Zappi Foundations

Contents

• What are Connected Insights?
  • How to set up a system for connected insights
• Insights systems
  • Innovation System
  • Advertising System
  • Brand Health Tracking
  • Ad Hoc testing
• Category
• Audience
  • Audience options
  • Representative Audiences
  • Custom Audiences
• Norm
  • Zappi Curated Norm
• Where to next?
  • Need help?

Introduction

Decision velocity has exploded - insights professionals and marketing teams today face more choices, at greater speed, across shifting competitors, consumer behavior, and technology. To keep up, you need more than one-off research projects. You need a connected system that puts insights at the center of decision-making.

Have you ever struggled to leverage learnings from your past research scattered across platforms, presentation decks or suffered from data incomparability?

Connected Insights solves these problems. It allows brands to mine their past insights to anticipate consumer behavior, understand what drives effective advertising, innovation and brand building, and in turn, create a competitive advantage.

Setting up Connected Insights now ensures you’re not just running research—you’re building a long-term capability for better, faster, and more democratized decision-making across the business. 

What are Connected Insights?

Connected Insights is about unifying all your data and research—past, present, and future—across every stage of development into a single platform. This ensures you can access and leverage insights any time you need them, so every decision you make is better informed.

It’s a way of systematizing research that helps your organization get smarter with each iteration while building long-term capability. By starting with a connected foundation, every project builds on the last, creating a loop of insights that compounds over time instead of leaving you with disconnected findings.

Connected Insights also democratizes access. It makes knowledge actionable across your entire organization, enabling teams to move faster, with more confidence, and at greater scale. And because it’s grounded in consistent, high-quality data, your research avoids fragmentation and generates meaningful insights that drive effective advertising, innovation, and sustainable competitive advantage.

Zappi’s ultimate goal is to empower you to quickly and continuously acquire consumer data, and turn that data into actionable insights. Then you can easily access and leverage those insights anytime, whenever you need them, ensuring you can make the best, consumer-oriented decisions at every turn. Your team can deliver today's most powerful competitive advantage: true consumer centricity. 

How to set up a system for connected insights

When you use different methodologies or target varying audiences, it can create fragmented results that can't be reliably compared or scaled. To build an evolving data asset that you can continue to learn from and leverage for longer-term decision-making, research data needs to be grounded in compatible, high-quality data that lives all in one place. This is why we recommend consistently selecting the same category, audience, and methodology for each research project. It unlocks the opportunity to tap into past insights to help inform your next decision, compare performance, and surface trends as they develop.

To get the most out of your research, it’s important to think about the category you serve, the markets you are active in, and the audiences you target. These each affect the norm that your research is benchmarked against, so being intentional and consistent with your choices will help you gain high quality, reliable insights that you can compare over and over.

The major areas we will cover in this article are:

• Insights Systems
• Category
• Audience
• Norm

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Insights systems

Zappi’s connected insights offering is broken down into three systems, advertising, innovation, and brand. Each of these systems is composed of solutions that help you get the consumer insights you need to fuel your product and campaign development and grow brand health. It’s important to understand the use cases our solutions can help with so you can make the best choice for your business. 

Innovation System

Summary

• A modern innovation research system - supercharged by AI - to power agile, iterative product development with continuous consumer feedback. It allows you to learn and iterate quickly, course-correct early, and bring winning products to market with confidence
• Test ideas, elements, and early and late-stage concepts for iterative product development across every stage of the innovation life cycle. You can also leverage concept testing data and Zappi's leading agentic ecosystems to create new breakthrough product ideas, iterate on those, and feed back into your systematic testing. 

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Advertising System 

Summary

• A modern advertising research system that gives you quick, accurate consumer feedback, to fuel advertising development. Powered by data, supercharged by AI.
• Use iterative testing to optimize not just one ad, but your entire advertising program. Keep customers in the loop at every decision point from early ideas, to storyboards, and in a wide range of execution types and channels. Get market-validated insights to make sure your advertisements go to market in the best final version possible.

Amplify Ad System - Amplify is the most validated and predictive method on the market with significant depth of insight for confident decision making. It combines the top 3 research approaches: in context exposure with behavioural data, system 1 instinctive response and direct questioning.

Creative System - Creative Suite matches leading market benchmarks in its ability to predict ad performance and identify optimization opportunities.

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Brand Health Tracking

Summary

• A frictionless, scalable and cost-efficient way of delivering actionable brand data in real-time.
  • Monitor what people know, think, and feel about your brand so you can take action right away, or visit the data whenever you need it.

Ad Hoc testing

• Ask Anything is our Ad Hoc Testing solution that sits outside of Zappi's three core systems and is available to all platform subscribers. It’s a flexible and simple survey solution for any emerging business question.
• It's customizable and approachable with flexible questions, charts and analysis, to get any business question answered quickly.

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Category

Picking a category is one of the first and most important steps during Zappi’s configuration phase. Depending on the system or solution, the category you choose may:

• Determine the norm your stimuli are benchmarked against.
  • This helps you to view your ideas in the right competitive context to help you make smarter decisions.
• Impact the survey itself.
  • We tailor our surveys using the category context to generate more relevant responses.
• Define the broader audience in some solutions.
  • Our highest calibre solutions use a representative category audience, driving better data and more predictive results. You can learn more by reading our Activate It and Amplify articles.

You will be able to see what categories are available as you begin configuring your next project. It’s very important to be intentional when deciding on the category to use since it can affect what audiences and norms are available for your project. Zappi can help you choose the right category options for your organization during the onboarding process. 

Be sure to read through our guidance on how to choose a category.

