Overview
This document will help you learn how to detect insights.

The key messages are:
• A trigger event provides the anchor for your search (could be new data or observation from anyone in the organization).
• Start the search for insights by reviewing what you “know” (sift through existing facts and observations).
• Reviewing competitive context and meeting experts, stakeholders and consumers will lead you to create more hypotheses.
• There are many methods for detecting insights — decide your approach based on your situation. No single method or approach is right for all occasions.
• Recognize that it takes time, training and discipline to find insights.

In this guide, you learn:

• What are the various methods for detecting insights?
• How to develop insights for your brand.

What is a consumer insight?
A consumer insight is a profound understanding of consumers that leads to a business idea, which drives profitable growth.
Most companies respond to only the articulated needs of consumers, which may not fall under the purview of insights. That’s because, when asked to share his/ her experience, the consumer normally reports only what s/he can remember at that time. This document aims to provide you with an approach that unlocks moments of truth with consumers, which provide valuable insights that can lead to profitable business ideas.
For more details, see What is an insight?: Guide.
How to discover insights for your brand
Although most exponents say it’s a matter of mind power or intuition, it is actually a matter of looking at the same data/facts and observations with a new perspective. When you approach the same facts and observations with an open mind, they will speak differently to you.
Insights are derived from the collection of data (facts and observations). Refer to the Insight Pyramid below for a visual description. Any brand would receive a continuous supply of data. Some of it is structured like market research reports or AC Nielsen reports or other syndicated reports. And lot of it—like information from field sales, retailers and distributors—is unstructured. Some of the data can also be acquired from the media or by web-crawling. There are marketers who claim that insights cannot emerge from traditional methods and sources. But, actually, insights do emerge from the same data (traditional and/or non-traditional) that is available to everyone, provided we analyze the data differently.
Theories are the first step towards organizing and distilling data into insights. Theories result from looking for patterns and connections in the data – “joined up thinking” – and identifying common themes. When looking for connections, we must also look at wide disparities/ anomalies in data.
If we press harder, ask a lot of questions and rigorously search for connections between theories, we eventually arrive at compelling insights that lead to a business idea that offers a strategic advantage. Such insights also suggest actions that can drive profitable growth.
The Insight Pyramid
The trigger event
Any insight detection begins with a trigger, big or small. A trigger could come to you from the Insight Opportunity template or a consumer observation or salespersons’ feedback. IWIKs (I wish I knews) are very good trigger points too.
Traditionally, the triggers for insight mining exercise have been ‘bad news’ in the form of a decline in brand equity or declining volumes or decline in growth. However, in today’s super competitive scenario, insight mining should be a continuous process and investigate even good news as triggers:

If nothing else, at least the annual planning process can trigger off an insight mining exercise. You can also use new trends (consumer, industry or allied categories) as triggers to start your search or use the VOC. In the VOC you can look for odd data or anomalies. For example, if most people brush their teeth for 20 seconds and 10% brush for 2 minutes, you have arrived at a trigger – ‘investigate these 10% consumers.
Review what you already know
It may seem counter-intuitive that your insight mining should start with what you already “know”. The same data point may mean different things at different points in time and to different people. Hence, it is important to keep an open mind and consider existing information from many different viewpoints to try and understand the full spectrum. The more open you are, the better you will be at making connections between your observations and the business.
What you and the company already know (or think you know) is represented by the VOC document. So, start with the VOC but narrow the search down to information relating to the trigger data. For example, if someone has observed that heavy users of a mouthwash product are also heavy users of dental floss, you might begin your search by understanding the usage characteristics of these consumers in the broad oral care category. So the data search approach goes down several adjacent paths:

The VOC is already linked to detailed market research reports, and if you find anything relevant to your search, you can go through the detailed report too. Refer to How to analyze VOC: Tips and Analyzing research: Tips for more information.
Cross-trend analysis
Cross-trend analysis can stimulate insights. Major transformations—from behavioral changes such as dietary shifts, to demographic evolution such as the aging of the baby boomers and the swelling of the American Hispanic population—can be a marketer's delight, but only if they are identified and analyzed.
It involves review of various trends and their impact on a specific brand or consumer segment. Try and answer the question “What are the implications of this trend for my domain, categories and brands?” or compare the data in the trigger event to all the major trends in the environment. Be persistent in your comparisons and questioning and do not be perturbed by unanswered questions. One of the unusual characteristics of great insight detectives is that at first they often uncover more good questions than good answers. One seldom gets a good insight without a good question.
Some real insights can also come from analyzing the effect of interacting trends or looking where trends “cross”.

