A big part of our business is developing insights for our clients. Insights into their customers, into what the competition is up to, into where the category is headed; even insights into how their organization feels about their brand.

We do get to some very good insights. Like for Regus, the world’s largest operator of on-demand office space, it wasn’t about having an office it was about the feeling that you had a real business. Having an office legitimized the business. For IRI, our insight was that information—or data—had become commoditized, but insights were highly valuable. As a result of our insight, IRI went on to refocus their considerable business on analytics to get to deeper insights. For SunPower, a large maker of PV solar panels for residential application, we thought the insight would be about going green. It turned out that their customers needed to understand the financial implications before they could rationalize the considerable expense on the basis of environmental responsibility.

What qualified the examples above as insights were three factors. First, the insight provided new understanding about a customer need. Second, the insight had the ability to change the way the company did business, and finally, the insight could be sourced from a fact-base. Since a real insight should have the potential to positively impact the business, a basis in fact is critical to build the case for investment.

What concerns me about the insight business is that there seems to be a lot of faux insights out there. I would label any insight that is based on “different”, “change” or “better” as a cop-out. I was really disappointed to see a display in the Apple store this weekend that said: “The App Store: this changes everything”. Besides being a bit unimaginative, it’s also a bit of an over-promise. From an insight perspective, change doesn’t really connote a positive benefit. It’s just…change.

Developing an insight is grueling work. It requires the requisite situational assessment, perhaps conducting hours of in-depth interviews or other qualitative research, iterating on themes with whoever will listen; associates, friends, clients. And then bringing it altogether in such a way that a group of people understand it and fall in love with it. It’s a tall order, but getting to a true insight is what it’s all about.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 14th, 2008 at 1:45 am and is filed under The Process. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.