By Kelley Nulton, VP, Sales

A view from the front lines of research

In my daily conversations with brand and insights leaders, I hear the same themes over and over. Consumer behaviors are shifting faster than ever. Teams feel the pressure to make decisions in real time. And yet, too often, they’re forced to rely on yesterday’s data because research lives in the hands of too few people.

Insights teams tell me they feel like bottlenecks, overwhelmed by requests, and stuck executing projects instead of driving strategy. Meanwhile, marketers and product managers say they want answers in hours - not weeks - but don’t have the tools or access to make it happen.

These conversations always point to the same truth: in today’s world, if insights aren’t accessible to everyone who makes decisions, organizations risk falling behind.

That’s why broadening research access is so powerful; it gives every team the ability to connect with consumers in real time, without sacrificing rigor.

Consumer Behavior Moves Faster Than Brands

Think about how often your own habits change. Yesterday you were meal-prepping; today you’re grabbing takeout. Last month you tried a new workout trend you found on TikTok; now you’re obsessed with a different wellness hack.

Consumers aren’t static and neither are the markets they move through. Bain’s 2025 CPG outlook describes today’s consumers as “in flux,” with volatile needs and experimentation across value tiers and categories. This constant state of change means brands can’t afford to rely on outdated research rhythms.

The old cadence of quarterly trackers or annual brand studies isn’t enough. If you’re still making decisions based on “last month’s” consumer reality, you’re already behind.

What you need is a way to capture consumer input as often as consumer behavior changes… which, let’s face it, is daily.

The Problem: Research Bottlenecks

Here’s where most organizations stumble:

• Insights live with a few specialists. Traditional research requires trained experts. That creates bottlenecks when marketing, product, or strategy teams need quick answers.
• Timelines don’t match reality. By the time a study is scoped, funded, and fielded through an external vendor, the consumer moment has already passed.
• Insights teams are stretched too thin. They spend their time running execution-heavy projects instead of focusing on foresight, storytelling, and strategy.

This is exactly why so many teams end up defaulting to gut instinct or chasing lagging data points.

The result? Brands become reactive instead of proactive. Campaigns launch without proper validation. Products miss the mark. Teams scramble to keep up instead of steering the business forward.

The Solution: Widening Access to Research

Expanding access doesn’t mean letting chaos reign. It doesn’t mean quality takes a backseat. It means giving every team – from brand managers to product marketers to innovation leads – the ability to run high-quality research studies, without always relying on insights teams to push the buttons.

Think of insights teams as guardians of rigor, not bottlenecks. They set the standards, frameworks, and templates. But with the right platform, they can confidently empower other business units to launch their own studies, knowing the guardrails are already in place.

The payoff?

• Insights teams free up time to focus on trendspotting, foresight, and strategic storytelling.
• Business units get the confidence to act on consumer-validated decisions, fast.
• The organization shifts from reactive firefighting to proactive leadership.

Why This Matters for Lean Insights Teams

For lean insights teams, enabling wider access is not about losing control. It’s about gaining capacity.

• Champions of quality, not roadblocks. Standards are set once, then enforced through templates, sample controls, and built-in methodology.
• Shift from execution to strategy. Free yourself from running every concept test and instead focus on connecting dots across categories and forecasting what’s next.
• Stay ahead of change. With daily shifts in consumer sentiment, you can’t afford weeks-long studies. AI-powered tools deliver hundreds of responses in hours, with direction on what to do next.
• Build organizational agility. Instead of being the only source of truth, you become the enabler who gives marketing, product, and brand teams the tools to act in near real time.

In other words, this isn’t dilution – it’s amplification!

Why This Matters for Non-Insights Teams

If you’re in marketing, product, brand, or category, you’ve probably felt the frustration of waiting for data. You need answers in hours, not weeks. Expanded access through Suzy changes that:

• Don’t wait for monthly trackers. Run your own quick pulse study to test concepts, refine a campaign, or check brand sentiment.
• Research without the red tape. No more vendor approvals or POs. You can field and analyze a study the same day.
• From reactive to proactive. Instead of guessing how consumers will respond, test and iterate in near-real time as behaviors shift.
• Data you can trust. Even if you’re not a researcher, you know your results are reliable, thanks to built-in methodological rigor from Suzy’s research team.

It’s the difference between running a campaign and learning from consumers while you run it.

Case Study 1: From Bottleneck to Breakthrough

One Fortune 500 CPG brand expanded research access across its product development teams.

