What exactly is an Insight Community?
An Insight Community is a closed/private web or app-based platform used to conduct ongoing research with Members (a group of research participants who have been selected to take part).
Insight Communities allow brands to engage with their current and future customers in real-time, in a safe, transparent, and secure online environment.
In this space, you can tap into real-time feedback, explore evolving attitudes and behaviours, test new ideas and propositions, track sentiment, and build deeper relationships.
According to the latest STRAT7 Researchbods Insight Community Buyers survey (2025), the top three benefits of Insight Communities quoted by marketing functions who use them are:
- Reducing time to insight
- Improving customer closeness / customer centricity
- Reducing the cost of insight gathering.
The role of Insight Communities in business decision-making
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.
The evolution of Insight Communities
Insight Communities are older than you might think! They trace their origins back to the early days of the World Wide Web. Large consumer-facing brands like PepsiCo had set up multiple online communities by the end of the 90s.
The major difference was that they were designed as direct marketing channels, rather than as a customer voice tool. This provided an early model for brands’ use of social media and reflects the mindset of the time. Brands saw new channels as an extension of the one-sided conversations they were having where the emphasis was on talking rather than listening.
By the early 00s, Market Research agencies developed the first dedicated Insight Communities. They were usually short-term discussion groups, centred on a succession of online qual tasks. These functions remain a central capability of Insight Communities, but the tools have evolved way beyond that.
Since then, the development of Insight Communities has run along three tracks:
- New features: The feature set of Insight Communities has expanded dramatically, to include survey data, live chat, video data and live video chat, collaborative tools like whiteboards, and more. All these increase the range of tasks for members and widen the scope of data the Insight Community directly collects.
- User experience: Alongside this the experience of taking part in an Insight Community has greatly improved. The basic interfaces – posting, commenting, uploading – are smoother, the information in a community is better organised, and mobile support is far stronger. Behind the scenes, it’s easier to track and reward activity and what motivates participants is better understood.
- Business integration: Data integration is crucial. A modern Insight Community can better integrate with existing survey, CRM and other data streams. But data is only a part of integration – a community also needs to mesh with an organisation’s structure, processes and workflows and align with its goals. This is an area in which technology can only do so much of the work, but it’s the area in which the future of Insight Communities will be determined.
About the author
Charlotte Moody is Managing Director at STRAT7 Researchbods, where she leads tech-enabled customer research and AI-driven insight strategy for global consumer brands, across the Insight Community and Custom Insight Divisions.
