The trouble with not enough insight

When my twin boys were four, I asked them what the capital of America was. ‘Washington’, said one, ‘Hollywood’, said the other. It was hard to say who was wrong because one offered me a truth, and the other an insight.

It’s insight most brand owners feel they are short of. We can buy creativity, outsource innovation, hire social media strategists, but insight remains something we feel the need to generate ourselves - it’s at the very centre of everything our company does. Yet for all the money spent on research, most of the time what’s served up are very expensive truths, rather than brand-changing insights. Too much Washington and precious little Hollywood.

One reason surely is that we have a monochromatic view of what ‘insight’ is and where to find it. We tend to use ‘insight’ as shorthand for ‘consumer insight’: something the consumer says or does that will open up a new possibility for us and our brand. Yet if one looks at brands that have really broken through in their categories, we see there is a much broader range of sources we could be drawing on: why consumers have much stronger relationships with other categories than they do with ours, and what it would mean to bring some of those drivers into our category; what made the brand successful when it was most successful and what that would mean today; why our company culture is unique, and what element of that our consumer might find compelling. The kinds of questions, in other words, we briefly consider in the first couple of weeks in a new job, and then push aside as the heat to deliver that quarter’s results kicks in.

If we want to expand brand horizons, the first thing we need to do is expand our sense of what an insight is. Look for entirely new sources of insight, and give ourselves the time and space to explore them properly. It’s the only way to get to Hollywood.

This article was originally published in the October 2010 issue of Campaign Asia-Pacific.