Examples
• Longer life spans and affluence, leading to prepaid nursing home insurance.
• Falling prices of technological products and availability of digital technology in languages other than English, leading to accelerated adoption rates for mobile telephones and computers in Asia and China, resulting in these geographies being bigger markets than Europe and America.
• Consider two trends: increase in the frequency of on-the-move eating and the growing popularity of the high-protein, low-carbohydrate Atkins diet. Now consider the impact these two trends could have on breakfast cereal producers such as Kellogg's and Quaker Oats. On-the-move eating has already helped products such as NutriGrain bars succeed at the expense of some breakfast cereals. And more than 15 million people in the US have tried the Atkins diet.
  So it may be worthwhile to assess the future economic potential of a "protein-seeking" segment that eschews the carbohydrates in breakfast cereals is important. (This example has been adapted from McKinsey Quarterly)

Trends can be environmental (demographic, social, health-related, lifestyle, etc) or technological. In addition to these, you may also want to consider industry-specific trends. For example: taste trends, ingredient trends and packaging innovations. Identify many environmental and industry-specific trends and use them for cross-trend analysis. You also need to be aware of regulatory trends (international sanctions, patents expiry, etc) that can impact your business.
Before the cross-trend analysis, ask as many questions as possible regarding the trends themselves:

These questions will help you generate theories on how the trend could impact your consumer segment and lead you to possible actions and insights.
Sources for trends data
For environmental trends, you could source data from professional consultants who specialize in trend watching. Or you could ask your market research vendors to put together yearly presentations based on information from academic or industry surveys. You should also ask certain functions within your organization to provide you with information related to their area of activities. For example, Legal could put together an annual report on regulatory, patent and trade-related trends.
For category and industry-related trends, ask your vendors who supply packaging, ingredients, flavors, etc, to annually update you on latest industry trends. For example, most paint companies today make annual ‘color trends’ presentations to automobile companies. Similarly, you might find ingredient suppliers who have a deep wellspring of data on human taste perception, which differs by regions, countries, etc.
Meet your customers to learn what are the trends driving their industry. For example, retail chains, gourmet stores, institutional buyers, etc. Large-format stores today have a wealth of information on sales of certain products. A retail store could give you detailed information on product sales by day part or product sales with other associated products.
You can source a lot of trends data yourself from periodicals, journals the Internet, store visits, meetings with experts and consumer visits.

Example In a leading consumer goods marketing company the rule is: if you travel to another city, for business or pleasure, you are required to visit at least three stores that carry your brands and competitive brands. You walk in, look around, analyze the situation and submit a report of those visits upon your return.
Why? One reason is to try to pick up any competitive activities or test-market products that have come into a market. But the primary purpose is to teach the discipline of walk-around learning. There isn't much to inspire new thinking in an office cubicle, but a store is filled with a wealth of stimulation on new trends to help you develop wonderful new ideas.

There is a lot of merit in practicing unconventional ways of discovering trends. Some of the world’s best marketers have benefited a lot from studying and observing marketing-related trends in other categories. Conduct in-store visits to study categories other than yours. If you are a marketer for personal products, jot down your observations in a toy store or a gourmet food store, for example. These observations may lead you to great ideas as illustrated by the example below.

Example The following extract is adapted from the book “How the World's Best Companies Play to Win” by Eric Schulz: “When I worked at Walt Disney Home Video, I taught the real-world observation habit to my brand team We'd pick a different product category every week and go study it-- detergents, deodorants, soup, motor oil, frozen foods--it didn't matter what the category was. ….. This information cross-pollinated our thinking and helped us recognize opportunities we otherwise would have missed. For example, one Friday afternoon we found ourselves in the toy department at a Kmart store during a huge sale of Disney plush toys. Consumers were buying the toys by the armful. We noticed that no Winnie the Pooh characters were available. Several consumers were asking the store clerks if the Poohs were sold out. When we returned to the office, we made a few calls to our friends in Disney Consumer Products and discovered that there were no Winnie the Pooh plush toys available to the Kmart store because Sears held an exclusive 25-year license on Pooh merchandise, We also discovered that this license was expiring in just a few months and would not be renewed. That afternoon we began dreaming up an idea for our Winnie the Pooh videos. On the day that the Sears license expired we launched a nationwide Pooh video and plush promotion, packaging our videos and Pooh plush characters in a single box. They sold like hotcakes. All four SKUs turned up on the Top 10 Video Bestseller list. In just three weeks, we sold 20 times more Winnie the Pooh videos than we had in the previous 12 months. By being aware of an unmet consumer need in a completely different product category (plush toys), we were able to produce huge profits for our video division.

Please refer to How to look for insights: Tips for tips on sources for trends data.
Study competition
To gain strategic advantage, it is imperative to understand three things about competition:

Do this for all key competition. It helps to do a SWOT analysis first.
Since most of the thinking here is in the realm of the hypothetical, it is better to use more minds than one. Simulation exercises and scenario-planning exercises in a small team work well.
Examples of trends with related scenarios for simulation exercise are:

If you have any hypotheses of possible insight or action from an insight, include it in the list of scenarios while doing a simulation exercise.
Meet experts/ stakeholder
Experts in various fields— anthropology, sociology, psychology, etc— have a wealth of information. These people make it their business to study consumers from a different point of view. They study consumers from cultural, societal or historical contexts. They are the repository of knowledge on huge trends, which can shape nations and races. Their broad perspectives on things help them predict future trends with greater accuracy then most marketers.
Stakeholders like vendors, local partners, customers, franchisees or category experts can also help you detect insights by providing broad-level hypotheses that lead to actionable insights.