Before, every innovation initiative went through a central insights team. Timelines stretched for weeks, and new product ideas were often pushed to market without proper validation. Product managers had limited ability to test concepts quickly, leaving whitespace opportunities unexplored and risks unmitigated.

After introducing Suzy’s AI-powered tools and standardized frameworks:

• Product teams could test new innovations with consumers directly, using stat-tested quant to size opportunities and qual at scale to uncover the "why" behind the data.
• The insights team shifted its focus to shaping the overall innovation strategy and identifying cross-category opportunities.
• Whitespace opportunities surfaced earlier, and potential missteps were caught before costly launches.

The result? Smarter product pipelines, reduced innovation risk, and faster identification of winning concepts.

Case Study 2: From Risk to ROI

A leading finance brand was preparing to launch a rebrand with a national campaign aimed at younger consumers.

Before, campaign development followed a traditional process: the marketing team worked with an agency to finalize creative concepts and allocate media spend, often committing millions before consumer validation. Without pre-launch testing, teams relied on historical data and gut instinct to decide which creative would resonate. When campaigns underperformed, postmortem learnings came too late to recover the investment.

After introducing Suzy’s AI-powered insights platform:

• The marketing team tested multiple creative routes in hours, not weeks, using Suzy’s quant-validated studies to identify high-performing concepts.
  
  
• Suzy Speaks uncovered why certain taglines missed the mark, helping refine tone and authenticity before media dollars were spent.
  
  
• Built-in research rigor and templates ensured every study met methodological standards – no extra vendors or approvals needed.
  
  

The result? The company optimized its rebrand strategy before launch, reducing wasted media spend and improving early campaign performance, achieving an increase in engagement among target consumers, and a reduction in cost-per-acquisition (CPA).

With Suzy, marketers gain the tools and rigor to test, learn, and optimize creative quickly, efficiently, and confidently – turning marketing risk into measurable ROI.

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How Suzy’s proprietary AI algorithms make it possible

Most organizations recognize that speed without quality is meaningless. That’s why Suzy’s platform is built on proprietary AI and research-grade methodology – so access never comes at the expense of rigor.

Our technology blends automation, intelligence, and expertise into one unified system. When a marketer or product manager launches a study, Suzy’s AI doesn’t just field responses – it dynamically optimizes question design, sample balance, and data validation in real time. The result is statistically sound data that teams can act on immediately.

But Suzy’s power goes far beyond faster data collection.

• Always-on insights. Suzy Speaks conducts hundreds of voice-based, AI-moderated interviews in a matter of hours, surfacing real consumer language and sentiment that reveal the why behind the numbers.
  
  
• AI strategist built in. Suzy Signals connects your research findings to real-world context – cultural trends, competitor moves, and economic shifts – so your team not only knows what’s happening but also why it matters.
  
  
• Scalable access with built-in quality. Guardrails are hardwired into the system. Templates and sampling controls ensure that even non-researchers produce consistent, high-quality data every time.
  
  
• Qual + quant in one place. With both conversational qual and quant at scale, your teams can move fluidly from exploration to validation without switching tools or waiting on vendors.

By merging human expertise with machine precision, Suzy transforms research from a department-owned process into an enterprise-wide capability, turning insights into a shared language across every function.

The Bigger Picture: Organizational Agility

When research access opens up, the transformation isn’t just operational — it’s cultural. Agility stops being a buzzword and becomes part of how teams work every day.

With democratized insights, the walls between research, marketing, and product dissolve. Teams can test, learn, and adjust in real time, evolving campaigns and strategies alongside consumers.

Organizational agility also means shifting how success is measured. It’s no longer about the number of completed projects, but about the speed of learning and the quality of decisions. Suzy enables that shift by putting reliable, consumer-validated data directly into the hands of the people who need it most.

Open access doesn’t just make brands faster; it makes them smarter, more resilient, and better aligned with a constantly changing consumer landscape.

What I’ve learned from the front lines

I started this piece by sharing what I hear in my daily conversations with clients: that consumer behaviors are changing too fast for traditional research models to keep up, and that bottlenecks prevent brands from making proactive decisions.

The solution isn’t to work harder or add more layers of approval. The solution is to expand access to insights that ensure both speed and rigor.

With Suzy, your teams don’t have to guess. They don’t have to wait. They don’t have to rely on yesterday’s data.

They can tap into real-time consumer truth - every day, at scale.

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