As the consumer and retail landscape transforms at speed, brands need more than transactions. They need conversations. Today’s shoppers expect relevance, transparency and experience at every touchpoint.

Insight Communities give consumer and retail brands a direct line to consumers, helping you test, refine and innovate with confidence. Whether it’s shaping tomorrow’s products, optimising today’s range or uncovering the behaviours that drive decisions, Communities put the customer at the centre of every decision.

Insight Communities deliver cost-effective customer understanding

At their core, Insight Communities offer an instant window into everyday customer conversations and interactions, and a chance to speak with them directly from your desk. Unlike traditional research methods, Communities are flexible enough to meet the unique and evolving needs of every client, whilst delivering customer closeness for all. One STRAT7 Researchbods Community client replaced fragmented ad-hoc research with an always-on approach, achieving annual savings of approximately £150,000, whilst increasing the speed and consistency of insight delivery.

Insight Communities offer unparalleled agility over traditional methods

Agility in insight delivery is now more important than ever. In fast-moving markets, standard research methods just can’t keep pace. Behaviours evolve quickly. Budgets tighten. Teams are stretched. Yet expectations for fast, accurate insight continue to rise. Teams are also under increasing pressure to prove the value of insight within their organisations, as well as increase their influence. In fact 19 of the 26 current users in our Buyers survey (2025) agreed that increasing influence on stakeholder decision-making was an objective for them or their teams.

Insight Communities are a holistic, integrated research solution

An Insight Community offers comprehensive research capabilities through one powerful platform, bringing together a range of research methods in one solution. An Insight Community acts as a single portal for customers to engage with your brand and provide feedback, and has the ability to pull and push data to and from your own systems, enriching customer profiles and enhancing insights. One STRAT7 Researchbods Community client uses the ex-plor platform to offer an immersive and tailored user experience for 17 magazine brands and 30,000 members, ensuring each brand engages with its specific audience while benefiting from the shared infrastructure.

Insight Communities can keep AI customer models grounded and up to date

Insight Communities provide the continuous flow of real human insight needed to build, validate and maintain effective AI customer models such as digital twins. By combining rich historical research with ongoing feedback from known customers, they help models reflect real attitudes, behaviours and segment differences. Communities also create a vital feedback loop: simulated responses can be tested against how members actually respond, gaps or low-confidence answers can trigger targeted new research, and fresh findings can be fed back into the AI engine. This prevents “information decay”, keeps models relevant as customers and markets evolve, and ensures AI-generated insight remains directional, transparent and grounded in human evidence.  

Insight Communities play an important role in business decision-making today. Consumers have more choice, their loyalty is more precious, so an Insight Community can support strategic decisions that ensure your brand is one they love and promote. The key is digging deep and really getting to know your customers.

There is no ‘one size fits all’ when it comes to Insight Communities. They can pop up for a few weeks or months (referred to as an Ad-hoc Community) or go on for years (known as an Ongoing Community). They can be home to a few hundred Members or tens of thousands.

The Community platform – the technology or interface that offers different research tools to Members, such as STRAT7 Researchbods’ ex-plor platform – can be branded or unbranded. Their set up and design all depends on what you’re trying to accomplish.

To give you an example, our ex-plor platform has helped:

• One of the UK’s leading airlines to gain always-on customer understanding to spot and resolve customer issues;
• The UK’s largest energy supplier to gather rapid feedback from customers on comms and new propositions in a cost-effective way;
• A global leader in customer data science to run research at pace and scale to deliver greater value;
• A fast-casual dining icon to stay on top of fast-moving trends amongst a young target audience;
• A giant in the automotive manufacturing sector to support product and service innovation across its portfolio of brands;
• A leading British multimedia news brand to turn audience closeness into commercial power;
• A charity to use campaign insight to drive behaviour change.

How your Management team benefits from an Insight Community

If you want to identify and seize growth opportunities, an Insight Community can help. By consulting with your existing customers on the platform, you can quickly sense-check your course of action and share it with your team. An Insight Community also offers a fast ‘gut check’ on emerging issues and news, as well as identifying growth areas and new customer groups.