Example In new markets, local partners can be an important source of insights, especially in developing countries where it’s harder to purchase market research. For example, sales of confectionary and tobacco products increased in many emerging markets once owners of global brands understood that although most consumers couldn’t afford to buy packs of cigarettes or bags of candies, they could and would buy individual pieces.

What kinds of experts?
Sociologists, anthropologists and psychologists are experts on environmental data. Similarly, generate a list of experts who may be relevant for your data search or trend search.

Example If you are looking for data and/or trends to fuel your insight mining in the area of health trends, you could generate the following possible list of experts/ stakeholders to meet:
• Doctors
• Managers of gyms
• Alternative healing experts for yoga, Reiki, oriental medicine, etc
• Nutritionists
• Health food store managers
• Producers of organic foods
• Hospital managers
• Authors of books on wellness, dieting, etc.
• Feature writers in magazines and periodicals who cover the health beat.

How and what to ask experts
Experts—sometimes, even professional researchers—do not respond well to structured questionnaires. The best approach to extract valuable information from experts is to meet them. A meeting with experts is generally like a discussion, so it helps if two or three from your team go to meet them.
Ask them to talk on their area of expertise and not your category or brand. The discussion can be around the brand domain or even outside of that. For example, if you are meeting an internet expert, talk to her/him about the internet and media at large or comparison of various media choices. It is your job to extract information and implications relevant to your brand and category.
Meet the consumer
Meeting the consumer is the best source of all consumer understanding! Consumers are often oblivious to many of their needs. This creates a difference between needs that are articulated and those that go unarticulated. The challenge is to understand and respond to both articulated and unarticulated needs.
If you and your competition are meeting the same consumer with the traditional market research tools available to everyone, chances are both of you will reach the same information in the area of articulated needs. You need to, therefore, build skills to uncover unarticulated needs.
The following ideas on meeting the customer, face-to-face generated from some best practices across the globe, have provided marketers with excellent consumer insights. The structured questionnaire, with large sample sizes, is best left to market researchers.
Considerations before you meet the consumer
Consider the five Ts:

• Teams
• Time
• Training
• Target
• Technique
  Example CLAAS KGA, a manufacturer of agricultural equipment based in Harsewinkel, Germany, maintains practice centers in each of its major markets. These are model farms where farmers test new equipment and company employees can observe what they like and how they use the new machinery.

Teams
Teams really help. Multi-disciplinary teams have multiple perspectives. For example, during a consumer visit when a respondent is demonstrating how s/he uses the detergent in the washing machine, the brand manager may observe something related to the scoop, the packaging expert may notice how s/he opens a new pack and stores the detergent, and the rest of the team make some other observations. Human minds think differently and insights are all about looking at the same data differently. That’s why it helps to have multi-disciplinary teams.
Time
You need to dedicate time to the process of meeting the consumer. Insights do not emerge in short time spans or narrowly-defined information need areas. The most insightful consumer research requires a great deal more patience than many marketers give. Insight mining in today’s market environment requires getting very close to consumers, immersing yourself with them long enough to understand the larger and complex cultural context in which brands continuously struggle, adapt, perish and thrive.
While most marketing folklore may make it seem the opposite, generating insights requires many consumers for lengthy periods of time over long distances. You also need to take time out to prepare yourself and your team for meeting the consumer.
Training
Set some time aside to train the team for the consumer meetings. There are two kinds of training. One is about getting updated on available consumer information, category trends, insights on competition and generating hypotheses before meeting the consumer.
The second kind of training is about the art of meeting the consumer. This kind of training is really acquired on the job. The more consumers you meet, the more you hone your insight-discovering skills. Please refer to How to look for insights Tips to train and prepare yourself for the actual interaction.
Target
Target respondent definition has to be decided beforehand to suit your project. It is important to have a balanced perspective on the responses you get. Remember to link the responses to the profile of the target respondent. Your target respondent definition will have an impact on the next T – the technique.
Technique
Your technique or methodology will directly impact your ability to uncover insights. This is the research design where a skilled researcher can really help. You could also take the researcher along for a large part of the discussion with the respondent.
Refer to Research Design: Guide and Research Types: Guide for more information.
Role of intuition Intuition has its role in searching for insights. But if detached from rigorous analysis, it is an unreliable guide. Use intuition to lead you to hypotheses but only rigorous analysis and data search can lead the hypotheses to an insight.
As Eric Bonabeau says in the Harvard Business Journal, "Detached from rigorous analysis, intuition is a fickle and undependable guide...The more options you have to evaluate, the more data you have to weigh, and the more unprecedented the challenges you face, the less you should rely on instinct and the more on reason and analysis.”