Context. Clarity. Conviction. Consider these your driving factors for presenting Insights that shape strategic business decisions. Eliana Wahnon (General Mills, VP of Consumer & Market Insights) recently joined The SIVO Insights Forum to share her expertise.

Let’s dive deeper into the framework Eliana uses:  

• Context: What matters around this particular topic, issue, or question?
• Clarity: Be brief and straight forward. Share the Insight in a cohesive story.
• Conviction: Create evidence to build that what you are saying needs to be acted upon.

https://youtu.be/Yv8JdvFvILY

Tune into a lively on-demand conversation “Bridging The Gap: Translating Insights Into Meaningful Business Results" to hear from Eliana and other Insights experts including Khary Campbell (Comcast, VP of Consumer Research & Insights) and Elizabeth Oates (Book Author, and former Ulta Beauty VP of Consumer Insights.) 

Learn from Insights leaders as they discuss: 

• The critical role Insights plays in shaping strategic business decisions
• Strategies and tactics to ensure Insights are acted upon
• How to navigate leadership that is reluctant to follow Insights’ guidance
• How to build trust and credibility with senior leaders
• The evolution of Insights roles in the future
• How to make a bigger impact within your organization

Special shout out to Natasha Weith, VP of Research at SIVO Inc. for hosting The SIVO Insights Forum!

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing industries, and marketing research is no exception. In the field of innovation, AI isn’t just a tool—it’s a transformative force. As market researchers strive to speed up timelines, generate breakthrough insights, and stay ahead of consumer trends, AI offers new opportunities. At SIVO, we believe in exploring AI’s strategic potential, balancing excitement with careful consideration of its limitations and practical applications.  

AI’s Advantages in the Innovation Process: Speed, Cost, and Quality

AI offers unparalleled efficiency across all phases of innovation. For example, traditional brainstorming sessions might yield a few dozen ideas over several hours, but AI-driven generation tools can produce hundreds of concepts in minutes. Models like ChatGPT can produce ideas 200 times faster than humans, feeding researchers more possibilities and compressing the innovation cycle, enabling faster decision-making.

AI also delivers significant cost savings. Research shows that organizations using AI for innovation can reduce costs by as much as 85% through the automation of “front-end” work streams such as data analysis, ideation, and concept validation. By minimizing the manual labor required, AI allows companies to reallocate resources toward high-value strategic efforts without sacrificing quality.

And it’s not just about speed and cost - AI excels in generating high-quality ideas. Studies suggest that AI-powered ideation rivals, and sometimes surpasses, human creativity. AI isn’t just capable of producing novel ideas but is also highly effective in generating nuanced originality. Furthermore, the emerging field of synthetic testing allows AI to simulate human consumer sentiment, attitudes, and behaviors, enabling iterative, real-time refinement during the ideation phase.

Key Applications for Innovation Insights Work Streams

AI offers powerful tools for businesses throughout the innovation funnel, from discovery to launch. At SIVO, we’re particularly intrigued by AI’s role in the “front end” of innovation and the growing potential of synthetic validation. Key areas include:

• Trend-Watching and Market Analysis: AI tools can scan vast datasets to detect emerging trends, helping businesses capitalize on opportunities early. This capacity allows AI to uncover patterns and insights that humans might miss, all at unprecedented speeds. With AI, businesses can shift from limited market understanding to robust assessments in a matter of hours, rather than weeks.
  
• Idea Generation: AI pushes the boundaries of human creativity, generating diverse, contextually conscious ideas based on vast amounts of structured and unstructured data. Its objective nature helps overcome creative blocks and organizational inertia, allowing for breakthrough concepts that transcend traditional human limitations.
  
• Simulated Consumer Testing: AI’s ability to simulate consumer responses via synthetic personas is transforming how researchers test products and services. Synthetic testing models mimic real-world consumer feedback at scale, significantly reducing the reliance on traditional, resource-intensive field testing. It’s important to recognize that synthetic data isn’t “fake”—it’s a machine-assisted way to process existing public and proprietary data to quickly generate valuable insights.

AI is reshaping innovation research. Thoughtful adoption of these tools is essential for businesses that want to remain competitive in today’s rapidly evolving marketplace.

Challenges and Watchouts:
The Importance of Oversight in AI-Supported Innovation

While AI offers immense potential, it also presents important challenges:

• Bias in AI Models: AI tools are only as good as the data they’re trained on. If the data contains biases or is incomplete, the resulting insights can be skewed. Ethical considerations and human oversight are essential to ensure that AI-generated insights are accurate, reliable, and free from bias.
  
• AI Hallucinations: Sometimes, AI can produce ideas that seem plausible but lack real-world applicability. These “hallucinations” can mislead the conclusions if not properly filtered. Human intervention is key to distinguishing between useful creativity and impractical output.
  