Here are some best practices:

• Think of the size of the category and what else may be competing with it. This can impact your sample. Consolidate where you can. 
  • We as researchers often see categories in a more narrow way than consumers do. They make choices to serve particular needs or occasions. They aren’t thinking of it as choosing between carbonated soft drinks and sparkling water; they are choosing something that will quench their thirst or multiple options to offer at a gathering.
  • If you have a broad range of products you test, there can be benefits when you avoid over-segmenting the categories you use. 
  • Our tagging functionality helps you unlock deeper insights into what is driving preferences on more granular separations. However, for the purposes of your research setup, you should stick to testing in fewer categories so that:
    • You have more robust child category norms
    • You can compare and learn more across your tests
    • You more easily test ads and concepts that straddle across categories
    • You test in a relatable and understandable way for consumers

Customization

If you need to create a custom category, we can set one up for you. There are some considerations and best practices when creating a custom category:

• Use intuitive and logical categories from the consumer’s perspective.
  • Choose categories that reflect the consumer’s regular buying experience. Take inspiration from large online marketplace categorization to help guide your choices.
  • Don’t pick a category so narrow that you miss the chance to capture consumers that may seek to have the same need met as those who are already converted.
  • If you need to add a category, be sure to pick one with an instantly recognizable name. The name should clearly communicate the category and what belongs in it. Avoid industry marketing terms in favor of simpler, descriptive names.
• During platform implementation our team will ensure that you have the right category for your needs, aligned with our best practice recommendations. If you are an existing customer and want to review or need to add a new category, then your team will be able to help.

Learn more about Categories.

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Audience

The audience is often the second choice you make when setting up a project, which determines who you will collect responses from. Your ideal audience will depend on your use case, but in all cases, broader is better. A broad audience maximizes your brand growth and sales by understanding the behavior of the widest range of potential buyers as possible.

Light buyers and non-buyers are shown by empirical research to be a primary source of brand growth. Since the top 20% of buyers typically generate only half of total sales, focusing solely on loyal customers overlooks the other 80% who have the potential to drive growth. By choosing a broader category audience, you can measure true market potential, engage more light and non-buyers, and build sustainable brand growth.

Additionally, effective benchmarking, norms, and meta analysis requires consistent, quality data. Consistency is key. You can't have a standard for what is effective advertising or innovation, if you choose your own adventure each time you decide who you want to talk to. You need to consistently talk to a relatively broad sample. 

Zappi generally recommends using quotas in conjunction with broad audiences to more fully control the number of respondents with specific characteristics,  to achieve a stable and reliable sample with greatest long-term benefit.

Read more about Natural Fallout and Quotas

Audience options

Selecting an audience is an important choice. It’s best to think through your options before you start your first project so you can consistently target the same broad audience each time. During onboarding, we’ll talk through your audience requirements to make sure you are equipped with the audiences you’ll need. Then, it’s up to you to use the audience that’s versatile enough to use across all of your future projects so that you can reliably compare your results from all of them. 

Representative Audiences

Zappi's Representative Audiences connect you with the people who truly drive your brand’s growth, through high-quality, predictive, and efficient samples that balance reach, feasibility, and research rigor. This audience option uses country level demographic quotas to create a real-market representative sample for the category.

The Amplify and Activate It systems use this audience selection by default. These solutions still let you narrow down the results by selecting different Profiles that will adjust your analysis.

There's a lot more to learn about Representative Audiences in our dedicated article.

Custom Audiences

Custom Audience Build is a professional service to help design and build a custom audience that matches your requirements while still following best practices to ensure the audience is feasible. Once the audience is available you will be charged a one-off build fee, and the audience will be enabled on your Zappi Platform for ongoing use. Read more about Custom Audiences.

Get more help with Audience Selection.

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Norm

Making the right comparisons is critical to decision making. With Zappi, you can benchmark in a flexible, dynamic way, enabling you to draw on the best available benchmarks for the decision and the stimulus at that moment in time.  

A norm is a set of aggregate survey responses, against which a similar subject or answer set is compared. Simply put, comparing your results to a norm allows you to determine "what good looks like" for key metrics. 

For the most actionable insights, you need benchmarks that reflect your specific category, market, and competitive landscape. In many cases, an organic norm will be available that is made up of every test run on the solution in your chosen category. If there isn’t a relevant norm, or the ones available don’t align with how you measure success, our Custom Norm Creation service builds a benchmark tailored for you. We design, source, and integrate data assets that ensure your comparisons are meaningful and aligned with your goals. 

Zappi Curated Norm

A Zappi Curated Norm is representative of the brands and categories in the market today and free of the noise that may be present in organic norms due to skewed brand mix, iterative testing, and historical data. Assets that build this norm are carefully selected by Zappi’s expert research team to ensure the norm is representative of the market and category landscape, robust, and relevant for today's decision-making.

Advertising curated norms are built from a set of high performing ads across a range of categories, which closely reflects the real world advertising environment. Since they’re refreshed annually, they’re always relevant to the current market. This gives us the flexibility to integrate emerging creative approaches, tones, and themes and we can continuously discover new normals as they form.

Learn more about Zappi’s Curated Norm availability in our dedicated Curated Norms article.

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Where to next?

Now that you have the tools to create a foundation for connected insights, you are ready to select a solution and start some research! 

Head to our Getting Started Guide for an in-depth look at configuring a Zappi Project!

Need help?

During onboarding and implementation Zappi will help set your organization for connected insights success. If you would like additional help after implementation, or if you're already a Zappi customer who is reviewing their connected insights system and need help to optimize it, we've got you covered!

Our Professional Services team and our consultants can offer technical customization beyond our standard onboarding, hands-on support in the platform, and guidance from strategic and operational experts.

Learn more about Zappi Professional Services and Consultancy.

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