Everyone has heard the word insight in business. Regardless of the industry, insights are constantly being asked for, and entire teams exist to generate them.
However, the term itself is broad and in Beauty and CPG, it is often used across brand, consumer, and market contexts.
In consumer research, an insight provides a deeper understanding of the consumer within the context of a product or situation that can inform strategic decision-making throughout product development.
The mistake is treating the answer to the research question as the consumer insight instead of understanding what that answer is revealing about consumer behavior.
The long-term value of a consumer insight is how useful it can remain beyond answering the original research question.
The Difference is What Happens After the Answer
When teams discuss consumer research to make a decision, the conversation often looks like this:
- “The consumer showed us this.”
- “The consumer told us this.”
That is not necessarily wrong, but what is often missing is understanding what the research is revealing about the consumer and what that means for the strategic decision being made.
When consumer research remains attached to the question it answered, it functions more like a conclusion. Its usefulness stays within the original context rather than contributing a deeper understanding of the consumer that can inform decision-making throughout the business.
A good consumer insight does three things:
- It synthesizes multiple observations of consumer behavior.
- It makes their behavior or situation understandable from inside the consumer’s reality.
- It provides an integrated view of the consumer that brand and cross-functional stakeholders can translate into their own initiatives.
For a consumer insight to live beyond the research, it has to provide an understanding of the consumer that can be integrated throughout the business without losing what the research revealed in the first place.
Without Empathy Insights Become Projections
One of the clearest indicators of a good consumer insight is that it makes the consumer’s behavior understandable from their reality.
One question can serve as confirmation:
- Can this behavior be explained from the consumer’s perspective, even when the same decision would not make sense from another perspective?
That safeguards the insight, so the consumer’s perspective remains intact as it is integrated throughout product development.
A Good Insight Becomes the Reference Point
Consider a rosy face lotion being tested in a focus group for appeal and likeability. Participants do not respond well to the product and give several reasons throughout the session.
The first conclusion might be:
- “Consumers do not like the rosy glow.”
That answers the immediate question. It tells the team how the product performed.
A second conclusion might be:
- “Consumers prefer a golden glow.”
That infers an answer from the result. The team may conclude that if consumers do not like one expression of glow, they prefer another, but that remains a hypothesis to investigate.
The insight might be:
- “Glow is not being perceived simply as color payoff. It is connected to the consumer’s ideal of transformation, desirability, and belonging.”
Now the team understands something beyond whether consumers liked the rosy effect. The insight reveals what their behavior throughout the research is communicating about how they evaluate glow.
That insight can inform strategic decision-making and support strategic anticipation throughout product development. As a reference point, its value can extend beyond the original research and inform strategic foresight for future product innovation.
The Best Insights Feel Obvious in Hindsight
The best insights are easy to undervalue because once something becomes clear, it becomes harder to remember why it was so difficult to understand in the first place.
That is when people say, “If I knew then what I know now” or “If it was so obvious, why couldn’t we see it at the time?”
The answer feels obvious because the ambiguity surrounding it has been reduced. However, don’t mistake that clarity for a lack of value.
Before the insight was established, the business did not have that understanding to inform its decisions. The fact that the answer now seems obvious is evidence that the work accomplished what it was supposed to do.
The business now has a deeper understanding of the consumer that is easier to recognize and apply throughout product development.
—by THE BUILD BRIEF