Observations, insights and ideas

You know us marketers use the term ‘insights’ as if there is no tomorrow. And yet it amazes me how often it is misused.

To be clear, in market research, we begin with observations of behaviour. These are facts, nuggets of consumer information that can be the raw material for insight generation. For example, US researchers in the 1970s saw kids walking around with big stereos on their shoulders.

An insight is when we get to the heart of people’s thoughts and feelings. It provides inspiration for business growth. Taking the aforementioned example, the insight was that these kids wanted to listen to their music when on the move.

So Sony developed the Walkman.

Interestingly though, when it was researched, consumers said they wouldn’t buy it because they couldn’t use it to record music like they could with a traditional tape recorder. But Sony believed in the core insight, pushed on with producing and marketing the product, and the rest, as they say, is history.

So from an insight comes an idea, in the above example the idea being to produce a small, portable, lightweight machine that can play music (tapes). Good ideas come from great insights which in turn come from deeply understood observations. And good ideas potentially go beyond what consumers say they need. It can require a leap of faith, as in the case of the Walkman.