What does insight mean?
The word ‘insight’ is one of the most commonly used terms in today’s marketing, but what it really means? Why is it so important?
The strict definition of the term is the capacity to gain an accurate and deep understanding of someone or something. Applied to marketing, however, it goes a step further, understanding insight as the key that allows us to find the solution to a problem. Therefore, they are the hidden aspects of the way of thinking, feeling or acting of the consumers that can generate opportunities of new products, strategies or actionable communication for the companies.
These insights are based on perceptions, images or experiences of the consumer related to the brand, so he can feel identified with the proposed message and act accordingly.
Let’s put it in context: From Mass Marketing to Personalized Marketing
Traditional marketing researches involved gathering lots of facts, figures, and statistics to look for trends, but they were actually just scanning the surface of the market. What they did was develop a product and then spend millions trying to convince consumers that product was what they needed.
Nowadays, things have changed. The Internet and social networks have allowed consumers to be interconnected between them. Thus, they have a lot more where to choose and compare, which makes them much more demanding when choosing a product. If we want to be chosen, we will have to offer them something that fits perfectly with what they are looking for and for this we must know exactly what they might want.
Current companies must collect consumer information in order to create effective and targeted strategies. Consumer researches now get under the skin and into the consumer’s head to find out the “why” of a purchase, to understand what happened and to project what might happen in the future.
Under this situation, insights appear and take power in the decisions of the consumer oriented companies.
How we identify an insight?
Consumer insights do not necessarily come from one focus group or customer survey. In general, information gathering activities are combined with a series of analyzes that provide meaning to this collected information. Often, in today’s business environment, it even includes the vision of an anthropologist or ethnographer for a deeper cultural understanding of what an individual or a group.
Generating information is always useful in these cases and allows us to get very meaningful information, but we must not forget that there are also other sources of information that the consumer is providing us. This information could come from complaints, social networks, consumer forums or reviews. Here are four tips to guide this investigation towards the client and get more out of the information we already have:
What can we use them for?
Once we have identified an insight we must take it into consideration in any of our actions related to the consumer, because this will help us to take any decision. However, there are four uses in which case they are very useful:
- Source of ideas for the generation of new products or services
- Source of positioning or repositioning opportunities
- Input of communication strategies aimed at connecting, attracting and retaining consumers
- The basis of a genuinely consumer focused business philosophy
To summarize, this concept can and should be applied to the commercial and corporate decision making of all those customer oriented companies that have as a purpose generate a competitive advantage towards the market. The ability to identify the influences of our consumers and predict how they will share information between them can lead us to a much more effective relationship with them. Once we know how our consumers think it will be much easier to establish and maintain long-term relationships with them.
Sources:
Advertising Communications Technology 