Insights are wonderful things. They can make us laugh, make us proud, make us sing, and make us money. But insights are not always easy to come by. They tend to take on mystical qualities so that we to think only ‘gifted’ individuals can create them. The good news is that we don’t believe insights belong only to the chosen ones. We believe that anyone can learn how to identify and craft brilliant insights and apply this skill time and time again for their brands and business.

Let’s start with our definition:

“A profound understanding of consumer belief and behaviours that provides inspiring springboards for exciting new brand building opportunities.”

You will notice that there are 2 parts to our definition, both fundamental to what an insight is.

“A profound understanding of consumer belief and behaviours…
We all know that the world is full of exciting facts. But consumer information on its own has no value. Unless analysed, interrogated and extrapolated it remains nothing more than a pile of facts. Interesting but not insightful.

To understand why consumers behave the way they do we need to understand the beliefs that drive their behaviours. What are the values, attitudes and principles that make them respond the way they do? What are the emotional and functional levers we can use to change behaviour?

The best way to uncover these is to use tools and a systematic approach to discovering insights. Tools can support you to dig below behaviours to understand the beliefs that drive them. They can also help you understand why consumer behaviour that appears contradictory on the surface makes sense. We do this by delving into the contradiction to analyse why two conflicting forces are at play.

…that provides inspiring springboards for exciting new brand building opportunities.”

A common trap to fall into is crafting an articulated insight that everyone loves BUT has no bearing on your brand or business. Whilst these insights are often fascinating, they are irrelevant for your brand. The insights we are looking to discover are those that are both based on a depth of belief and relevant to our challenge and brand. These are leverageable or active insights. We need our insight to be leverageable in 2 senses:

1. Fit to our challenge – does it create opportunities we can use for the problem we are trying to solve?
2. Fit to brand – are the insights and resulting opportunities appropriate for our brand?

Delving deep into consumer beliefs and attitudes that lead us to new opportunities requires more than a ‘gift’. The good news is that this skill is learnable and repeatable. It requires the desire to understand the ‘why’ that sits below the behaviour and what opportunities this offers the brand. It requires practise and persistence, information and intuition, creativity and rigour. It requires the perfect blend of method and magic.

If you’d like help with using tools to help you turn your understanding into insights, please get in touch!