No Time for 'Why'?
A creative director once told me he had received a brief for a fast- food restaurant with the insight statement ‘they (the target) will be on O’Connell street and they will be hungry’. A discovery about human behaviour and the motivation behind it? No. A new way to think about that consumer and how they exist in the world? No. Does it change how we serve that target or what we do for them? Nope!
There is information, data, analysis and then there is intuition and subjective or seasoned points of view and only by bringing these together will we get to insight.
Insights are not things we have witnessed, because what we see does not always explain why the behaviour is happening. Nor are they trends that we observe from the data, they are the ‘why’ behind those trends.
Insights take time and effort and I think today we are so addicted to quick answers and instant gratification, we often forget to simply keep asking ‘why’ ? We are information full and insight-empty. We don’t always translate the information we have into real actions that can drive business growth.
We need to remind ourselves to make the distinction between information and knowledge. We need to make time to turn the information we have into knowledge we can use.
I believe if you are good at puzzles you might be good at insight discovery- looking at something everyone is looking at and seeing something else!
I worked with a brilliant colleague who received the quantitative data on why fishermen chose not to wear a flotation device. The data was clear- they did not wear it because it was ‘uncomfortable’- so, let’s make it comfortable?
Or maybe not. Her instincts (and experience) told her that was not the truth behind their actions. She knew from past experience that people had often said they did not wear seatbelts for the same reason. Armed with her scepticism on the quant data, she took herself pier-side and interviewed the fishermen themselves- not scientific, but very enlightening. She unlocked a complex relationship between fishermen and the sea and understood their reticence to wearing a PFD. She was able to use this understanding to make a connection and change their behaviour.
Customers can tell you of their experience and inform you of what they believe they need now, but don’t count on them for more than that.
We need to make time to interpret the data we have in front of us. We need to shift focus from amassing the data to using the data to provide real knowledge that we can act on.
I think this skill has been somewhat undervalued and, because we are moving at pace all the time, we lean on the information and neglect to make time to interpret it.
The ability to use the information is a skill that distinguishes us as marketers. That skill relies on experience, intuition and, most importantly, a point of view. A point of view requires a leap of faith- it must extend from and be more than the information and the data, it requires experience, intuition and time.