
Ask the Experts
January 13th (12pm EST), Aashima Praveen, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Bumble, will be answering your questions on translating consumer insights into PMM strategies.
January 13th (12pm EST), Aashima Praveen, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Bumble, will be answering your questions on translating consumer insights into PMM strategies.
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In Product Marketing Alliance you can ask and answer questions and share your experience with others!
Hi Aashima. I'm in the preliminary stages of putting together a new strategy for 2021, but before I do so, I'm keen to understand your preferred methods for gathering consumer insights? I don't want to rely on guess work, I'd like to be guided by cold, hard facts. Thanks so much.
Hey Lukas, thanks for sharing your question. Different organisations have different ways of collecting insights based on various factors such as available resources, maturity of the product, organisational goals.
In my case, there are a few really good methods that have really helped me get brilliant insights in the past:
Lastly, research led insights should always be corroborated with usability testing/in product behaviour to not fall into the trap of blindly following what user is "say they do" vs what they actually "do". More often than not, they're contradictory.
Hope this was helpful!
Thanks
Aashima
Hey Aashima, happy new year.
The benefits of both qualitative and quantitative data have been well documented. But from your perspective, what’s the most effective way to utilize both types of data to understand consumer insights and form a well-rounded strategy? Do you have times when you favor one, over another?
Hey Martha, thank you for your question and happy new year to you too!
Very valid question, which seems to be a mystery for all of us product marketers.
So I am going to be a bit controversial here, and say we should NEVER look at quant and qual data in isolation to come up with an insight.
In fact, both quant and qual offer very different kind of insights. I personally love the relevant + authentic framework (visualise a venn diagram and an intersection) In other words, true insight lives in the intersection of what's relevant AND authentic to your target audience. Qual (through interviews etc.) provides the relevance of their experience and quant actually supports the authenticity of that insight (enough number of users feel a certain way)
So the question is never about choosing which one but how do we layer on the feedback from each of these methods to come up with an actionable robust insight to build our marketing strategy on.
Hope that helps.
Thanks
Aashima
Hey Aashima - How regularly would you recommend a product marketing team reviews their customer insights and potentially introduces a revised strategy? I imagine in such versatile markets, some company’s plans can be susceptible to becoming stagnant?
Hey Bella, thank you for sharing the question.
Ah, I am not sure if there is a one size fits all kind of answer for this. It truly depends on the pace at which your business needs/consumer preferences are changing.
Personally, I have been in more dynamic organisations where business planning was done on a quarterly basis and hence it was important for us to review our insights as part of our quarterly strategy reviews. And then adjust our plan/spend for the next quarter based on that. In fact in one of my roles, I was going through the NPS + customer feedback on a weekly basis to check on any declining trends as we were in the middle of a big PR crisis.
So I would really recommend to use your company's business planning cycle as a proxy to review insights and introduce a revised strategy. There could be two triggers for this:
1. Time based review: 3 months, 6 months or a year based on the company. This also helps in cross functional alignment when you do come up with a new strategy and want to be rolled out as everyone else is also rethinking their plans.
2. Event based review: This happens in case of unforeseen events/situations. Good examples would be a pandemic, or sharp drop in market share, or a company acquisition. All these big events which could have a significant impact on business operations/strategy and should be trigger point where all existing insights are reviewed irrespective of time.
Hopefully this gives you more clarity!
Thanks
Aashima
Which areas do you and the product marketing team at Bumble prioritize when you’re collecting customer insights?
Hey Heather, thanks for your question.
Online dating industry is actually one of few industries where I believe apps have a very deep relationship with its customers. To the extent, we have to be very careful of the user experience that we deliver as it goes on to impact how a person feels about themselves and relates with other people.
So at Bumble, we have to be really close to user in order to have a pulse on the behaviours we are encouraging and overall experience of the customer. For us to be able to build a safe way for women to find meaningful connections, we prioritise deep diving on:
Hope that was helpful.