How your Sales team benefits from an Insight Community

If you want a holistic view of your customer journey, an Insight Community can provide the knowledge and power you’ve been missing. An Insight Community integrates with your CRM and segments your target audience within the platform, so that you have a better understanding of the motivations, pain points and messaging that will wow your prospects and convert them into customers. For example, ITV’s Commercial Team leveraged their Community to map out purchase journeys and behaviour, advertising engagement and impact. For those selling to businesses, an Insight Community will provide rich audience/end-user insight to your buyers, strengthening relationships and growing revenue.

How your Marketing team benefits from an Insight Community

If you want to understand how memorable your branding is or how your audience will react to your upcoming advert, an Insight Community offers greater certainty in decision-making by involving customers in the creative process. Early testing and iteration on creative routes, messaging or assets, with fast feedback, also supports budget optimisation.

How your Research & Development team benefits from an Insight Community

If you want to ideate with customers to develop customer-focused solutions, an Insight Community is home to customers who can help you to fine-tune new ideas or innovations. You can also integrate cultural insights to understand emerging opportunities that your competitors might not be considering yet.

How your Product, UX and CEX teams benefit from an Insight Community

If you want to optimise products, test ideas and refine experiences before launch, an Insight Community can help uncover evolving preferences and needs. For example, National Trust’s Visitor Experience Team launched an Insight Community to focus on visitor experience and understand how best to communicate strategy messages to different audiences.

How your HR team benefits from an Insight Community

If you want to explore strategic growth with people who are experts on your products, services and customers, an employee Insight Community presents a huge opportunity for your business. Not only can customer-facing employees provide valuable consumer insight to your HR team, but they can also input into new internal corporate initiatives and ideas, fostering a sense of engagement and loyalty at the same time.

We need to understand our customers better

Brands want to be best buddies with their customers. They talk about “putting customers at the heart of everything we do” yet often fall short. Insight Communities make it much easier to embed your customers and prospects into your plans. In short, Insight Communities facilitate customer closeness.

We need answers, fast

Insight Communities are agile. They are always-on, allowing for real-time consultation without project set-up. Even better, an Insight Community will also alert you to issues before you’re aware of them.

We need to make better decisions, with confidence

An Insight Community allows you to get useful responses from profiled Members and turn questions into answers and answers into strategy. In hours not days. Spend more time analysing and less time managing, so that you can make better business decisions, at speed.

We need a cost-effective research solution

Streamline your roster of research suppliers. Cut down the need for individual project pitches and tenders. Save time managing projects. Insight Communities are most effective when used on a long-term or ongoing basis.

We need insight to integrate with data

The first generation of Insight Communities were often their own little bubble, with limited ability to incorporate wider data. This is no longer the case. A modern Insight Community is designed to be part of a greater data lake, and can integrate CRM, ERP and third-party data, making them a greater strategic asset.

We need a short-term solution right now

Insight Communities are flexible and can adapt to the size and needs of any brand wishing to use one. Short-term plug-and-pay communities are becoming as common as the highly managed long-term versions, and both fit a particular set of business and knowledge needs.

We need real, human insight

This is going to sound a little obvious, but the most important reason to use an Insight Community is… the insight. If you want real, unfiltered customer views and opinions. If you want genuine customer knowledge. Then you need a platform to engage and capture it on a regular basis.

Insight Communities are good for helping you to understand customers

Today’s customers are more powerful than ever. There is so much information at their fingertips in the form of product reviews and price comparisons. Not only that but they have a global choice of brands to buy from. If you want to win their loyalty, you need to understand and pivot to their changing needs.

Insight Communities are good for fine-tuning your brand and communications

Your brand lives in the hearts and minds of your customers. Brand consistency is difficult in a world where technology and trends change rapidly. Dig deeper into how customers truly see you and what they really want and adapt your brand without losing core values. Dig deeper into your brand elements using image association and metaphor tasks.

