Fuel Cycle FCX Delivers Better Customer Insights for Unified Market Research

Sudipto Ghosh

April 30, 2018

Fuel Cycle FCX Delivers the Combination of Behavioral Data with Stated Preference Data (Like Survey Data) Enabling Insights Professionals with Context-Driven Marketing Research

Last week, at the Martech Conference 2018, leading marketing insights platform, Fuel Cycle launched Fuel Cycle Exchange (FCX). To better understand why Fuel Cycle launched a new product for market research suite, and how marketers could benefit from Fuel Cycle FCX, we spoke to Rick Kelly. Rick is the VP Product Marketing at Fuel Cycle.

Why did you launch Fuel Cycle FCX? What is the core technology driving the insights from FCX?

Customer insights are becoming increasingly important to enterprises. Customers have a growing amount of choices and insights are the best way to understand what customers need, how to position offerings, and grow your business; everyone knows this. But, as we looked around the marketplace, we saw a real gap in market research solutions. There was no solution available to connect multiple tools and methodologies into a single, unified platform. FCX solves this hole by unifying data from multiple sources and partners.

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FCX is enabled by a few key capabilities Fuel Cycle has created over the past 12 months. First, is our integrations API that allows profiling data stored on Fuel Cycle to be posted to integrated tools. Second is a progressive profiling solution we call Profile Maps.

Profile Maps allows us to automatically unify data from multiple sources into a single point of truth around a customer making us agnostic to different data sources, whether that’s your CRM, a survey, or a data file that you upload to Fuel Cycle. This core functionality was developed entirely in-house and makes Fuel Cycle’s ability to ingest data from multiple sources very scalable.

There was no solution available to connect multiple tools and methodologies into a single, unified platform. FCX solves this hole by unifying data from multiple sources and partners.

How does Fuel Cycle FCX enable market researchers to gain better audience insights?

Does it integrate with other martech platforms, like CRM, Data Management Platforms, Marketing Automation, Clouds, etc?

FCX has two important points of integration. The first is with organizational data stored in CRM and Marketing Automation platforms that provide behavioral data on organizations’ research community members. The other point of integration is with research point solutions that enable organizations to capture specific specialized insights. The combination of behavioral data with stated preference data (like survey data) enables insights professionals to finally have research with context.

An example of how this works is Fuel Cycle ingests data from a marketing automation platform that contains a customers’ loyalty tier. Then, we conduct a behavioral segmentation algorithm in a survey and then set up a video-focus group.

Historically, it’s been either impossible or extremely labor intensive to connect all that data together. Now, we’ve created a solution that brings all that data together in real-time to help researchers make better decisions and have a more realistic view of their customer.

Would this new platform help marketers zero onto accurate attributions to their resources?

Fuel Cycle FCX helps marketers create a unified market research suite and derive more value from their data, thus increasing ROI.
Attribution analytics is not a core focus of FCX, however.

The platform allows Fuel Cycle’s integration partners to build on top of the FCX API, providing infrastructure for respondent management via Fuel Cycle’s other product offerings; Fuel Cycle Communities and Fuel Cycle Panels.

What key technologies did you explore at MarTech Conference 2018?

MarTech was a great conference and we met a bunch of potential new partners and integrations for FCX. We’re very interested in data unification and customer experience solutions. There is a lot of interesting technology in the market right now, and we’re anxious to partner with some of the best-in-class technologies.

What are your predictions on Marketing Research platforms for 2018?

The days of siloed market research solutions are now over. Going forward, market research solutions will become more of a solutions suite than a fragmented set of vendors and data unification will be expected.
Any company that’s not integrating multiple data sources is falling behind.

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How should CMOs better invest in technologies that deliver all-in-one audience insights and full marketing lifecycle?

The CMOs are generally very tech savvy and have focused heavily on integration and automation throughout their marketing stacks. However, market research and customer insights is an area where they haven’t emphasized integration as much. The highest-performing companies today are increasing connections between their data sources, from operational data to CRM, to market research.

Thank you, Rick, for chatting with us.