How to lead insights into action:

If there is any consensus among CEOs, they would all agree that actionable consumer and customer insights are a pre-requisite to be successful.

However, the existing belief systems around insights within companies are not helping to build a true insight culture or what is called consumer centricity.

So why do companies struggle with this? Why is there still so much money and effort spent in developing a lot of good information without teams being able to action that information?

Let us start with the fact that if you asked your C-suite people what insight is, they might all give a different answer.

Often their views about insight would relate to data and information, rather than focusing on the very essence of insight.

Second to that, there is a certain complexity in the concept of insight as it refers to be actionable, specific, directional and not multi-interpretable.

An insight is a deeper understanding about customers’ and consumers’ behaviors, motivations, attitudes and beliefs that can lead into immediate and specific business action.

An insight without action (at least to the stage of potential action), is just banal information without reason to exist.

“People want to eat healthy food”, “people seek convenience”, “people want good service”, “people want to pay low prices”, etc.

All of these statements are truisms, but they are not insights.

If you join high level meetings, they are full of truisms. They seem to give leaders the idea of being insightful, however the truism don’t direct a business towards how to specify actions leading into a non-negotiable direction. They allow people who have to execute to make their own interpretations (at best) or are just ignored (at worst.)

All of these truisms or buzz words lack specific “human context”.

An insight cannot be properly defined without specifying context.

The way we as human beings are organizing the complexity of our reality starts with the situation we are in.

A human context is defined by a situation we are living and how we have learnt to adjust to the moment practically and emotionally.

It is about how we have learnt to apply solutions to our situational needs and also to overcome barriers we experience.

Imagine a mother in the UK who wants to feed her children in the morning. This is a very specific context that triggers emotions and desires of everyone being part of that moment.

Now imagine the same mother has to organize a birthday party for her children.

The same mother could make quite arbitrary decisions on food items that she find adequate, where she would try to reduce sugary solutions in the morning moment and would add a lot of sugar alternatives to the birthday moment.

On the surface that looks like people are not very consistent and rational with their behaviours. And that is true if we look at how people behave in so many contradicting ways. However, we can find rationality we analyse human context.

This is such a profound starting point for any kind of innovation process and branding exercise.

The next layer that determines insight is related to human intent.

Within any context you are looking at, you need to identify the intention the protagonists and antagonists in the situation have.

Coming back to our example: The mother who makes breakfast in the morning might visualize her kids going to school. She wants them to perform at their best, being active and energetic – focused on the lessons in school. She has read a lot about how a lot of sugar now might boost the energy levels of her children short term but will leave them tired after. Her intention is to introduce good and balanced nutrition for breakfast so the children have energy throughout the day.

Her intention at the birthday party leaves her with a very different intention: She knows that sweet stuff and McDonald food make the children happy and it creates the best shared denominator among all the kids in the room. She knows it is actually bad food, but hey, you only have birthday once a year, so the issue of unhealthiness can be post rationalized.

I think we can now all relate how context induces intent.

We also understand how personal intent is driving decision making and how we overcome conflicts that the decision making can bring forward. In the end we all have our mental biases.

If we want to understand human beings we have to start from there even though we have to accept that a person can contradict her/himself through the day in many ways.

If we start accepting this we will stop trying to identify insights based on socio-demographics or other paradigms.

Finally, we have to discuss the quintessential element of insight aside context and intent: the barriers people experience to maximize the satisfaction of their intent.

Going back to the morning mothering moment.

Her intent is to get nutritious food into her kids. However, she knows that regularly ends with a battle because what mothers consider to be good food in the morning isn’t necessarily what the kids love to eat – a classical conflict of interest.

With the three markers – context, intention and barriers – you can define an insight platform that lends itself for everything a marketer is looking for. It is concrete and gives actionable direction for decision making.

A marketing person in the dairy industry now has all the practical and emotional components that have to be part of any concept idea they want to push forward.

The platform allows for digging deeper into how specific products doing a good job to help the mother and the kids maximizing the moment. It makes it possible to identify language and creative expressions that connect with the audiences effectively.

Let us now turn the page and have a look at how companies are trying to get to insights these days.

Businesses today have seen a lot of attempts to come to better data integration.

Behavioural, attitudinal, social media, internal and other descriptive data is combined and statistically analysed to identify patterns that could explain behaviour and can help to identify opportunities from new product development and to fine tune creative engagement processes.

It is also utilized to get more granular information about audiences related to the brand and to do post mortem analysis.

Working in this environment of complex data structures, we may not forget the relevance of the three areas I have explained earlier.

Even the best statistical approach that estimates future behavioural patterns requires an analogue focus on how data establishes understanding about human context.

We often see data on slides, however we cannot connect the dots between the data we see and the life of people behind the data. Because of that we cannot define how to identify better solutions.

To be able to connect data to peoples’ lives it requires empathy for human beings aside the critical capabilities to analyse complex data-structures.

If decision makers cannot establish context that connects with numerical/statistical conclusions there is no insight.

But it goes further than that.

If you apply any kind of analysis, methodology or procedural approach to guide your teams through a marketing or innovation process, you have to ask yourself if you can truly relate to human context, intention and barriers.

The mainstream conversations around these issues are related to the fact that data or methodology is not insight and that is true.

The point we need to uphold and teach organizations is that data or methodology can become insight when we are able to contextualize it within the lives of people we serve.

A true challenge for the profession to get fresh and actionable insights into business.