Insight Communities are good for sourcing innovation and creativity

It’s a jungle out there. With new competition and new products popping up, it’s never been harder to get in front of customers. Anything new is always risky. Quickly learn what works and what doesn’t by using continual feedback loops to ensure insight is embedded at every step of the innovation process.

One of the most important indicators of a successful Insight Community is the value it delivers to internal stakeholders.

Ask yourself:

• Has the Community helped teams make more confident decisions?
• Has it strengthened negotiations with buyers or suppliers?
• Has it provided robust evidence for strategic discussions?
• Has it made senior leaders’ roles easier by providing reliable customer insight?

This type of impact can be harder to quantify, but it’s often the most powerful. Reviewing the projects conducted through your Insight Community can quickly reveal where insights have influenced business decisions or shaped internal thinking.

Strong stakeholder advocacy is often one of the clearest signals that your Community is delivering value.

This is probably the most frequent issue we encounter.

When launching an Insight Community, stakeholders understandably want as much data as possible from day one. It feels efficient. If we collect everything now, we won’t need to ask later… right?

In reality, long and complex profiling surveys often lead to:

• Drop-off during sign-up.
• Lower completion rates.
• Early fatigue.
• Reduced enthusiasm for future participation.

And that’s a difficult tone to reset.

How we fix it

Before building the profiling questionnaire, we go back to basics:

• Who are the primary audiences we’re looking to recruit and how are they defined?
• What decisions will this Community inform?
• What data is absolutely essential at launch?

From there, we prioritise only the most critical questions. Everything else can be collected through progressive profiling, which means woven naturally into early activities.

We also look closely at what customer data already exists. In many cases, clients already hold valuable information in their CRM systems, so there’s no need to ask members to provide it again. Instead, this data can be securely integrated into the Community platform and added to member profiles, with dynamic updates where needed. For example, a telecoms client might refresh usage data monthly to understand how much data a customer is consuming.

By combining progressive profiling with smart data integration, we only ask members for information the business doesn’t already have.

This keeps onboarding quick and frictionless, while still building a robust data foundation over time.

For Sarah, the Give to Gain theme perfectly captures what mentoring actually is.

“Mentoring is a two-way relationship,” she explains. “It’s about seeing things from multiple perspectives and being able to learn and be inspired by each other.”

Volunteering to mentor hasn’t just been about sharing experience. It’s helped her better understand her own motivations and ways of working. “It’s been emotional and thought-provoking,” she says. “It’s inspired me to practise what I preach.”

Francesca echoes this sense of mutual growth. For her, mentoring reflects a broader shift in how women can support each other at work.

“For far too long women had to compete for the few spots left at the table. Whilst this is changing, there is so much work we actively need to do to help women thrive. The mentorship programme is a brilliant example of Give to Gain in action. Carving out time to share knowledge, experience and encouragement, because when everyone thrives, we all win.”

Mentoring, in other words, isn’t transactional. It’s collective.

Many organisations assume inclusivity is just about tone of voice. Our research consistently shows that for neurodivergent customers, the words used (and how information is structured) matter far more.

Clear, consistent and concrete language reduces cognitive load and builds confidence.

When organisations prioritise clarity, insight often reveals the following patterns:

• Specificity beats warmth

“Here are the three steps to reset your password” consistently outperforms “We’re happy to help you get back on track!” Customers want to know what to do, not how the brand feels.

• Structured information reduces cognitive load

Bullet points, numbered steps and section headers make information easier to absorb, particularly in moments of stress.

• Concrete examples build trust

Replacing abstract phrases like “unusual account activity” with specifics such as “three failed login attempts from a new location on [date]” removes ambiguity and reassures customers.

• Consistency reduces friction

Repeating the same term throughout a customer journey (rather than using synonyms) helps minimise confusion and mental effort.

• Clarity benefits everyone

Language designed for neurodivergent customers often improves comprehension for time-pressured users, non-native speakers and customers accessing support on mobile devices.