digging for gold
TRANSCRIPT
The quest to uncover high potential consumer insights, to drive marketing innovation is not new within the wider mar-keting community.
For some time now many consumer (and even B2B) compa-nies have engaged in ‘close to customer’ programmes.
These insight activation processes can easily lead to dozens of insights that can all serve as a springboard for marketing innovation.
However, in the current commercial environment marketing dollars are not limitless, so a selection of insights with the highest potential is becoming more crucial.
In this paper, we will explain how insight validation can help identify the insights with the highest innovation, activation or branding potential.
What to expect?
The quest for
consumer insights
What’s in a name?
‘Consumer insights’ is one of the most misused terms in marketing & market research. Below we give a definition of what a consumer insight is.
“A consumer insight represents an under-standing of the inner nature of things, leading to a discovery of something that is not-yet obvious but at same time recognizable and real, and providing the basis for relevant and actionable marketing decisions, ultimately leading to competitive advantage.”
A consumer insight is typically a short, single minded statement written in consumer language that reflects the opening sentence of the product or brand story that engage the consumer by setting up the need, the wish, or the desire.”
“The consumer is to be at the heart of all our innovation, branding and communication.”
Recognize this mission? Although many brands claim to integrate this credo in their DNA, many companies strug-gle to implement this in a structural way. It is obligatory to set up a structural approach for discovering and selecting consumers insights that can serve as a springboard for innovation & brand activation. In this paper, we will demonstrate you that within this process insight validation is a necessary, but often forgotten step. But before we get to that, let’s first define what a consumer insight exactly is.
Our magic
formulafor an
insight
EmotionAn insight should have an emo-tional valence. It can be a friction or problem that consumers want to solve. But it could also be a desire for something. Consumers should be excited about having a potential solution.
Aha!An insight should be a fresh and present a new way of looking at things. This includes both discov-ering something completely new as uncovering an existing reality in a new way. An insight should not be immediately apparent. It is latently present and often you only realize that it is true the moment you hear it. It brings to the surface what was there subconsciously.
The better the insight, the higher the business potential. It can unlock marketing innovation on different levels : brand innovation, product innovation, service innovation, communication & consumer activation.
It’s meA good insight is relevant for a consumer. Relevance can be driven by personal identification or by peer identification (this is when we call an insight contagious).
Our definition uncovers
some crucial elements that
a consumer insight should
possess in order to drive
business potential.
Insight validation, a
necessary step!
• Insight validation will help to assess the potential of an insight for your brand and your target group. Let’s be clear - we are not proposing that all consum-er insights generated during earlier activities are not built on real consumer needs, but how do we know:
• which ones deal with original thoughts and aspira-tions for your target group?
• which ones are already intuitively linked to our brand’s DNA?
• which needs your target group is relatively more motivated to see a solution for?
• to what extent does the insight address needs from all consumers or just from several segments?
• Insight validation helps you to optimize and better understand the insights. By several creative tools, one can detect why a certain insight is not scoring well. By measuring emotions, we get a better un-derstanding of the emotional space that an insights captures.
Even companies that put consumer insights at the core of innovation sometimes lack the discipline to validate these insights before starting ideation. How-ever, skipping this stage has several drawbacks:
• The cost and time investment further down the innovation funnel is only increasing with time. When solely selecting insights for ideation based on a ‘gut feeling’ you risk to invest in innovation that is not based on a need that is recognized by a large proportion of your consumers. Innovation or brand activation dollars are not endless.
• Once you start validating concepts without prior validation of the insight, it is hard to separate the potential/quality of the different building blocks of your concept. Is my insight driving the success or failure of a concept or is it something else?
Prioritizing in the fuzzy
front end
A first crucial step is to test the consumer language. Insights that do not pass the ‘Clarity’ minimum ac-ceptable score will be given a quali-tative analysis on how to improve the wording of the insight for possible re-testing.
