6 Ways Condé Nast Uses an Insight Community to Drive Value

As more and more companies put customers at the heart of business decisions, insights and feedback from hard-to-reach customers become pivotal to success. Global media company, Condé Nast, is one of thousands of global brands using an insight community to collect deep customer insights to fuel business growth. Check out these six ways Condé Nast uses their insight community, powered by Vision Critical, to drive value to the organization.

1. Global Beauty Study

To support their commercial teams, Condé Nast created a piece of research that told the real-life stories of global luxury beauty buyers. They wanted to go beyond just sharing a slide with numbers and charts. By tapping into their insight community, they recruited 50 beauty mavens from around the world who were pre-identified within the community. Because of the closeness and trust fostered through the community, the mavens spent a whole week recording their beauty regimes and interactions with beauty content. This gave Condé Nast unparalleled insight into the daily lives and routines of their consumers. These rich insights revealed trends and challenges in the market, providing the commercial teams with immersive feedback alongside new stories and insights to tell key clients.

2. Product Testing

In Spain, the team uses the community to support product trials. By working with their advertising partners, Condé Nast is able to offer over-the-top research services for new products being launched or to support advertisers looking to get consumer feedback from specific audiences. Through the community, they’re also able to invite customers into a live environment and test products with them to get rich, valuable feedback that informs further product innovation.

3. CNX (Conde Nast Creative Services)

The creative services teams initially used the community to support creative pitches to advertising clients. However, the team is now starting to use the community in the actual design process. They engage the community when testing video content to optimize their efforts. With customer feedback, they’re able to validate marketing effectiveness before pushing anything live, saving the team time and resources by reducing the need for iterations.

4. Global Trends Tracker

It’s not just qualitative insights being generated by the community. The team also uses the community to conduct regular surveys with hard-to-reach customers. Every quarter, they build a deeper, ongoing understanding of how the trends from titles such as Vogue and GQ are translated by consumers.

5. Customer Closeness Sessions

As Condé Nast becomes more consumer centric, it's important for them to get up close and personal with their customers. They’ve started inviting people from pre-identified segments in the community into their HQ. With the customers, they run workshops to design co-created content or bring them onto live panels in front of key stakeholders to let teams ask questions and get a better understanding of their audiences.

6. Editorial Support

The editorial teams are using the community to identify key needs of their consumers. They’re learning why customers are coming to Condé Nast brands—Are they coming to be entertained? To learn something? To get updates on the latest news? The editorial team uses these insights to finetune their content creation to align with the needs of their consumers, greatly increasing content engagement and providing a better customer experience.

Optimizing Value from Insight Efforts

“At the start of any insight project, we try to understand what business need we're serving. We don’t want to waste time on research that is just interesting. We really challenge ourselves to align to business needs and have a really good idea from the business what the key strategy is.”

— Paul Nesbitt, Head of Audience Research, Condé Nast

For Condé Nast, it's an ongoing journey. At the end of each project, they challenge themselves to engage with the stakeholders to find out how the research is being used, if follow-up research is needed, and what value the insights provided. They have continued conversations with stakeholders and challenge themselves to learn from their projects to do better next time.

They also realize the work being done usually has a greater impact for other stakeholders in the business.

“Now when we’re commissioning work, we think about any other teams or initiatives within the business that might get value from the work we’re about to do. We reach out to see if they want to be part of the process, shape it in any way, have any specific outcomes, etc. We don’t want everyone in the business to drown us with ideas, but it’s something we do to help the work serve a bigger audience and add greater value to what we’re trying to achieve as an organization.”

— Chis Austin, Director of Data & Insights, Condé Nast

Want to hear the full story of how Condé Nast transitioned from 32 regional companies to a global brand powered by a single research and insight team? Watch the on-demand webinar today.

About the Author: Jason leads the global Customer Success Management team, responsible for the value realization from the Vision Critical platform by our customers. Passionate about customers, Jason is intuitively aware of customer sentiment, achievements, areas of growth, and how Vision Critical will work towards helping them exceed their business goals. His practical expertise on the challenges and best practices for deploying, adopting, and using technologies has evolved over his 20 years in enterprise software. A highly regarded industry speaker, Jason has spoken at dozens of technology events, primarily focused in the enterprise software space. When Jason isn’t discovering new service-oriented solutions for customers, find him sharing ghost stories with his wife and two kids about his hometown, Pawleys Island, on the east coast of South Carolina.