Thanks
Aashima
In a recent discussion with my Senior Product Marketing Manager, she encouraged me to look at other sources of information, in addition to customer insights. Which other areas can I explore that could potentially provide me with invaluable snippets as we begin mapping out our strategies in the coming months?
Hey Philip
Thanks for your question.
I am sure if I completely understand your question but let me give it a go. So basically customer insights is not a "source of information", it's rather the opposite - it's the result or what you find through that source.
In simple words, customer insight is basically a tangible actionable learning about your customer that can inform your marketing strategy.
As I have answered in the question above, there are 3 ways or "sources of information" to get to these insights:
Hope this helps. Best of luck with your strategy for upcoming months.
Best,
Aashima
Hi all!
What are some of the barriers you’ve faced as a product marketer when it comes to maximizing the true value of your customer insights?
Hey Fergus, thanks for participating in this AMA!
Oh man, I have faced so many barriers! But rather than sharing my sob story, I'll just share a couple of barriers that I feel have been the most challenging for me.
Hope this was helpful.
Best,
Aashima
Hi Aashima,
Thank you for making time for this.
When entering new market segments what other sources can I use to gather more consumer insights combined with the feedback received from our sales team and initial market research?
Hey Carolyne, thanks for the question!
Sharing some good methods that have really helped me get brilliant insights in the past especially when venturing into unchartered waters:
Hope this was helpful!
Thanks
Aashima
Thank you Aashima.
What are the best ways of presenting consumer insights to top executives to always get their buy in? This will lead to the execution of set product strategies. I am currently using PowerPoint presentations but I’d like to use more immersive ways to get them to feel the customers’ pain points
Hey Carolyne
Thanks for sharing your question!
This is super interesting one. My view on leadership is that they connect well with things that are on wide ends of the spectrum as they have limited knowledge of day to day operations.
So, something that has worked for me is to be able to share hard facts/data or impact on users (show how big the problem is) which leadership members can validate through their own personal experience with the product to understand why. Meaning you should share both quant and qual when sharing insights. For example something like that your product is facing high user churn rates because of poor experience with customer support. With this insight leadership would get both the quant data (which helps them see size of the problem) and qual because they can try and reach customer support personally and see how frustrating it is!
Some methods that I use to really get them to understand the experience/insight:
Hopefully this was helpful.
Thanks
Aashima
This is super helpful.
Thank you!
I’m conscious of missing vital information when dissecting customer insights. When you’re building your product marketing strategies at Bumble, how do you pinpoint pivotal customer insights during the research phase and apply these in your practice to help exploit gaps in the market?
How do the product marketing team at Bumble work with other teams when devising relevant pathways to transform research into tangible results and strategies? Am I right in thinking this process doesn't fall exclusively at the feet of the product marketing team?
Hey Scott
Thanks for participating in the AMA!
You're bang on here! Building a robust customer insight is not possible just by the product marketing team. In fact, the richness of the insight is directly correlated with the number of perspectives that shaped the insight in the first place.
It's typically the PMs or the PMMs who might identify a problem or want to test an insight. Before actually diving into research the PM + PMMs will get into an hypothesis phase where we would try to come up with multiple explanations based on data, previous research or market landscape. Based on this discovery exercise, we identify the exact hypotheses and gaps that we want to cover with primary research.
This is when we brief our killer research team! At Bumble, we have a very strong internal research team that is responsible for conducting all kinds of user and market research. User research looks from a product thinking perspective and market research supports from a brand/competitive view. A lot of projects cut across both kinds of research but some may be exclusive to product or marketing.
The research team will come up with the best plan to test a hypothesis/explore a question. Based on the scope of the project, there are various teams such as customer support, brand, marketing, sales etc that input into the research brief and collaborate on the insight extraction sessions to ensure we are looking at the problem/solutions from all perspectives.
Hope this was helpful.
Thanks
Aashima
Hi Aashima, as you'll know, product marketing strategies comprise various elements: pricing strategy, positioning and messaging, and so forth. In your eyes, which area plays the most fundamental role in a company's PMM success? Thanks!