Customer Insights Consulting and Strategy

With rich customer insights—and the right strategy to act on them—leaders can capture growth opportunities and solve pressing business problems. BCG’s Center for Customer Insight leverages a combination of customer behavior knowledge, deep databases of insights, extensive partnerships with market-leading digital innovators, and our unique methodology for turning insights into actionable imperatives to bring value to our clients.

More than 75% of CEOs, presidents, and chief operating officers believe customer insight is critical to accelerating growth, but very few companies use—or even have—all the customer information available before making major decisions. More importantly, most companies find it challenging to interpret insights and distill them into actionable and business-relevant imperatives. And despite the common misconception, customer insight programs are not just for consumer-focused organizations. B2B and B2C companies in industries from health care to energy can unlock dramatic growth through this data and achieve larger business goals.

How BCG Turns Customer Insight into Sustainable Advantage

BCG research shows that 80% of companies have only the most basic customer insight tools and capabilities, and they underuse what little they have. BCG’s Center for Customer Insight team is experienced in BCG’s unique hypothesis-driven approach to converting insights into action. We are the engine behind BCG’s innovative customer-centric programs, powering our partnerships with clients in areas such as marketing, sales, and pricing.

Whereas the typical approach to capturing customer insights includes research disconnected from strategy, as well as analysis that attempts to answer a given question, we carefully integrate research into broader strategic decision making and inform the most important executive-level questions. And instead of leveraging a massive volume of data from multiple sources, our customer insight experts—consultants who bring strong business acumen to every project—prioritize the data that will best solve the problems at hand.

We conduct our own quantitative and qualitative research—often using proprietary BCG tools and techniques, such as MindDiscovery and demand-centric growth, combined with state-of-the-art digital listening tools—to discover the most pertinent information related to customer behavior and thinking. We generate foundational customer insights for industries and markets that do not have institutional or syndicated information already.

These methods enable us to help clients with the following:

Consumer Solutions

Product and Brand Solutions

Growth Solutions

Our Client Work in Customer Insights

Our customer insight consulting team has delivered the benefits of customer insights in more than 4,000 client cases, across 50-plus countries, representing more than 40% of Fortune Global 100 companies. Examples of our work include:

A Global Snack and Beverage Giant

To counter increasing pressure driven by changing consumer needs and increased competition, this global company worked with us to map out the demand and positioning of every brand in its portfolio. We used the demand-centric growth approach to set a growth strategy and enabled a client team to drive action and innovation. The result: shifts from negative growth to positive and from losing share to gaining share as well as more than $1 billion in additional annual revenue sustained over multiple years.

A Cinema Chain in Asia

This company was grappling with changing consumer needs, the deconstruction of value chains, and new competition. Leveraging deep consumer insights we conducted an end-to-end customer experience transformation for a leading cinema operator in India. The result: a reimagined cinema-going journey for consumers—physically and digitally—and a Top 5 loyalty program with a first-in-market personalization engine.

A Fashion Brand in Europe

To help this client sharply define a five-year channel strategy, we used consumer research to gather millions of purchase pathways, allowing us to paint a clear picture of the customer journey. Tapping advanced analytics, we helped the company to understand how the channels will evolve and how to craft the role of each channel so that it is fully able to inspire, persuade, and engage consumers in their fashion choices. The result: a clear strategy for distribution and marketing investment, redefined guidelines for communication and brand development, and an updated organization structure.

A Restaurant Chain in North America

This client was facing sales declines and fading resonance with consumers. Our demand-centric growth approach revealed that the company was the incumbent leader in a large but underserved set of consumer spaces. With this new consumer insight, we helped relaunch the brand and redesign the overall menu strategy. The result: a doubling of EBITDA in the first year of the program.

Meet the rest of our customer insight consulting team

Learn More About Customer Insight

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Measuring the ROI of Customer Insight

Most consumer companies spend big bucks to learn about their customers, but they don’t understand the return on that investment. Take four actions to fix the problem.

COVID-19 and the New Leadership Agenda

As the business impact of the COVID-19 crisis mounts, leaders in every industry are moving urgently to protect employees and build resilience. Governments are mobilizing to safeguard citizens and manage the economic fallout. Immediate action is critical, but leaders must also embrace a new agenda—one aimed squarely at what comes next.