Every day, consumers tell brands what they think without being asked. That was the starting point for our recent webinar, Unprompted, where i-Genie.ai CEO Trevor Sumner was joined by Elaine Rodrigo, Chief Insights and Analytics Officer and AI Marketing Lead at Reckitt, and Vijay Raj, former Global Head of Consumer and Market Insights at Unilever.
The scale is hard to ignore. Google handles more than 5 trillion searches a year, there are 5.66 billion social media user identities, and nine in ten shoppers say they consider reviews before buying. The survey, by contrast, is under strain: up to 40% of online panel data comes from unreliable or fraudulent respondents, and results can take weeks to reach decision-makers.
So the question facing insights leaders is no longer whether digital signals matter, but how to use them well alongside everything else.
Consumer insights are only as good as the decisions they change
For Elaine, the purpose of insight hasn’t changed: understanding consumers to unlock growth. What has changed is how that understanding is generated, how fast, and how readily it turns into action. At Reckitt, that has meant moving from individual projects to enterprise-wide intelligence, and from hindsight to foresight. Here’s what Elaine had to say on the topic during our recent webinar. To watch the full discussion, click here.
Vijay sees the same shift from the business side: insight still exists to reduce risk in decision-making, but what the business expects has moved from information, to insight, to growth, and it wants it faster.
Three signals, three questions
Each signal answers a different question. Search shows what people want, social shows what they’re talking about and why, and ratings and reviews show what they experienced once they bought.
“Search is the most honest thing a consumer does. Nobody performs for a search bar.” Vijay Raj
For Vijay, search is the purest digital signal: the related searches for “how to shave” reveal needs nobody would admit to in a survey. It is predictive too. Divorce rings took off on search about a year before they trended on social, roughly the time it takes to launch a product. Share of search also tracks market share in many categories (IPA research). Social adds cultural context. Reckitt combined social listening with medical expertise and behavioural science to surface the gender pain gap behind Nurofen’s See My Pain. Reviews, and the customer sentiment analysis built on them, give Elaine’s team an early read on product performance after launch.
Social listening is fifteen years old. “What’s changed isn’t the existence of these digital signals,” says Elaine. “What’s changed is our ability to connect that with other sources of data and insight.” At Reckitt, social listening is no longer a standalone dashboard but part of the consumer insights analytics that answer business questions.
Connection is also the safeguard. Elaine’s warning is not to confuse volume with truth: the loudest voices online may not reflect the broader population. Vijay adds that fewer people post as feeds shift from friends to interests, and that promoted reviews need separating from organic ones. Read alone, volume misleads; read against behavioural and attitudinal data, it becomes evidence.
And, not or
Most large organisations have a brand tracker with 10 or 20 years of history, and teams wary of changing it. Elaine’s first social brand health tracking experiment, at Danone in 2017, didn’t work because she treated it as a replacement. Things only shifted once she saw it as complementary, and Reckitt has now been integrating digital signals into its brand health tracker for several years. Here’s what Elaine had to say on the topic during our recent webinar. To watch the full discussion, click here.
Vijay sees disagreement between the two as fertile ground, not a turf war. Social listening in Japan barely mentions dandruff, because commenting on personal hygiene disturbs social harmony, and resolving contradictions like that produces the strongest insights.
“This isn’t about conventional research methods versus digital signals, because that’s just a false choice.” Elaine Rodrigo
The hard part is people
AI makes transformation easier to start and harder to sustain. MIT research found that just 5% of enterprise AI pilots make it into production with measurable value.
“The technology was probably the easier part,” says Elaine, who has been building AI-powered capabilities at Reckitt since 2021. “The challenge has been embedding AI into how thousands of people work and make decisions.” Her rule of thumb: embedding AI is 20% data, 10% algorithms and 70% people. “In the places where we’ve gone with a people-first approach… we’ve succeeded.”
Done well, the payoff is real. At Reckitt, insight generation is 70% faster, ideas go green in concept testing two to three times more often, and going from a blank sheet to a qualified idea has shrunk from 12 weeks to six hours.
Vijay agrees, adding that unlearning old habits is often harder than learning new ones. What breaks the inertia is one big commercial hit: when a colleague wins with a new tool, it creates a flywheel of adoption. Anyone investing in AI market research should plan for a result the business can see. Here’s what Elaine and Vijay had to say on the topic during our recent webinar. To watch the full discussion, click here.
Start where nobody is looking
For Vijay, the tool should match the risk: digital signals or synthetic data for smaller markets and low-risk calls, and a tracker augmented with digital signals for big markets. “It’s never an either-or, it’s an AND, and it’s a context-specific AND.”
Trevor sees large clients cutting traditional tracking from quarterly to annual, using digital signals for the more actionable reads, and using them in markets that never had a tracker because it was too expensive. Whatever you build or buy, both guests urged insights teams to work hand in glove with IT.
Elaine pointed to one more place few insights teams are looking yet: generative engine optimisation (GEO) and social-first content. If insights teams don’t own it now, digital or media teams will. “It’s not the future, it’s now.”
That is the thinking behind Brand Pulse, which turns search, social, video and ratings and reviews into continuous brand equity tracking, with two years of history from day one. You can test the correlation with your own tracker immediately, rather than waiting a year to build a baseline.
To go deeper, download our white paper on augmenting brand equity tracking with digital signals, or book a demo to see your own category.
