How to deliver consumer insight

Merry Baskin
Source: WARC Best Practice, September 2016
Downloaded from WARC

Insight is not synonymous with market research, but too many Customer Insight Managers (the Market
Research Executive rebranded) are still only data gatherers.

It is not just the collation of information but the application of insight that matters.
Neuroscience, behavioural economics, semiotics, sociology, anthropology and ethnography
provide new opportunities to garner, hone and apply insight beyond the traditional group
discussion or segmentation study.
The crucial question in insight mining is 'why?' For every response, keep asking 'why does that
matter?' or 'what is going on here?'.
Insight is a powerful tool if you can identify something penetratingly differentiating and relevant
about consumers' motivation and behaviour that you can then use.
The challenge is to translate it into strategic ideas that grow the brand and deliver profit.

This Best Practice paper, is an updated and revised version of Merry Baskin's 2010 paper, Consumer insight.
Merry Baskin is founder of the planning consultancy Baskin Shark and a frequent contributor to Warc.

Jump to:
Where to start | How to get consumer insights | Processes and tools | Further reading

Where to start
Insight is usually pegged to the word 'consumer', but there are myriad kinds of insight in our industry – business,
media, product, brand, strategic and competitive, just for starters.

This piece focuses on the 'people' sort of insight; what motivates our behaviour and preferences, because at the
end of the day, most of what we do is about getting people to change their behaviour. Consumer insights
emanate from a deep human truth, or the culture of the communities within which we operate, the latter gleaned
from the beliefs or learned from the behaviours of others around us.

Insight is not synonymous with market research, but too many Customer Insight Managers (the Market Research
Executive rebranded) are still data gatherers, rather than knowledge-appliers. Yet it is the 'application' of insight
that really sorts the men from the boys.

The primary purpose of an insight is that it is actionable – it is a fresh and thought-provoking perception (about
the consumer, the category, the brand and so on) that can be applied to improve a business solution, to
challenge a marketing strategy, stimulate a different communication idea. It can aid the development of a new
product, the writing of a creative brief, or make an executional element resonate. Otherwise, it is an interesting
piece of understanding, a bit of relevant data, a market research finding, a mere observation of human
behaviour.

If the response is 'so what?', or 'and..? Your point is?' then you haven't got an insight. If the response is 'Aha!'
('that makes sense, I can see now why that is so, I know exactly what to do with it') then you've struck gold.

Why do we need insight? Well, our communications efforts do not persuade shoppers to dash blindly into stores
and start buying exactly what we tell them to. Many other factors come into people's decision-making – previous
experience, reputation, familiarity, perceived quality and value, mood, values, imagery and so on, all filtered
through their emotional, neuro-aesthetic responses to all of the above.

Just as people are never passive receivers of communication, nor are we simple consumers of products. We
now have relationships with brands, we engage in dialogue with brand owners and we interact with our brands
at all kinds of different touchpoints, and rarely do we do any of it in isolation. What is a 'relationship' but an
emotional interaction?

Illustrative case history on Warc:

Many consumers all over the world are turning away from a culture of conspicuous consumption towards one
that eschews waste and values resourcefulness. We are becoming more conscious of how much time and
money we waste and how much rubbish we generate. Following on from a segmentation study, the US Glad
rubbish bag company discovered that many consumers were trying to make smart choices that created less
waste in their lives. Not only did they want to tell consumers about their new stronger bags with less wasteful
plastic in them, they wanted people to reduce their wasteful behaviour. One core segment in particular they
called the 'Trash Scentinels' – no that's not a spelling mistake – and through a breadth of further qualitative,
ethnographic and neuro research among them, Glad and their research agencies unearthed and honed several
insights about how to use their communications to drive engagement in a low interest category, educate
consumers, effect behaviour change, initiate a national conversation about waste, and yes, sell more garbage
bags.

How to get consumer insight

Mining for strategically applicable insights means generating them or catalysing their development from
observations, common sense, and all sorts of soft and hard data. With the help of neuroscience, behavioural
economics, semiotics, sociology, anthropology and ethnography, there are a lot of new methodological
opportunities beyond the group discussion or segmentation study, previously the traditional default methods for
gathering insightful data about consumers.

