Retailers and brands are discovering new ways to gain valuable customer insight through their use of social media. By creating online social communities, retailers are not only able to build brand loyalty but receive feedback on their products and gain insight for future projects. A recent report found that 85% of marketers believed customer insight is one of the most valuable advantages of social media.

We decided to put the spotlight on the customer insight panel at this year’s SMWF. Lars Silberbauer, Social Media Director at LEGO will be speaking on the dedicated panel discussing how customer insight managers are using social media, and what the best approaches to using social media for market research are. We caught up with him for a chat ahead of the event.

LEGO not only uses the generic social media platforms to interact with their customers, they have also created two unique platforms of their own and thereby. One of these platforms is CUUSOO (Japanese for ‘I wish’) which is a stage for consumers to upload and share their own LEGO models with other LEGO Fans “This way fans can see what amazing ideas others are coming up with and this is another way of showing how creative building LEGO bricks can be,” commented Silberbauer.

LEGO fans are also able to suggest new projects on LEGO CUUSOO and if a projects gets more than 10,000 supporters LEGO Group might turn it into a real product. Through CUUSOO LEGO is gaining invaluable product insight and market research to aid the planning of their future product lines.

The other social media platform created by LEGO is ReBrick, it’s a bookmarking service where LEGO fans can curate content and share the content with other LEGO fans. Silberbauer said “The content is very impressive, and ReBrick is one of the ways that we hope to show more people these amazing creations”.

The platform is creating a mutually beneficial relationship between the brand and their fans as both inspire each other, creating a unique dialogue with their customers.

“For us it’s about creating a stage for fans, we want fans to be the centre of attention, so we can step out of it. It’s not about the LEGO Company, it’s about our fans and the notion they have of LEGO.”

With these two unique social media platforms the issue of sustainable growth is a high priority for LEGO. “From a general perspective everything we do in social media is of course about growth, about creating engagement with the product and the brand. We have a growth strategy that is hopefully viable and long term, we want a good engagement with fans not just lots of likes on Facebook page, and we are in this to develop a long term sustainable growth in social media.”

Lars Silberbauer will be joined on the customer insight panel by Al Tepper, Head of Digital & Marketing, EMP plc, Will Abbott, Marketing & Communications Director, Freesat and Diana Plazas, Online Marketing Director, Doubletree – Hilton Worldwide. The session will be taking place in the keynote social media track at 1pm on 28th March at Social Media World Forum and will be discussing how social media is used for co-creation and the benefits that can create. You can find out more about the event here and register for a pass here.