January 13th (12pm EST), Aashima Praveen, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Bumble, will be answering your questions on translating consumer insights into PMM strategies.

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:

1. Product behavioural data: This is unequivocally the best way to get a sense of how users are really driving value from your product. Funnel conversation rates, deep dive on users profiles to identify feature adoption behaviour, engaged users/ total users are great metrics to understand what really is going on at the macro level and develop a hypothesis.
2. Quantitative Surveys: Quant surveys are very popular and for good reason. It is the easiest way to get some qualitative insight while keeping a large enough sample size in order to ensure that the insight/problem is representative of our what our customers believe in. You can use surveys to engage with existing user base or use industry tools out there to get feedback from the potential target audience who are not customers yet. I prefer to have these rolled out on a recurring basis to capture the trend in responses, impact of campaigns over time. 
3. Qual Research/User Interviews: This one is the most in depth and perhaps best way to truly get a pulse of the customer. What are their motivations, needs and desires? Helps you really deep dive into their backgrounds and purchase decisions. Obviously these interviews don't scale effectively, and always need a quant survey overlay to ensure what's being captured is representative of the audience and not the view of an individual. 

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 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 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

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:

1. User experience and behaviours on the platform
2. Emotional Barriers and motivators of our users to find a connection
3. Perceptions/Affinity around online dating as a category and Bumble as a brand

Hope that was helpful.

Thanks

Aashima

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: 

1. Product behavioural data: This is unequivocally the best way to get a sense of how users are really driving value from your product. Funnel conversation rates, deep dive on users profiles to identify feature adoption behaviour, engaged users/ total users are great metrics to understand what really is going on at the macro level and develop a hypothesis.
2. Quantitative Surveys: Quant surveys are very popular and for good reason. It is the easiest way to get some qualitative insight while keeping a large enough sample size in order to ensure that the insight/problem is representative of our what our customers believe in. You can use surveys to engage with existing user base or use industry tools out there to get feedback from the potential target audience who are not customers yet. I prefer to have these rolled out on a recurring basis to capture the trend in responses, impact of campaigns over time.
3. Qual Research/User Interviews: This one is the most in depth and perhaps best way to truly get a pulse of the customer. What are their motivations, needs and desires? Helps you really deep dive into their backgrounds and purchase decisions. Obviously these interviews don't scale effectively, and always need a quant survey overlay to ensure what's being captured is representative of the audience and not the view of an individual.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your strategy for upcoming months.

Best,

Aashima

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.

1. When data contradicts your qual insights - This perhaps is single handedly the biggest barrier (and also a truth checker) for insights. Let's say we get some feedback from users that their primary pain point with dating apps is lack of enough personal information on profile page. We share that with product team and their data shows that most users swipe left/right on the first picture itself and never scroll down to see more information rendering the insight useless! Users are irrational and their behaviour is contradictory - hence I always believe in testing and experimenting to validate insights before actioning on them.
2. Defining a unified marketing strategy with diverse local insights - This is a tough with a not so straight answer. How do we find a global insight and inform a marketing strategy when user behaviours are so different based on cultural contexts? Every market can have different pain points and consumer preferences. What I try to do here is find find key trends/themes in insights across markets which could be prioritised for global strategy but this is always a complex one to field.
3. Internal advocacy with cross functional stakeholders - Given product marketing is a highly cross functional role, we actually rely heavily on multiple other teams for execution. Unfortunately, some times it happens that even after great work, these insights just sit in a folder somewhere are are forgotten about. Typically this happens because the teams who have to act upon it product, channel marketing, sales don't necessarily have a clear view on what needs to be done or don't have the agency to make decisions. I always suggest aligning on the project scope and outcomes with all stakeholders before kicking off any kind of insight work to minimise these situations.

Hope this was helpful.

Best, 

Aashima

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:

1. Behavioural data from existing segments: Use your current segments as a starting point. This is the best way to get a sense of how your current users are driving value from your product. Funnel conversation rates, deep dive on users profiles to identify feature adoption behaviour, engaged users/ total users, platform activity are great indicators to understand what really is going on at the macro level and develop a hypothesis on how these existing segments might be similar or different from the new segment that you're trying to break into.
2. Quantitative surveys with potential customers: Quant surveys are very popular and for good reason. It is the easiest way to get some qualitative insight while keeping a large enough sample size in order to ensure that the insight/problem is representative of our what our customers believe in. You can use various industry tools such as pollfish etc. out there to get feedback from potential target audience who are not customers yet. I prefer to have these rolled out on a recurring basis to capture the trend in responses, map out feedback over time.
3. Competitive research analysis: Truly deep dive on competitor solutions and how the customers are responding to that. This could be done by combing through online community forums, Trustpilot in case of an app, social media and helps in identifying gaps is existing solutions/potential opportunities. How is the new segment reacting to competitor's products? What kind of social media sentiment is around them. What are themes emerging out of customer support issues being flagged on social media/community forums. A lot of this is information is publicly available and can be easily accessed. 

Hope this was helpful!

Thanks

Aashima

Thank you Aashima.

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:

• Imbed short 20-30 sec videos of key customer insights/feedback in your presentations - put a real face to those problems and humanise it rather than making it a laundry list. Leadership will always be intrigued by this as they're so far away from every day ops. Prioritise sharing customers/user groups (enterprise clients, premium or high paying customers) whose voice is valued by leadership
• Testimonial bubbles to share anecdotes - Great way to share specific/interesting feedback from customers which highlight a contrary point of view but might not be immediately applicable/in line with the overall strategy. 
• Word cloud for all pain points - very powerful way to show the key themes and feelings emerging out of customer surveys/feedback. This supports credibility too as the leadership is able to validate themes themselves and not feel that you're trying to force your insights onto them

Hopefully this was helpful. 

Thanks

Aashima

This is super helpful. 

Thank you!

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