Inspirational Insight

thebuzz

marketing news, views and insights

to insight to see if they’re real obstacles or not and find the solutions to overcome them. Our aim is to give you an answer to the important question: “How do I know when I’ve got a really useful, inspirational insight?”

Issue 2: May 08

Consumer Insight: Old Chestnuts & New Tricks

If marketers were to compile a list of their most over-used words they’d probably include at least one, if not all three, of the following: Passionate Used by agencies to impress upon clients how enthusiastic they are about their business; Workshop Used largely because it sounds more impressive than ‘meeting’ Insight Used loosely to label anything that emerges from observations or research as having inherent value about a brand or a form of consumer behaviour Of these three buzzwords, it’s the ‘I’ word that is generating far and away the most discussion. Everyone is talking about Insight; from clients to the trade press, from conference speakers to agency specialists. One of our bigger clients attaches so much importance to insight that it has 37 (yes, I counted them) full time insight managers on its books. All this noise about insight has naturally driven a fair amount of myth-making, and one of our jobs is to sort the nuggets from the nonsense; to de-bunk some of the myths that we can show aren’t true. We also need to test the more obvious barriers

Insight myths

of how to provide well designed, quality products but at affordable prices. He realised that if he could ship his furniture unassembled and have the customers put it together after purchase, then his brand promise could be achieved. That was a simple insight, around which a global business was built. Today the company has about 280 stores in 40 countries, with a turnover of £10 billion. That’s a lot of furniture, but it also sold two billion meatballs and enough hot dogs to feed the Russian army! The following decade, in the 1960s, Professor Theodore Levitt told his...