Vision Critical, one of the leading customer intelligence platform providers, just launched its Consumer Goods Intelligence Suite, a software solution created to help CPG companies make smarter, more customer-centric business decisions. Established CPG companies are facing growing competition from smaller, more agile upstarts, driven by the growth of digital-savvy customers who lack product loyalty, shop across a variety of channels and rely on peer recommendations.

Consumer Goods Intelligence Suite is a turnkey solution for professionals who want accurate, impactful and timely insight into the people who matter most to their business—their customers.

With the Consumer Goods Intelligence Suite solution, CPGs will be able to better anticipate customer preferences, anticipate trends and understand constantly changing purchasing behaviors by having ongoing conversations with customers through a secure, opt-in online community.

“Driven by the rise of the empowered customer, nimble CPG upstarts present a serious and growing challenge to the way incumbent CPG companies do business,” says Andrew Reid, president and founder of Vision Critical. “Today’s customers have more channels to buy from and are heavily influenced by peer recommendations, making it difficult for CPG companies to keep their loyalty. Further, existing solutions meant to understand customer behavior, like ad hoc surveys and social media analytics, are ineffective. Based on Vision Critical’s 15 years of experience working with many of the best known global CPG companies, the Consumer Goods Intelligence Suite solution helps CPGs make smarter, more customer-centric decisions by engaging a secure, online community of their customers for ongoing insight.”

“Established CPGs companies are struggling to move quickly, recognize customer preferences and adapt to changing purchasing paths,” adds Kobi Ofir, chief technology officer of Vision Critical. “To succeed in this new marketplace, CPG companies must increase brand loyalty, adapt to different purchasing channels and understand new paths to purchase. We developed the Consumer Goods Intelligence Suite solution for CPG companies to address these common obstacles by gaining the actionable insight they need to give their customers want they want.”

Built on the Vision Critical customer intelligence platform, the Consumer Goods Intelligence Suite solution allows CPG brands to predict customer preferences more effectively by rapidly learning about their needs; forecast trends more accurately in order to improve products and messaging; and better understand the increasingly complex path to purchase influenced by native advertising, social media and review websites.

The Consumer Goods Intelligence Suite provides CPG companies access to an ongoing, two-way dialogue with customers through a secure, opt-in online community. Programmed with pre-built tools and templates, the solution helps CPGs quickly and easily to engage community members for insight in order to solve key industry challenges.

The Consumer Goods Intelligence Suite solution enables CPG companies to:
• Build detailed member profiles of their customers.
• Deploy regular customer engagement projects.
• Access a customer intelligence library pre-programmed with activities designed to address the most common CPG challenges.
• Analyze and report on member feedback quickly and efficiently.
• Share actionable insight with important stakeholders across the company, leading to smarter, more customer-centric decisions.

According to the Boston Consulting Group, since 2009, large CPG companies have lost two points of market share amounting to about $18 billion. Existing approaches, such as traditional market research and social media analytics, fail to produce accurate and actionable insight. The Consumer Goods Intelligence Suite solution provides CPGs with the feedback they need to make customer-driven decisions at the speed of business.

With Vision Critical’s Consumer Goods Intelligence Suite CPGs can now:
• Become more agile and quickly iterate on new products and positioning to drive sales.
• Become more informed through increased visibility into upcoming trends and competitor behavior.
• Become more customer-centric through direct insight into customers’ path to purchase to fulfill customer experiences.

The Consumer Goods Intelligence Suite solution is available as an add-on solution to existing Vision Critical Insight Community customers and as part of a Vision Critical Insight Community product offer for new customers.