It's for CEOs to ensure that their businesses are consumer centric

The insight generation needed to meet growth objectives is an exercise that requires top sponsorship

- HARSH MARIWALA & ABHEEK SINGHI are, respectively, founder and chairman of Marico, and the chair of practices at Boston Consulting Group India.

Today's CEOs have many things on their minds—technology, geo-politics, regulations, talent, sustainability, and much more. Tepid consumption growth in the last few quarters makes it even more critical to put consumer centricity back on the CEO agenda. The consumer is too important to be left only to a company's marketing or research function.

In the last few years, we have had increased data and information on consumers—on where, what, when, and how they spend, save, and shop—and that has led to greater visibility, efficiency, and effectiveness in targeting consumers. This data-based approach is necessary but not sufficient for true insight generation.

That requires data analytics to be combined with on-ground consumer engagement, observation, and trend-spotting. The imperative for leaders, therefore, is how to get consumer insight into strategy development and deployment, whether it is in terms of innovation, communication, or activation, or even choices around the organization and operating model.

We have identified six practical principles that can help in this journey.

Be clear on the key question: Are you trying to generate new insights or are you testing specific hypotheses? Both are useful in their own ways. But most of the time, teams focus only on the latter, and worse still, they tend to confuse the two.