Streetbees raises $12m in Series A funding to scale the world’s first real-time global consumer insights platform
The investment, led by Atomico with participation from all existing investors — including LocalGlobe, Octopus and BGF Ventures — signals a new era for the consumer research space as a whole. Here’s why.
And so begins the latest chapter in Streetbees’ short history. With this investment, the company will be able to further develop the core machine learning technology at the heart of our methodology, as well as expanding our data science teams and officially expanding in the US branch.
But the truly exciting element of this story (find out more here) isn’t about what it means for the business. It’s about what it means for understanding consumers — wherever they are in the world, whatever their habits or lifestyle.
Take the food and beverage industry. Legacy brands (read: large scale, multinational corporations) are struggling to keep up with smaller, more agile competitors. One reason for this? A lack of rich, genuine insights — preventing them from making more informed and accurate decisions about consumer behaviour, and unable to predict future trends with confidence.
A recent Streetbees study, carried out in the UK, shows that when it comes to new products that appear on the market, consumers are almost as likely to prefer to try something created by a small, independent brand than they are a bigger, well-established one (a 52% — 48% split). This shows that the marketplace has fractured into two distinct groups, each with very different characteristics.
When asking these consumers to name the reasons why they prefer their chosen type of brand, the results are polarising. Small-brand shoppers, for instance, are much more focused on discovering something new. More than one-half (56%) choose these brands because of their innovative offerings — over four times the amount of big brand shoppers (13%) that feel the same way.
For them, the production (natural ingredients, sourced locally, produced ethically — polling at a combined total of 63%) is a big deal, and something established brands can no longer avoid if they want to maintain their historic market share.
In comparison, big brand shoppers are all about quality (69%), familiarity (64%) and the trustworthiness (67%) that comes with it; ethics, ingredients and provenance barely register as concerns. In short, this means brands are simply unable to corner the whole market using a traditional approach to gather consumer insights — they need to identify who they want to target, however specific, and begin learning about their habits.
In 2018, it isn’t economically viable to rely on lengthy, expensive panel discussions; they need authentic insights, delivered by customers at the moment of product exposure, purchase and consumption — and this is where Streetbees comes in.
For the consumer, it’s a vital step towards an environment that encompasses the best of both worlds. For brands, it’s a game-changing ability to capture the detail within people’s lives at scale and analyse it, allowing them to both understand the bigger picture and act like an innovative start-up that has intimate knowledge of local markets.
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A quick word on our methodology: The figures in the article are taken from 875 people across the UK, carried out in March 2018. All of the data was collected by mobile and web surveys, and is accurate to within 3 percentage points 19 times out of 20.
Streetbees is an independent research platform, founded on the principle of humanising how we collect data. Join our community today by downloading the Streetbees app.
