Insights

The term Insight has become probably one of the buzzwords most frequently used by marketeers and innovation experts around the globe. Strictly, the Oxford dictionary defines insight as the capacity to gain an accurate and deep understanding of someone or something. In business, we understand insights as needs that the market has not yet properly fulfilled, and that we can use as starting points in the process of developing new products and services.






Innovation expert Xavier Camps defines insight as:

"An interesting revelation, a learning that arises from the observation of people's behaviour.

It is an interpretation of what we see, and it is often the result of asking why people do things in a particular way in some occasions. The goal is to identify problems that costumers find in their daily life, so that new areas of opportunity show up"

Xavier Camps, The jazz musician

Whatever definition we take, the key to revealing meaningful insights is proximity to costumers. In words of Peter Drucker, the father of modern management, the best way of knowing what costumers want is sitting with them, chatting, and above all, observing them:

[...] the best way to find out [what customers want] is to ask customers, not by questionnaires but by, again, sitting down with them and finding out. The most successful retailer I know in the world is not one of the big retail chains. It is somebody in Ireland, [...]. This particular company is next door to Great Britain with its very powerful supermarkets and all of them are also in Ireland; and yet this little company has maybe 60% of the sandwich market. What do they do? Well, the answer is that the boss spends two days each week in one of his stores observing customers, from the meat counter to the checkout counter, to being the one who puts stuff into bags and carries it out to the shoppers' automobiles.
And he knows what the customers pay for.

Manage Yourself and Then Your Company: Set an Example

LECTURE BY PETER DRUCKER ON THE 10TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE IEDC, 1996

In our current societies dominated by massive information flows, and e-relations, Peter Drucker's words resonate in the rebirth of ethnography as a tool to understand our costumer's needs. Unlike traditional market researchers, that ask targeted questions, ethnographic researchers visit, observe and listen to consumers and costumers at their homes and work places. An the best ethnographic research team is the one composed by the future developers (marketing, sales, R&D, ...) that will later on be in charge of imagining the new products and services.

Catching insights is then, all in all, a matter of attitude and culture. So, as a manager, encourage your team to step outside of the lab or office, and sit down for a while with your costumers!


Additional material.

Template for an ethnographic session