Product17 Oct 2024

If users are so important, why do we know so little about them?

Despite its importance for marketing, product development, and sales, most organisations lack knowledge about their users for decision-making. Semilattice changes this.

Fabian TeichmuellerCo-Founder, Commercial & Operations

Today, more than half of all the goods and services the average consumer buys are in competitive markets: there are multiple products to choose from and they all do the same or similar things. Based on the growth of competitive market sectors, this share is forecasted to grow to around 60% by 2030, up from 40% in the 1980s. Consumers also spend across a wide range of categories, multiplying the number of different products and brands they need to navigate. And this is just consumer spending. Similar trends exist in B2B, which is usually estimated at twice consumer spending. Differentiating is becoming pivotal and increasingly hard, which means understanding users is becoming ever more important. In a recent HubSpot survey, marketers said understanding customers and customer needs was one of their top 3 challenges, coming just behind generating traffic and leads—the activity which dominates most marketers’ time, not to mention their budgets.

Chart showing how 80% of companies believe they provide a superior proposition while only 8% of their customers agree

Most businesses don’t realise how little they know about their customers

A much-cited study from Bain & Company found that 80% of business leaders believe they deliver a “superior experience” to their customers, but only 8% of customers agree. A large part of the reason for this disconnect is a lack of investment, a fact that has changed little since the study’s publication. The same study found that 95% of management teams claim to be customer focused, but on average businesses only spend 5-10% of marketing budgets on research, and that average conceals a lot of fragmentation. More than 50% of research spending happens in the US and nearly half comes from just 3 sectors (pharma, media and entertainment, and consumer goods). The second part of the reason is that even when companies invest, understanding consumers is hard. Customers are varied, opaque, changing, and hard to reach. Secondary research takes hours or days and primary research takes weeks or months, and costs thousands. The vast majority of decisions get made with very little of the relevant information at hand, with customer feedback only available once products or campaigns are launched. And for businesses without the resources or time to invest in research, this can be fatal. CB Insights found that 45% of startups failed because they didn’t understand the market, either because they mistimed it or there was simply no user need for their product.

What if you could ask your audience in seconds?

Semilattice was founded on the belief that orders of magnitude improvements in the speed and cost of research would have a big impact on business’ ability to understand the market. Our first product gives you an AI model of your audience which answers questions like they do in seconds. By mining the vast amounts of human insight inside LLMs while being closely aligned to your specific audience, it lets you rapidly answer research questions across the customer journey, from brand awareness, market trends, and competitor perceptions to jobs to be done, use case requirements, and customisation needs.

Try Semilattice for free

To accelerate your market understanding, try Semilattice now. Get started for free with 15 ready-to-use audience models covering a range of tech industry segments. Or schedule a call to talk about creating a custom model of your audience.