As media consumption becomes more fragmented and emerging formats gain traction, marketers face challenges in tracking consumer feedback, opinions, and sentiment across multiple data sources in real time. This growing need for a unified view of the consumer and faster insights is being answered by consumer intelligence platforms.

What Are Consumer Intelligence Platforms?

As social listening tools have expanded their remit well beyond social media monitoring, we broadened their market name to consumer intelligence platforms. Forrester defines consumer intelligence platforms as platforms that derive real-time insights and reporting from data sources outside of their company (e.g., social media, news media, or consumer data) using proprietary analysis techniques to enable consumer-driven decisions.

How Do Consumer Intelligence Platforms Add Value To Your Marketing Team?

Consumer intelligence platforms help marketing and consumer insights leaders leverage real-time insights to better understand their customers (current and prospective), refine their marketing and product strategy, and monitor and manage their brand’s reputation.

In our just-published report, The Consumer Intelligence Platforms Landscape, Q4 2025, we identify the top 10 use cases for this market, broken out by core and extended use cases.

Core use cases:

  • Audience segmentation and insights
  • Brand health monitoring
  • Competitive intelligence
  • Trend identification and forecasting

Extended use cases:

  • Campaign performance
  • Creator and user-generated content identification
  • Customer experience optimization
  • Media monitoring and crisis management
  • Product research
  • Search engine optimization

Check out the full report to learn about notable providers in this market, functionality by use case, and extended use cases by provider. Forrester clients can schedule a guidance session to learn more about the social suite landscape and how to supercharge their social media team.