Ethnography has become the popular technique of late, embraced by clients who want to really get under the
skin of their customers, some spending up to 15 hours a day observing people going about their lives, without
any specific agenda. This is a great way of introducing customer-centricity into product-led companies (such as
mobile telephony, where the geeks come up with a technological tweak or a new widget and then tell marketing
to sell it, whether or not the customer actually wants or needs it).

Another advantage, since there are no predetermined or preconceived questions integral to this method,
observation removes the response and recall biases, since people are often not conscious of the things they
did.

Similarly, encounter groups (where internal stakeholders from both the client and agency side get to meet 'real
people') can be engineered online or face-to-face to develop new products or services collaboratively, not just
hone communications. In the case of hard-to-reach audiences (such as drug users and dealers) attendees can
include people dealing with the issue in the front line, such as police, community leaders and social workers. If
you are Procter & Gamble, you set up a division called Connect and Develop, which is a form of crowd sourcing
and co-creation for new product development. This allows them to expand their ideas and technology quickly,
more affordably and effectively than spending vast amounts of money on internal R&D.

Then, of course, there is simple participation; immersion and first-hand experience (doing, feeling, seeing,
hearing) of the customer journey itself; understanding the lives of the people you are targeting – knowing what it
is like to spend a day queueing in a Job Centre, or what it is like to be elderly and living on a pension, or to
suffer the constraints of a particular medical condition.

As the methods of collecting and collating consumer information evolve, it becomes even more important to be
able to integrate findings and distil them down from key themes into actionable insights, rather than stop at the
more superficial 'interesting observation' or 'curious factoid' that may be fascinating and surprising to the less
insightfully vigilant, and just elicit a 'yes, of course' from everyone else. These data are, however, potentially the
bits of grit from which the pearl is made; the nugget around which you can build your communications solution,
or take some sort of action.

Illustrative case history on Warc:

UK Tribes is a long running research panel (or online insight community) among 16-24 year old C4 viewers. It
segments UK Youth into 25 different tribes based on their self-professed cultural and lifestyle preferences, and
weekly questions are posed to hundreds of them to help advertisers better understand this ever changing and
often remote or alien seeming audience. Here's a cited example of an insight genered by the panel for teen
fashion retailers: “Brands which allow Tribes to express individuality are cutting through. For many young
people it's now a case of fitting in by standing out. Tribes want brands that enable them to fit in but also stand
out at the same time. The multitude of colours and designs offered by the likes of Converse and Dr. Martens
are prime examples of this”.

Processes and tools

1. Develop some hypotheses about the nut you are trying to crack, about the objectives of the comms task
ahead and what you (think you) know about the people you are targeting. Who are they? Why are they the
way they are? What are the drivers, influencers and barriers affecting their attitudes and behaviour?
Remember, man is a social animal. The key is being able to get to the bottom of what people do, and why.
Mind mapping can be a useful tool to help organise and span out your thoughts at this stage. Write your
theory in the centre and then interrogate it, branching out your hypotheses as you go. You will be left with a
one-page map of various themes that you can collate, craft and leverage.

2. Conduct a data gap analysis. Figure out what research and consumer knowledge you do have to hand,
and what you don't have that you need to go and find out. Identify the optimum method (given your budget
and timing constraints) and go fetch. Start with the most affordable: desk research – digging into
government stats on demographics or syndicated data, your client's databases plus information from the
media and social sciences about social, political and economic trends. Customer loyalty cards provide an
insight goldmine into shopper habits, behaviours and preferences.

3. Conduct a careful study existing (historic) market research – if you're lucky, you will have a fresh, robust
segmentation survey to hand. Dig deeper into the most compelling segments. Find out what really defines
and motivates them. The Body Shop's Anita Roddick may have dismissed running a company on market
research as like driving while looking in a rear view mirror, but there is no point reinventing the wheel by
recommissioning rather than updating a study that has already been done and then left to gather dust by
an over-ambitious brand manager who has long since moved on.

4. Don't forget the wonders of the online world – bearing in mind that while Twitterers and the bloggerati are
not representative of the world at large, they are a very immediate source of knowledge. Online blogs and
chatrooms, as well as the client's own customer letters, can be great sources of nifty, penetratingly honest
data.

5. Commission or even conduct your own special qualitative or quantitative survey designed to unearth the
emotional heart of the issue in hand. Or just get out there and informally observe.
 6. When you have unearthed some great nuggets from your plethora of sources, collate them into groups of
similar themes and start to craft them. Take your collection of interesting and (what you perceive to be)
pertinent bits of consumer data, and use your instincts to identify any patterns emerging.

