The Bedrock of Brand Building: Why Consumer Insights Matter
Announcing our investment in Tracksuit
As investors, we spend most of our time exploring the “art of the possible,” imagining how breakthrough technologies will change the way we think about software and commerce. However, it is equally important to ask: “what isn’t going to change over the next 10-20 years?” Throughout VMG’s two decades investing in consumer brands, one truth has remained constant: brands care about what people think. The need to understand how consumers feel about a company’s products pricing, advertisements, experience, and overall brand is – and will remain – mission-critical for any consumer business.
Rooted in this belief, VMG Technology is leading Tracksuit’s $25M Series B fundraise. Tracksuit provides brands always-on awareness, consideration and brand health data, contextualizing results against a brand’s competitive set and driving informed decisions in brand-building. With a powerful longitudinal data set covering 10,000 brands (expected to double by end of this year), and robust tooling to drive decisions based on this information, Tracksuit is at the forefront of the consumer insights category’s tech-fueled renaissance.
Consumer insights is one of the largest and most durable categories of spend for brands. The market research services industry alone is an $80B+ market, and that excludes the billions of dollars spent on technology and internal insights teams. AI and automation will not make the category any less essential, but will open up new ways for brands to understand and make use of consumer sentiment, paving the way for emerging businesses to lead the next generation of insights.
Many large brands invest millions of dollars annually to better understand their customers, using these insights to drive decision-making across the organization. Through our work with consumer brands and discussions with operators across a range of consumer-facing industries, it’s clear that consumer insights is not a siloed function; it is a foundational capability underpinning every function in a business:
The data builds a cohesive picture of who customers are, what they care about, and how they respond to a brand’s actions – helping organizations make long-term, strategic and short-term, tactical decisions.
“At Turo, we’re redefining what it means to move freely, and that requires more than just a bold vision. It demands a deep, real-time understanding of how our brand is resonating across markets. Brand tracking isn’t just a marketing tool for us. It’s a strategic compass that gives us the agility and clarity to measure what matters, adapt quickly, and stay ahead in a category we’re helping to shape.”
- Global Brand Strategy Director at Turo, Matthew Kerbel
State of the Market Today
A number of options exist for companies looking to better understand their customers:
Larger enterprises typically have the budget and in-house expertise to blend multiple research methods - commissioning robust brand studies via service providers while also running recurring surveys using DIY tools. Many have highlighted the need for a hybrid solution that combines the rigor and strategic depth of months-long brand studies with the repeatability, speed, and ease of a DIY solution. Smaller companies, constrained by budget and resources, tend to rely on occasional studies and affordable DIY tools, and are underserved when it comes to robust, trusted, and accessible insights.
The Opportunity Ahead
With clear demand for innovation, new entrants can learn from what has made each segment successful, including the depth and actionability of insights from consulting firms / agencies, the mission criticality of research tooling (e.g., used as the survey system of record), and the ease and speed of DIY solutions.
“There’s an incredible appetite for consumer insights to step up more, to be that real-time strategic business partner that comes at the right moment, with the right processes, and with the right consumer insights to challenge and inspire the teams. Because markets are only getting more and more competitive.” [1]
- Chief Consumer Insights Officer at PepsiCo, Stephan Gans
Historically, generating meaningful insights required complicated survey design, interview time (e.g., for qualitative insight), and manual analysis. AI unlocks a faster path to insights with dynamic survey creation, AI-led conversations, and ongoing data collection, while also making it easier to extract clear, actionable takeaways from complex datasets. Companies can now build higher-quality, longitudinal insights that are both scalable and cost effective, driving outperformance over legacy solutions on two key consumer insights product vectors:
Improving the economics of delivery via lower cost data collection/validation models or improving the speed to complete any step in the insights process.
Impacting decision-making by improving insights extraction and quality.