Insights are primarily evaluated against 4 key performance indica-tors resulting in an overall ‘Insight strength’ score. We measure both the potential of the insight with the consumer themselves, as well as the contagious nature of the insight to activate conversations. This latter KPI helps us map the social potential for the insight.
The composite score is bench-marked against a global bench-mark database and based on that, recommendation to go ahead, rework or reject a specific insight can be formulated
Before we activate insights
and start ideating, they
should be validated using
an online survey with a
representative target
sample (n=min. 150).
To what extent can you personally identify with this statement?
Aha, I did not think of this issue or idea this way before!
How excited would you be if a solution or mes-sage was developed to address the issue?
How often have you noticed other peo-ple talking about the issue?
FreshnessRelevance Excitement Contagious Conversations
INSIGHT STRENGTH
From validation
only tounderstanding
It is one thing to know which insight is most powerful; it is another aspect to understand why this insight is performing well or not. With a set of quantitative and qualitative diag-nostics, we stimulate consumers to think harder and better. They help us to go beyond pure benchmarking. It helps us contextualize the insights and to understand why an insight is (not) performing well.
The word marking tool allows participants to indicate what aspects of the insights they like and dislike. This way, we are able to understand why consumers do or don’t identify with your insight. We can for example detect to what extent a friction in a given insight is driving the identification.
Identification with certain insights can be largely driven by the context. Therefore we invite consumers to make a collage which reflects a typical context in which they would experience the need described in the insight. This way we can get more insight on future consumption moments.
2
1
As pointed out earlier in this paper, it is important that each insight has an emotional valence. Through emotional measurement, we map which emotions are triggered by an insight and what the relative emotional posi-tioning is. Knowing the emotional space that an insights claims is powerful information for ideation, concept development and future communication and brand activation. Captur-ing emotions in survey research can be done both explicitly and implicitly. In the latter case, we put consumers under time pressure to avoid their rationalizing their answer. First find-ings demonstrate that implicit measurement under time pressure is a particular powerful technique, especially when dealing with nega-tive or socially desirable emotions.
Through a projective technique, we measure how close or far away an insight is perceived to be to a particular brand. Consumers are probed to think about the biggest fan of a brand and to indicate to what extent this brand fan would identify with the brand.
Activation
PleasantUnpleasantDisgusted
AshamedBored
Disappointed
Lonely
Enthusiastic
Relaxed
Admiration
Contempt
Excited
Love
Happy
AngryAfraid
Deactivation
4
3
Common Pitfalls in
Insightvalidation
• Fuzzy front end research is often associated with innovation. However, there are also insights that relate to communication, customer experience or branding. Insight validation can be applied on all types of insights. In this context it is also vital to look at the individual KPI’s and not only to insight strength as an overall measure. For example, when working on communication or brand activation, you may find it more important that the insight is ‘fresh’ and ‘conversation worthy’ rather than other types of insights.
• Crap in…crap out. Writing the insights that serve as input for the validation is an art in itself. An insight should be written in consumer language, focus on a single minded idea and clearly contain an emotional dimension. This has proven to be a very challenging skill in workshops with clients and requires consisten-cy and strict moderation.
• Insight validation is particularly challenging when it comes to testing taboos or socially (un)desira-ble insights. Taboo insights often lead to negative results, due to reluctance to admit embarrassing or socially unaccepted situations.
Insight validation can bring a lot to the table. Of course it requires a careful execution. Here are some pitfalls to look out for:
• Benchmarks are crucial to evaluate the perfor-mance of your insight. But insight validation is a relatively new discipline, so often category or target group benchmarks are absent; In this case, it can be wise to add some ‘old/proven’ insights to create an internal benchmark.
• Do not limit yourself to quantitative analysis only. Although Insight validation is done through quantita-tive surveying, it is only by blending it with qualitative research that one can get most out of the data. By performing a content analysis on groups of insights that perform (less) well, we can detect the underlying characteristics an insight should have to score well.
