do you agree that marketing should get that responsibility? It’s certainly an interesting perception, especially when there are many other factors that go into the success of a product and not just the marketing of that product.
Takeaway #2:
Executives Often Interrupt Product Development With Their Opinions
72% of respondents said that executives always or sometimes change the direction of new development with their opinion.
Takeaway #3:
New Product Launches For Larger Companies Most Often Happen in Spring & Early Summer
48% of companies surveyed stated they launch new products between April and June. We were surprised by this result, as we expected it would be more evenly distributed throughout the year when we designed the survey.
Takeaway #4:
92% of Larger Companies Run Some Type of Customer Feedback Survey
How does your company measure up? The majority (a whopping 92%!) of companies that responded to the survey had deployed some type of customer feedback survey and also found value in them.
Interestingly enough, the number of respondents that did not run a survey grew, as the company’s annual marketing budget went beyond $10 million. However, this could also be because the individual stakeholders in companies of that size are not involved with their consumer insights teams.
Survey Demographics
Responses from 981 survey participants were captured
Industries
49.9% of respondents said they were part of the Software or Marketing/Sales Industries
Other respondents were from Information Services and Data, Retail, Market Research, Hotel and Food Services, Fashion Apparel, and Advertising
Top 3 roles
of participants, which made up over 45% of all survey respondents were:
18% Senior Management
14% C-Level Executive
14% Sales Staff
Ages
Ages 35-44: 42% of respondents
Ages 23-34: 34% of respondents
Ages 45-54: 13% of respondents
Ages 18-24: 7% of respondents
Aged 55 or older: 4% of respondents