Business First, Again.

This year’s ranking of buyer priorities for research and insights underscores the imperative for any supplier who wants to remain relevant.

When looking at their own corporate function, insights and research buying organizations are prizing business knowledge as a key priority for their teams, recognizing consumer intelligence cannot be seen purely as a cost or “box to be ticked”. To stay relevant, insights departments, increasingly partnering with other functions seamlessly across organizational borders, must act as an integral and growth-creating asset. It therefore becomes obvious for insights buyers – and the suppliers who serve them – that we all must anchor all efforts to the growth agenda of a brand, business unit, or wider organization.

The authors of this report describe the implications of this part of the report as “Business first, Again!” We’d argue that research’s purpose, particularly for suppliers, should never have been anything else!

The industry-wide implications are clear: we can only claim value as suppliers if we innovate to influence consumer behavior in a way aligned with the growth objectives of client brands.

This year’s GRIT Report is therefore less of a revelation to us and rather a confirmation that we at Behaviorally are on the correct path to serve clients well, now and into the future. It is why we have focused our business on helping clients achieve THE most critical moment in which marketing value is created: when a consumer chooses your product, and a purchase transaction is made. Perhaps the famous automotive innovator, Henry Ford said it best: “Nothing happens until someone sells something!”

How has this shaped our business? Our singular purpose has been building and taking to market a product stack anchored to that most important client business objective of enabling more valuable transactions. We have developed tools that identify the Benefits that motivate the consumer purchase behavior, and the Barriers that introduce friction into the path-to-purchase that can derail the transaction, at both the digital and physical retail shelf. Whether it is leveraging AI and the world’s largest database of packaging metrics to derive reliable, predictive scores for in-market sales growth, mapping the opportunities across the shopper journey to influence customer behavior to our clients’ advantage in retail, or applying decades of expertise and AI-based image recognition to optimize conversion at the digital shelf, this will always underpin our brand promise. It is why we are the Transaction Experts.