In combination, these two improvements can deliver brands the depth and decision-driving influence of a bespoke research report at the cost and speed of the DIY solutions. We’ve seen three key categories of product innovation emerge that are taking advantage of this fundamental capability shift:
Always-on surveying: Advances in survey instrumentation and AI-based respondent qualification have reduced the cost of continuous surveying. This unlocks value in two key ways: first, by enabling budget-constrained mid-market brands to access ongoing consumer insights, and second, by allowing them to chart how specific actions drive changes in customer behavior and sentiment over time – not only in discrete moments. Tracksuit is a breakout leader in this category, enabling brands to continuously monitor brand health and awareness for themselves and their closest competitors through a simple dashboard. Giving brands direct access to this continuous stream of data generates new possibilities, such as integrating top-of-funnel brand awareness metrics into downstream applications like marketing mix models (MMMs).
Accessible complexity: Advances in natural language processing and generative AI have simplified the most time-intensive aspects of complex insights research. AI-native tools can do more than improve accuracy, speed and cost. They can also power greater depth by prompting context-aware follow-ups at-scale and in real time – an aspect of research that was previously time-consuming, labor-intensive, and only facilitated after an insights professional reviewed the initial results. Today, brands spend two to three times the original survey cost just to re-engage the same panel with targeted follow-up questions. Emerging companies like Knit, Strella, and Listen Labs are automating complex qualitative research with AI, reducing both the marginal cost of an interview and the time to insight. Incumbent qualitative platforms like Suzy have also quickly expanded into AI-based offerings for follow-up questions.
Synthetic data: Identifying and surveying the right panel is the most expensive part of the insights process today, and directly impacts the quality of insights. Legacy players like Numerator have built strong moats through proprietary panels. Now, AI-native startups like Brox are training “synthetic” panels from in-depth interviews with real consumers, enabling fast, low-cost querying across topics. This method cannot collect actual customer feedback or capture real-time reactions, and will require trust-building within organizations that base high-stakes decisions on insights. Still, the dramatic improvements in speed, depth, and cost of delivery make these companies worth watching - particularly for areas like concept testing or looking at low-incidence categories.
What Will Win the Market?
Amid the wave of change reshaping the consumer insights market, we think a couple different product archetypes have a path to building durable, multi-billion dollar businesses.
First, we think becoming the system of record for critical, repeated use cases gives companies a clear and durable place in the insights tech stack. Particularly as the insights category has become more competitive, specificity gives technology players an advantage in building trust (i.e., being known for something) and allows for more impact on decision making. These are the recurring metrics (e.g., brand tracking, NPS) that anchor quarterly planning meetings, inform GTM strategy, and ladder directly into board-level metrics. By focusing on frequency, consistency, and cross-functional relevance, this archetype embeds deeply across the organization. Success here means being known for one or multiple metrics that matter and becoming indispensable as the company's source of truth for measuring them.
“[Brand tracking] is a good proxy for our top of funnel channels and tracks closely to our business KPIs and financials. We know what adding +1pt of awareness means and is valued to our business.”
- VP of Marketing at Leading Consumer Financial Products Company
Second, we are excited about accessible complexity: helping companies write, program, field, and analyze complex research at a fraction of the time and cost of services firms. A large share of the insights market is spent on one-off studies like segmentation, pricing, or brand equity, which require deep research expertise and strategic insight. We see an opportunity to deliver the same strategic depth through researcher-led AI, replicating the workflows and judgment of a top-tier quant researcher or strategy consultant.
In both models, the clarity of takeaways is critical. Whether consistently tracking drivers of brand-health like Tracksuit, or enabling teams to build complex research to shape go-forward strategy, category winners will help companies not only understand what consumers are saying, but also what to do about it. Empowered by a fundamental shift in technology architecture, we are inspired by the latest wave of consumer insights innovation and these companies’ prospects to win an even greater share of the $80B market than the prior batch of innovators did.
Our investment in Tracksuit reflects our conviction in the first model—becoming the trusted source of truth for a core, recurring metric. If you're building in the next gen insights space — particularly by making high-complexity research radically more accessible— we’d love to connect!