Understanding or Insight?
Most companies have more understanding than they know what to do with
Data from qual and quant consumer research; observations from market monitoring, trade observation and knowledge generated by internal review all crowd in to the point where they just don’t have the mindspace to separate the important from the irrelevant.
What they often lack is insight. The genuinely fresh and inspiring connections between pieces of understanding that provide the springboards for original thinking and inspired solutions.
We define insights as “the inspired connections that lead to big ideas”…
Insights are anchored in truth
They are anchored in truth, but contain an element of consumer dissatisfaction with the status quo that means consumers are open to new solutions.
The truth can be something pretty well established: like the desire most people have to eat more healthily, or the determination to organise their time better. The insight comes from beginning to understand why so many people fail to achieve their deired outcome. In these barriers or disconnects lie powerful and motivating insights.
The best insights are always dynamic and have the power to drive innovators inexorably towards a course of action… and the invention of the next big idea.
Insight can come from anywhere
Our processes are designed to help clients convert their mass of understanding into a manageable and accessible asset bank of insights
The inspired connections that are the foundation of great insights often occur when you are least expecting them - we have clients who’s breakthrough connections have occurred whilst driving, whilst shaving, whilst jogging, even when they’re in the shower.
That’s because it’s not the conscious brain that is responsible for insight, but a tiny part of the brain called the right hemisphere anterior superior temporal gyrus.
Scientists have demonstrated that you are most likely to have a genuine insight when your conscious brain is focused on something else - and your subconscious is allowed time to free-wheel!
Insight generation and management
Insights might occur in the most unexpected places, but you are highly unlikely to have a genuine insight without fresh stimulus.
Our insight processes start with a structured review of the richest sources of fresh stimulus. This can be your bank of existing consumer research, published market data, or material found on the internet. Original material can come from consumer research, conversations with stakeholders and expert witnesses. It can also come from R&D reviews, trend reviews and myriad other sources.
The challenge is to dig out the most relevant, inspiring and though provoking material ... and turn it into rich inputs and stimulus for workshops.
Insight creation workshops
Insight Creation Workshops then create opportunities for your team and ours to share their understanding of your consumer, market and brand.
We would always recommend the use of a multi-disciplinary team for insight creation. That way you have many different perspectives on the world covered in every session.
We then isolate the market truths around which insights can be clustered and use proven, structured processes to transform them into dynamic insight models containing ‘idea spaces’, each capable of driving creative idea generation and problem solving.
Multi-dimensional insight models are then constructed linking together the market truths, insights and idea-spaces into opportunity maps that can be build on and enhanced over time.
But identifying and mapping your insights is only the start of the process. Next you need to use them as the starting points for insight activation workshops and as platforms on which to begin building innovation workstreams.