INSIGHT on INSIGHT: An Introduction to Insight

So what brought you to this exciting series about insight?

Is your business struggling and you’re looking for new ways to grow sales?

Do you have a job title that includes the word insight and you realize your skills might have room for improvement?

Are you the curious or ambitious type just looking to learn new things or find a new secret weapon?

Regardless of what brought you here, I hope I’m able to help you find what you’re looking for.

WHY LISTEN TO ME?

Being responsible for insights, specifically shopper insights, has been my career since the 1990s (ignoring a brief diversion into homebuilding shortly before the 2007 real estate bubble burst).

I’m not sure what qualifies one to consider himself or herself an expert so I’ll avoid that word.  However, I can confidently say that there aren’t many people that have more experience doing what I do.  And by experience, I’m referring to both the length of time doing shopper insights and the breadth of topics studied.

I was among the early group tasked with figuring out how to translate consumption-focused market research techniques into a better understanding of the shopping side of the equation.

I’ve personally designed and executed hundreds of online surveys and conducted hundreds more in-person interviews.

I’ve studied over 150 retail-based CPG categories (that is, Consumer Packaged Goods sold through stores to the American shopper).

LOTS OF WORK DOESN’T EQUAL GOOD WORK

Some of you are smart enough to realize this only proves that I’ve done a lot of insights work.  It is still very possible that I’ve only done a lot of crappy insight work, not great insight work.

Hopefully I can keep you engaged long enough to provide enough evidence that my experience and practice gravitates toward the excellence end of that spectrum and gets nowhere near the mediocre end.

LET US BEGIN THIS JOURNEY

I’m going to assume you already have a working definition of the word insight based on how it applies to your business.  But let’s take a moment to make sure we’re on the same page.

Based on the textbook definition, insight is the capacity to gain an accurate and deep intuitive understanding of a person or thing.  In the world of business, insight is about better decision-making and risk management:

• It can be a single piece of information powerful enough to build an entire company, an annual strategy or targeted tactics around.
• It can be the sum of multiple smaller observations that lead to a less obvious, but often even more powerful, conclusion.
• It can even be an untested hypothesis, unproven assumption, general anecdote or gut intuition incorrectly treated as ‘fact’ to justify a decision. 

In its purest, most powerful form, insights identify cause and effect that, once understood, allow a business to manipulate the cause in order to influence the effect.  As businesses learn how to coordinate the right inputs, they more consistently get the desired output.

In a more corrupted form, insights can be used to find evidence that justifies or validates decisions that have already been made.  Last-minute research can be designed to ensure particular supporting data points are delivered.

I prefer insight work focused on learning and discovery that produce light bulb moments.  But I’ll also admit that I’ve done plenty of projects solely to build an insight-based selling story for a product that has already been finalized.

For better or worse, both of these approaches have their place.  Both can help your product gain better retail distribution (getting on the shelf) and more sales (getting off the shelf).  And, therefore, it is critical to know how to deliver both.

That’s one of the many things you’ll learn from this series.

But let’s spend a little more time discussing how insights are important to almost any job.