• Synthetic Data Limitations: AI-generated synthetic data may not always capture the complexity of human behavior. It can replicate biases from original datasets and miss outlier insights, leading to incomplete conclusions. Blending synthetic data with traditional qualitative and quantitative research methods provides more reliable results.

In a field where accuracy and context are critical, these limitations must be accounted for. AI should not replace human creativity and research expertise but should instead serve as a collaborative partner that enhances researchers’ ability to innovate more efficiently and comprehensively.

Strategic Integration of AI for Innovation: A Balanced Approach

To successfully integrate AI into your innovation process, it’s important to narrow your focus. Identify the areas where AI can deliver the most value—whether in trend analysis, ideation, or simulated consumer testing. From there, begin experimenting with AI in those areas to build trust and familiarity.

For those hesitant to fully embrace AI, running parallel testing alongside human-led research can be a great starting point. This approach allows teams to compare AI-generated insights with traditional methods, building confidence in AI’s capabilities while reducing risk. Alternatively, AI can be applied to lower-profile projects first, allowing teams to rehearse its application and refine their approach as they gain experience.

The key is to strike a balance—lean into focused, mindful use of AI to reap its benefits and stay competitive without feeling the need to chase every new use case. AI should be applied where it truly adds value and enhances the innovation process.

SIVO: Your Partner in AI-Enhanced Innovation

At SIVO, we’re actively experimenting with AI tools and exploring AI’s potential to transform how market research supports your new product innovation needs. We see AI as a powerful tool to accelerate processes and enhance creativity, and advocate for a stepwise, cautious approach. We’re eager to guide clients through proof-of-concept tests, blending AI’s scientific power with the art of human-driven insight application, which remains at the core of our work.

If you’re ready to experiment with AI and enhance your innovation process, contact us at Contact@SIVOInsights.com or visit SIVOInsights.com today to schedule a discovery call.  

Let’s navigate the future together! 

As 2026 planning season approaches, most leaders are focused on big decisions: where to invest, how to grow, and which bets to place. But the strongest strategies don’t begin with goals, they begin with your consumers. 

In fact, the annual planning season is the perfect time to pressure-test assumptions. Before you finalize budgets or commit to growth strategies, it pays to refresh your understanding of today’s consumer landscape. What’s changed? What’s emerging? And what gaps in understanding could derail your decisions? 

This post outlines how to approach annual planning through the lens of consumer truth, so you can build smarter, more aligned strategies. Let’s dive in!  

Why Annual Planning Should Start with the Consumer, Not Budget Goals

For many organizations, planning still begins with internal goal-setting: revenue and profit targets, innovation and growth priorities, and cost cutting. And high-performing teams know that successful strategy isn’t just about setting ambition, it’s about aligning that ambition to current market conditions.  

Consumer behavior is one of the most dynamic variables in that equation, and often, one of the most overlooked. Market assumptions that were true a year ago may no longer apply. Purchasing patterns, motivations, and category expectations can shift quickly, especially in volatile economic environments like the current one. And if your plan doesn’t reflect those changes, it’s much more likely to underperform. 

This consumer-centric understanding is foundational. It informs product decisions, pricing, messaging, innovation, and channel strategy. Without it, even well-intentioned plans can quickly drift out of sync with real consumer needs. Starting with the consumer also accelerates alignment. It gives cross-functional teams, from marketing to finance to sales, a shared understanding of where the business is heading and why. It moves planning conversations from opinion to evidence and from speculation to strategy.

If the case still isn’t clear, consider this: even well-resourced plans fail when they aren’t aligned with current consumer behavior. It’s often not about effort or execution, it’s about starting with the right inputs. Let’s look at a few examples:

How Outdated Insights Can Derail Strategic Decisions

Outdated consumer insights can lead to misdirected efforts, misaligned messaging, missed opportunities, and unnecessary risk. To illustrate what this looks like in practice, here are two common scenarios where strategy easily goes off track because the consumer context was never fully validated.  

Scenario 1: Revenue Growth: Investing in the Wrong Innovation 

A company sets aggressive growth targets and decides to compete more directly with newer players in the category. They allocate budget toward developing a new product with features they believe will differentiate them. The plan gets approved. Timelines are set. Everyone is getting ready to mobilize fast and execute. 

But the innovation was based on an internal assumption about what consumers wanted – not on recent consumer insight. In reality, consumers weren’t looking for more features. They were looking for simplicity, availability and value. The company spends $$$ getting the launch ready, but the product doesn’t gain any traction. The opportunity for a product refresh was real, but the execution missed the mark because actual buyers weren’t consulted.  

Scenario 2: Cost Efficiency: Accidentally Cutting the Value Driver 

Another company, facing margin pressure, looks for quick wins through cost reductions. They make the decision to cut a service element they believe is underutilized, based on operational data and internal team feedback. 

What they didn’t realize is that this element was one of the few remaining differentiators in the eyes of their customers. It wasn’t used loudly, but it created trust and loyalty. Cutting it might save money in the short term, but it might erode value perception and reduce retention in the long term.  

