Customer insights for innovation: A framework and research agenda for marketing

Abstract

Customer insights play a critical role in innovation. In recent years, articles studying customer insights for innovation have risen in marketing and other fields such as innovation, strategy, and entrepreneurship. However, the literature on customer insights for innovation grew fragmented and plagued by inconsistent definitions and ambiguity. The literature also lacks a precise classification of different domains of customer insights for innovation. This article offers four key contributions. First, it clearly and consistently defines customer insights for innovation. Second, it proposes a “customer insights process” that describes the activities firms and customer insights intermediaries (e.g., market research agencies) use to generate, disseminate, and apply customer insights for innovation. Third, it offers a synthesis of the knowledge on customer insights for innovation along ten domains of customer insights for innovation: (1) crowdsourcing, (2) co-creating, (3) imagining, (4) observing, (5) testing, (6) intruding, (7) interpreting, (8) organizing, (9) deciding, and (10) tracking. Fourth, the authors qualify and quantify the managerial importance and potential for scholarly research in these domains of customer insights for innovation. They conducted 12 in-depth interviews with executives at market research agencies such as Ipsos, Kantar, Nielsen, IQVIA, and GfK to do so. They surveyed 305 managers working in innovation, marketing, strategy, and customer experience. The article concludes with a research agenda for marketing aimed at igniting knowledge development in high-priority domains for customer insights for innovation.