customer insights

Customer insights cut right to the heart of marketing.  This is true whether you are building a marketing strategy or developing a campaign brief.  But the thing is, insights can be tricky to get right.

First, what exactly do we mean by a customer insight?

An insight needs to speak to why customers behave in a certain way.  Looking backwards an insight should seem obvious, but it’s likely you didn’t know this ahead of time.  Understanding the why is what moves information from mere facts and data into insights.

·        A human tension that’s relevant to the brand

·        Resonates with the audience (a-ha moment that drives you into action)

·        Leads to a competitively differentiated idea (relevant to the business)

·        Powerful enough to change behavior (motivation based on beliefs)

Getting insights right is the first step to building effective marketing.  And making sure they meet the points above will go a long ways to building effective insights.  Different people have different definitions of an insight, but regardless of your definition it’s important to have a common understanding that marketers rally around.

Now that we know what insights are, where do they come from?

Now that you know what an insight is, how do you go about getting them?  Marketing has a host of tools and market research capabilities in order to power insights.  One of the common maxims in Silicon Valley is to get out of the building and talk to customers (Lean StartUp).  This is powerful because it speaks to the customer mindset of really getting to know your customer with a high level of empathy.

One important thing to remember.  It’s always necessary to get back to the why regardless of how you get to an insight.  Data synthesis tools can give you a powerful understanding of what’s happening, but it is still critical to develop sound hypothesis about why it is happening as you translate your observations into actionable insights.

·        Asking – talk to your customers

·        Observing – watch your customers behaviors

·        Analyzing data

·        Experiments

·        Synthesizing

The role of empathy in customer insights.

Having a strong customer empathy is central to insights.  This starts with the customer mindset and pulls through in the various tactics that you take in developing and honing customer insights.  There are a few tips to developing your customer empathy.

The first is seeing the customer’s whole life.  This can’t be accomplished through the lens of your product of service.  It means taking a human centric approach and truly meeting a person where they’re at.

Next is eliminating blind spots.  There are several common biases (overconfidence, anchoring, risk aversion, etc.) that are well studied and impact all of us.  It’s important to evaluate your biases and control for them as part of your insights development process.

Finally, leverage the power of small insights in big moments and connect the dots to see the big picture.

Practicing customer insights

The great news is that it’s easy to practice and improve your skills around customer insights!  As a simple practice, take a look at a new product and try to reverse engineer the customer insight.  You can do this same thing for advertisements.  Finally, really read and absorb online comments about a brand or product and see what insights you uncover.