7. Some neat tools to consider: A great insight development tool is a variation on the ever popular 'laddering'
technique; also good for brainstorms, proposition development and brand benefit tiering. Another favourite
tool of mine is to try different 'lenses' through which to view a bit of consumer data, utilising various angles
to try and figure out what makes people tick – Wendy Gordon calls them 'Mindframes'. They cover
Kahneman's System One, Semiotics, Behavioural Economics, Herd Mentality, Likeability and Context,
among others.

8. The main question – possibly the only question – you need to ask in insight mining is 'why?' You will begin
to sound like a petulant four-year-old, but it works. For each one, ask yourself, 'why does that matter?', or
'what is going on here?'.

Take the example of disposable nappies. Rationally, they're convenient, less messy and they work. Why? 'They
make my life easier.' Why? 'Providing I change frequently, my baby stays dry and comfortable and doesn't get
nappy rash.' Why? 'Because nappy rash is horrid, avoidable, and makes my baby suffer.' Why? 'Because caring
parents should look after their babies.' Why? 'Because they are helpless and terribly precious.' Why? 'Because
we have great hopes for him to grow up and be a happy and healthy, well-rounded person.' Why? 'Because he
is an extension of us and we don't want to let him down.' Why? 'Because if he turns out wrong, it is our fault and
it means we've been lousy parents. Why? Because he'll be emotionally constipated and in therapy for the rest of
his life.'

What this example illustrates is both the huge role emotions (guilt, love etc) play in something essentially
practical and convenient, and how the marketer can stop at various stages on the ladder, reflect upon, consider
and share the various product, strategic and communications options. Pampers always focused on efficacy and
dryness, via various technical layers and blue liquid demos, stress-tested by some authoritative nursery maid
who spent her daily life dealing with nappies. Huggies, on the other hand, took it up a notch and talked about
how their elastic-sided nappy allowed baby greater freedom, without leaking, to crawl, to walk and explore, to
grow and be stimulated. Both brands offer the emotional benefit of happy babies. Which is the more emotionally
rewarding for the parent? Which brand had the better insight? Why do you think Pampers adopted the Huggies
strategy in the end?

Curating customer insight is a powerful process if you can identify something about people's motivation and
behaviour that is genuinely helpful to the (creative) team. The challenge is to translate that understanding into
strategic and creative ideas that grow the brand and deliver profit to the business.

Further reading on Warc.com

An A-Z of insights by Peter Field, Admap May 2008

Will client insight functions survive the recession? by Michael Harvey, Market Leader Q4 2009

When the low hanging insights have fallen by Simon Blyth and Mark Simmonds Market Leader Q1, 2015

The Feldwick Factor: Knowing when you have an insight by Paul Feldwick, Admap May 2010
Marketing to women by Jane Cunningham and Philippa Roberts, Admap March 2007

Why is good insight like a refrigerator? by Jeremy Bullmore, Market Leader, Summer 2005

The insight story by Suresh Ramalingam & Aruni Ghosh, ESOMAR 2009

Local here, global there – how can we build brands that travel globally and are loved locally? by
Saurabh Sharma, Warc, February 2010

Springsight or thinsight? by Mark Simmonds, Market Leader, Summer 2008

Home Office/COI – Acquisitive Crime by Alice Huntley, APG Awards 2005

Co-creating with consumers: a new way of innovating by Ana Medeiros and Andrew Needham, Market
Leader, Spring 2009

Glad: Stronger stand against Waste - DDB San Francisco et al, ARF Ogilvy Awards, 2013

C4 UK Tribes – Channel 4 & Crowd DNA, MRS Awards, 2013

Other reading
Mindframes - 6 enduring principle from 50 years of market research – by Wendy Gordon, published by Acacia
Avenue, October 2016

See Feel Think Do – the Power of Instinct in Business by Andy Milligan and Shaun Smith, Cyan
Communications, March 2006

Added Value – the Alchemy of Brand Led Growth by Mark Sherrington, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003

About the author

Merry Baskin founded planning and strategic consultancy Baskin Shark in 2000 after CSO stints at JWT London
and Chiat/Day New York. A former chair of the APG, a Cannes Effectiveness Master and a Fellow of the New
College of the Humanities, she also teaches planning craft skills around the world.
merry@baskinshark.com
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