• Are all your insights scoring well in China, but not in the Netherlands? You probably did not take response styles into account. From previous research, we know that there is a culture influence on how con-sumers rate insights. Normalization is therefore crucial!
About taboo testing
Our research has indicated that insight formula-tion is crucial when dealing with taboo platforms. We set up an insight validation study aiming at testing different formulations: (1) Original taboo insight, (2) Positioning the insight in a positive emotional context & (3) Presenting the insight in a third person, with more context, through story-telling. Additionally the Consumer Relevance KPI ques-tion was asked indirectly in order to identify taboo situations. Our results show that the taboo effect can be minimized: whilst performing equally on all other KPIs, the Consumer Relevance increas-es when positive or storytelling formulations are used. Relevance KPI in the 3rd person is also useful to identify a taboo insight. Also the average insight strength increases significantly across different insight formulations.
‘Going out I enjoy that feeling of being
part of a group...’
Positively stated
‘When going out we’re usually just sharing good times and catching up...’
Storytelling formulation
‘When in a disco, I want to fit as one of the
crowd...’
Original insight
By conducting insight validation, Heineken signifi-cantly reduces their chances of moving weak insights further down the innovation funnel. As a result, ideas and concepts based on validated insights perform significantly better.
The latter is clearly demonstrated in a meta-analysis which revealed that the unpriced buying intention of concepts based on validated consumer insights is up to 20% higher in comparison with concepts based on insights that were not tested upfront.
As part of an organizational drive to strengthen their consumer led innovation process, Heineken Interna-tional sought a partner to provide a meaningful solu-tion to help select the most potent consumer insights to use as a basis for product innovation or branding/communication initiatives.
Since 2010, Heineken has tested hundreds of consum-er insights across the globe using our Insight Validation Tool. We partner also in other phases of the innovation journey (insight writing workshops, ideation workshops, concept writing workshops,…).
The insight validation phase has become mandatory in the Innovation Process and the quality of product concepts generated further down the innovation funnel is clearly benefiting from this. Marion Hoek-Koudenburg, consumer insight manager at Heineken, explains it as follows: “A protocol for Consumer Insight testing, which is in line with our HNV Consumer Insight criteria, allows us to even better understand our consumers and their lan-guage, adding significant value to our innovation projects while helping minimize the risk to the company”.
Some proof
from our clients
Insight validation is part of a
picture
Ideally, it starts with leveraging ex-isting knowledge: previous research that touched upon a certain topic, data collected by the consumer care centre, consumer feedback that is shared on social media. We sit on a (big) pile of data and the efficient digestion of what is already known can already uncover new insights.
Consumer immersion is a second important component in the mix. New methods like consumer-led ethnography allow you to deep-dive into the consumer’s world so we can fully understand all consumer needs and underlying motivations and therefore discover new consumer insights. By innovative techniques like crowd interpretation or using the power of Consumer Consulting
After validation, the most potent insights are used as inspirational springboards for idea generation. Also here, companies often do not involve the consumer. It is impor-tant to ensure that the consumer is “kept alive” throughout the ideation – either in the physical workshop, through overnight idea screening or through virtual co-creation commu-nities.
Innovation is a journey. Insight
validation is only one step in
the fuzzy front end. Therefore,
and in order to ensure it is truly
powerful, one should not use this
research in isolation.
1Leverage
Seco
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sear
chIdentity meaningful observations
360 interpretation Shaping insights Prioritize
Development & validation
Insi
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Con
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Idea
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2Immersion
3Insighting
4Validation
5Ideation &concepting
Ashley Smith
+3292691212
@ash_m_smith
linkedin.com/in/ashleymarksmith
Daniel Teixaira
+3292691512
@DTeixeira
linkedin.com/in/danteixeira
Annelies Verhaeghe
+3292691406
@annaliezze
linkedin.com/in/anneliesverhaeghe
Filip De Boeck
+16463340694
@filip_deboeck
linkedin.com/in/filipdeboeck
Thank you!
@InSites
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