#2. Insight development is based upon a desired attitude and/or behavioural change
When your sales, marketing or management look to improve their business results, their real objective is to change the attitude and/or behaviour of your current or potential customers. For example:
- From buying a competitive brand to purchasing yours.
- From using your services once a month, to once a week.
- Moving customers’ beliefs about your brand from a traditional or classic brand, to a more modern image.
- Changing customers’ perceptions about the price of your brand from expensive to good value for money.
Because insights are based on a desired change in your customers, they usually contain an emotional element that is communicated through advertising and promotions. The emotions that are shown in your communications are more likely to attract customers by resonating with their own emotions. This results in them feeling that the brand understands them, a powerful emotion in itself. They are then more likely to remember your brand and be more motivated to take the desired action you have identified.
If you are looking to increase sales or improve your brand’s image or equity, look to connect emotionally with your (potential) customers. Identifying the change you need your customers to make is a foundational step of insight development.
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#3. Insight development needs more than Insight professionals
Although this may sound strange at first, insights really do benefit from working with people that have differing perspectives. This is by far the easiest way to get to that “ah-ha” moment, that many refer to. A deep understanding of customers and their reasons for behaving in a certain way, comes from looking at all aspects of their lives.
If you only review the actual moment when they choose or use a product or service, it is highly unlikely that you will develop the deep understanding you need. What happens before and afterwards also leads to their choice of their next purchase.
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This is why it is important to work as a team when developing insights. Depending upon the issue or opportunity identified, the team can be made up of people from marketing, sales, trade marketing, production, packaging, advertising, innovation, and/or distribution. And these people don’t even need to work on the category in question; sometimes it is by taking ideas from different categories that real insights are developed.
#4. Insights are usually based on a human truth
The insights that resonate best with people are those that are not only emotional, but are also based upon a human truth. As you can imagine, these two elements are closely connected.
A human truth is a statement that refers to human beings, irrespective of race, colour or creed. It is a powerful and compelling fact of attitudes and behaviour that is rooted in fundamental human values. It is something that is obvious when quoted, but is often ignored or forgotten in daily business.
Human truths are linked to human needs and although it’s validity has been questioned in the past, it is seeing a revival today. The covid-19 virus has moved all human being back to a search for the basic levels of safety and health.
Examples of human truths used by some brands include:
- Parents want to protect their children.
- Men and women want to find love.
- People want to be better than others.
If you are struggling to find an insight, it can help to review which level of needs your target audience is on and see how your brand can respond to help answer it.
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#5. Insights aren’t always category specific
Following on from the above points, it is particularly interesting that once found, an insight can be adapted and used by different brands. There are many examples of this, particularly amongst major FMCG / CPG companies.
So take a look at your competitors’ communications and see if you can identify the insight on which they are built. Do the same for other categories targeting a similar audience. Sometimes you can use the same insight for your brand as they are using. But I would only recommend this if you are really struggling to develop your own insight.
One very successful example of this is the advertising for Omo/Persil from Unilever and Nestle’s Nido. They are both based on the insight “I want my child to experience everything in life, even if it means getting dirty.” Take a look at the two ads below and see what I mean.
- Unilever’s Omo: shows that a good mother lets her child experiment and learn – even if this means getting dirty. If you don’t know their advertising, then check out one example from this long-running campaign.
- Nestlé’s Nido: illustrates this need as a mother providing the nourishment for healthy growth which allows her children to explore the outside world safely. If you would like to see a typical advertisement, check it out on YouTube here. Interestingly, Nestlé has used this same insight to develop advertising for its bottled water in Asia and pet food in the Americas too.
Another example of a shared insight is again from Unilever’s Dove and the local Swiss supermarket Migros. The insight is “Young women want to be appreciated for who they are and not just their external looks.”
- Unilever’s Dove was the first brand to recognise and benefit from this insight. Their famous Real Beauty campaign resonates so well with young women that many other brands copied it, especially their Evolution film. Here is one of their latest ads from 2021 that follows the same idea but now tackles the problem of heavily edited selfies. Dove continues to defend the need for real beauty standards, and I heard recently that they are even offering to pay other brands to diversify their ads! Here are the two ads.
- The Swiss Supermarket chain Migros has a store brand named “I am” which uses this same insight across all their health and beauty products. Somewhat unusually, the brand name itself is based upon the same insight, and its advertising repeats it several times: “I am – what I am”.