An Executive Voices Blog by Sharon Vinderine, Founder & CEO of Parent Tested Parent Approved

Consumer insights go so much deeper than just knowing who’s buying what. It’s customers telling you exactly what they want—and don’t want.

It’s not enough to know that mom bought an educational toy for her three-year-old. What we need to understand is how she bought it. Did she check out reviews from other parents? Did she watch a video? How does she determine that she is going to trust that brand? How does she know this is the best option for her child?

Consumer insights encompass the complicated reality of how people live their lives and make purchasing decisions. They reveal the gap between what people say they want and what they actually purchase.

This is crucial because brands have to meet people where they are, not where you think they should be. The most powerful insights come from building genuine relationships with your customers over time. They want to feel they mean something to you, and that you are listening to what they are telling you. That’s how you build genuine trust and loyalty.

Choosing The Right Approach

Personally, I love co-creation sessions because they flip the script. Instead of showing consumers a finished product and asking if they like it, you bring them in at the very beginning and say, “Help us solve this problem.” You’re designing solutions together from scratch. The insights that come out of those sessions can be game changers for a brand.

Surveys give you the “what” and focus groups show you group dynamics, but if you really want to understand behavior, you need to observe people in their everyday lives. By creating a custom survey you can see how products actually get used.

It’s important to take steps to make sure the collection process doesn’t influence consumers’ responses, because that’s where so many companies make mistakes. They ask leading questions or create scenarios where people feel like they need to give the “right” answer. That’s not getting insights, that’s coaching, and it doesn’t give you a true picture of what consumers are feeling.

The first rule is to ban leading questions. Don’t ask “What do you love about this?” Instead, ask them to describe their experience with a product. The difference in what you’ll hear might shock you.

Next, you need to create psychological safety. People need to know that negative feedback isn’t going to hurt anyone’s feelings. We actually tell our respondents that criticism helps our partners build better products. When someone feels safe to say, “this product frustrated the heck out of me,” that’s when your insights are gold. It tells brands what they need to improve on.

Implementing Insights

Brand owners should be using insights as their blueprint for everything they do. That includes product development, messaging, partnership decisions, and even pricing. We’ve worked with brands who completely changed their target audience after insights revealed that their most loyal customers weren’t who they thought they were.

Retailers have this amazing opportunity to use insights to create experiences, not just sell products. When you understand the consumer journey, the research phase, and the moment of decision, you can design your strategy to support each step.

For manufacturers, insights prevent expensive mistakes. Understanding how products actually get used in real life can save you from launching something that looks great in a lab but fails inside a real home.

For example, we had a toy manufacturer convinced they needed to make their educational products more advanced to compete with others in the same space. But when we dug into what parents were actually saying, we discovered the opposite was true. They weren’t avoiding their products because they weren’t “advanced” enough. They were avoiding them because they felt intimidated. Moms and dads were afraid they wouldn’t be able to help their kids if the toys were too complicated. That fear was preventing purchases entirely.

These insights led to a complete brand overhaul. Instead of showcasing complexity, they focused on approachability and ease of learning. They redesigned packaging to emphasize how easy the products were to use together as a family. They also changed their licensing partnerships to prioritize brands that felt comfortable and familiar to parents. Sales increased significantly the following year because they addressed the real barrier, not the one they assumed.

Taking the First Steps

Be prepared to be wrong, because that’s actually the whole point. If insights just confirm what you already believed, you’re not asking the right questions.

Start small but be consistent. Begin with monthly conversations with your actual customers. Make it part of your regular rhythm, not something you do only when you’re launching something new. If you don’t have the time or resources, partner with someone who can help ask the right questions on your behalf.

And here’s the thing that makes all the difference: share stories, not just statistics. When your team hears directly from consumers, through videos, quotes, social media, or even bringing customers into conversations, insights become real. That changes everything.

Remember, you’re not trying to predict the future. You’re trying to understand the present well enough to make smarter decisions about what comes next.

Sharon Vinderine is Founder and CEO of Parent Tested Parent Approved. In addition to being North America’s leading awards program, Parent Tested Parent Approved conducts custom consumer research from its community of over 250,000 parents to help brands better understand their target audience’s preferences. Sharon is a serial entrepreneur, recipient of the RBC Women of Influence Entrepreneur of the Year Award, Stevie Awards winner and has made over 300 television appearances across North America on networks including ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX and CNN.