In 2004 I started working in the market research industry. With a PhD in physical chemistry and 7 years at Unilever Research, broadly speaking, I’d been in the business of insights for quite some time already. Scientific insights. Insights for new products. In my intermediate years as a management consultant, new insights into how to innovate businesses were core to our services as well.
Yet, market research is the real business of insights. We sell them. Or at least we think we do. I thought so – when I started. To my surprise, about half of the projects I saw were not aiming for insights. Clients bought them for assurance. Peace of mind. “I know what our market share is, I just want to be sure”. Or “If the research agency says the product launch is OK, at least I’m not to blame when it doesn’t work out”.
Another remarkable insight I had was that the actual profits were made in data collection. And not with insights. If market research is a value chain, then the last step before it goes to the client – the step where the most expensive and experienced researchers work – should be the place where most economic value is generated. Right? Wrong. I still think that this is the reason why bigger research agencies had data collection in house – just because that’s where the money is.
What’s the anatomy of insights anyway? Let’s do some surgery. Data, nor observations, are insights in and of themselves. Consumer needs are not insights, even if they are well articulated. Insights have something deeper, something hidden, something unexpected. Some fundamental human truth that gives new perspectives. A new way of looking at the world. Wiki says “Insight is the understanding of a specific cause and effect within a specific context.” It is believed to originate from the Middle English words inner-sight. Also known as wisdom. And it has certainly gained popularity over the last two centuries.
For me the value chain leading to insights looks like this.
- You start with data –> you add structure –> you get information
- You have information –> you add context –> you get knowledge.
- You have knowledge –> you add reflection –> you get insights (possibly).
- If not, go back to start
Looking at this sequence of steps, the first thing you see is that it requires persistence. It’s not easy. And there is no guaranteed outcome. Looking a bit deeper, one can also observe that the first two steps require rational labor. Then suddenly, creative labor is required. To distil the most powerful essence of your work: the wisdom, the inner-sight. For the first two steps you need to be smart. For the last steps you need to be wise.
In my experience, it comes down to having the time to reflect. It’s not easy to do this when you want to produce insights ‘en masse’. When there are client deadlines and internal KPIs to be met.
But you need time to look for surprises. To find the weak signals (not the strong ones). To find that something hidden. You need to allow the other part of the brain to do its work. You know, this shower moment, these sudden …. insightful moments.
As we all have learned: “the worst place to get a good idea is in the office”. The same holds for insights. Probably.
For deeper insights, I recommend the works of the poet David Whyte: “when your eyes are tired, the world is tired also”. Or the writer and neuroscientist Jonah Lehrer, on the increasing value of non-cognitive skills.
I wish you many more insights.
1 comment
Perhaps the issues is not that profits are made during the data collection phase, but rather than researchers aren’t demonstrating their value during the insights phase. To simply share insights is not enough. People need to know how to interpret and apply those insights in their business, in their markets, within their constraints. Sharing a light bulb moment might be interesting and entertaining but researchers need to show how those light bulbs can be converted into greater and longer-term business success.