Scenario 3: Missed Market Signals: Falling Behind in a Shifting Landscape 

A brand team, focused on stabilizing performance, decides to stick with the same marketing and channel strategy that had worked well in the past. But in the background, both consumer behavior and category norms had shifted. 

Competitors began simplifying their digital experience, consolidating touchpoints, and creating seamless mobile journeys. Meanwhile, this brand was still investing in a fragmented app strategy and outdated content flows. The team didn’t realize that expectations had changed. Consumers weren’t looking for more brand interaction, they were looking for convenience and control in one place. By the time results started to dip, the gap was already visible. A competitive audit or trend review could have flagged these shifts much earlier, giving the brand time to adapt before losing relevance. 

These are not unusual cases. They reflect a planning process that moved forward before validating the reality on the ground. Other common issues include planning around outdated needs or occasions, targeting segments that have shifted or declined, or simply prioritizing the things that don’t matter to consumers anyways. None of these decisions are inherently flawed, but when they’re based on outdated or assumed insight, the risk of “planning in the wrong direction” increases.

What Consumer Insights to Refresh, Replace, or Revalidate Before You Strategize

The good news is you don’t always need to start from scratch. In many cases, the best approach is to audit what you already have, identify gaps, and decide what needs to be refreshed or revalidated.

Here are some key areas worth pressure-testing, before you commit to planning: 

1. Who your core consumer is today: Recheck your segmentation. Are the groups you’re targeting still behaving the way you expected? Have new needs emerged that shift how they make decisions or what they prioritize?

2. What needs are driving behavior now: Validate what’s motivating purchase (or non-purchase) in your category. Are you solving the right problems with benefits that still differentiate? Are consumers making new trade-offs? Have recent competitive moves or industry trends shifted expectations?

3. Where the category is shifting: Look beyond your own brand. What competitor moves, adjacent innovations, or retail dynamics are influencing what consumers see as normal, or even expected?

Pro Tip: Run a Get Smart session 

Many teams start with a Get Smart session. It’s a fast-turn immersion that pulls together everything you already know, from existing data to partner knowledge to internal POVs, and highlights what’s still missing. These sessions help surface blind spots, align teams, and set the foundation for what to explore further through new research or analysis, which will lay the foundation for a solid and strategic plan.  

Insight work at this stage doesn’t need to be complex. It just needs to be focused, current, and relevant to the decisions you’re about to make.  

From Insights to Action: How Updated Consumer Truth Drives Smarter Planning 

The strongest strategic plans are built on a clear understanding of the consumer. When that understanding is current, relevant, and grounded in reality, teams make better decisions, faster, with less risk, and greater impact. At SIVO, we help businesses enter planning season with confidence:

Custom Research, Built for Planning Timelines 

Whether you need to revalidate consumer segments, understand emerging behaviors, or map new usage occasions, our team designs studies that answer the right questions at the right time. We work fast, focus on what matters to your business, and turn insight into clear recommendations for strategic use you can easily relate to in your annual plans. 

Rapid Discovery & Immersion Sessions 

Need to align insights and teams quickly? Our Get Smart sessions help you make sense of what you already know and highlight the gaps that matter most. These sessions help build internal alignment early and avoid late pivots, and are perfect as a foundation for your annual plans.  

Flexible On-Demand Talent (ODT) for Extra Capacity 

Already have an internal insights team, but planning season is stretching your resources? SIVO’s On Demand Talent gives you access to senior insights professionals who can plug into your team quickly. Whether you need a trends lead, moderator, or strategic storyteller, we match you with the right expert, without hiring delays and long-term commitments. The perfect flexbile insights approach to supercharge your insights team for the planning season!  

Consumer truth is the foundation of smarter annual planning. Whether you're building that foundation or scaling your team to deliver it, we're here to help.  

Contact Us

Be consumer first. Don’t be consumer only. Powerful words by leading Insights executive, Khary Campbell, VP of Consumer Research & Insights at Comcast.

https://youtu.be/xJSQO7VSw5Q

During a recent SIVO Insights Forum, Khary shared the importance of considering the implications of all functions. After all, every function is working in orchestra of the business.

Click here for a lively on-demand conversation “Bridging The Gap: Translating Insights Into Meaningful Business Results" to hear from Khary and other Insights experts including Eliana Whanon (General Mills, VP of Consumer & Market Insights) and Elizabeth Oates (Book Author, and former Ulta Beauty VP of Consumer Insights.) 

Learn from Insights leaders as they discuss: 

• The critical role Insights plays in shaping strategic business decisions
• Strategies and tactics to ensure Insights are acted upon 
• How to navigate leadership that is reluctant to follow Insights’ guidance 
• How to build trust and credibility with senior leaders
• The evolution of Insights roles in the future 
• How to make a bigger impact within your organization 

Thank you to Natasha Weith, VP of Research at SIVO Inc. for hosting The SIVO Insights Forum!