What is customer insight?

Here is our guide to customer insight. What is it? How do you find them? How do you use it to transform your organisation?
What is customer insight?

At the heart of every successful marketing strategy lies customer insight. If we discover an insight or ‘truth’ that our competitors haven’t yet found or considered, it can provide us with our point of differentiation. This differentiation can motivate consumers to want to engage and form a relationship with us and, eventually, buy from us. 

An insight is an uncommon truth that crystallises an understanding of your target customers, their context, or their relationship with your category, or brand.

Customer insight forms the nucleus of every marketing campaign. By extension, customer insight can also become the single largest point of failure in any marketing activity. It’s like two railway tracks running parallel to each other — even the smallest separation at the beginning can result in a difference of miles the longer they run.

Similarly, if we are even slightly off on customer insight, the entire campaign can be ineffective (not to mention a huge waste of money!). The importance of getting this step right cannot be overstated. Relying on market research is the primary way to ensure accuracy in this area. 

What is a Customer Insight?

Often, the most powerful insights are rooted in tension: a hope or need the customer has and the barriers in their way to fulfilling it. The opportunity for your brand might lie in uniquely addressing that tension.

Here are a few examples of insights: 

Customer insight example 1: Like a girl – Always campaign

Always, an American brand of menstrual hygiene products, launched the Always #LikeAGirl campaign based on an insight about gender and self-esteem. A 2002 study on self-esteem by the American Psychological Association found that during puberty, girls’ self-esteem drops twice as much than boys’. The company found that a large part of the reason for this drop was rooted in gender stereotypes specifically, ways of thinking about gender that surface in language. For instance, the expression ‘like a girl’ is used as a way to put a person down, to ridicule them for presumed weaknesses like being too emotional, or physically weak. This insight sparked an idea for their advertising campaign in which the expression — like a girl — was instead used as a way to empower girls and women.

Customer insight example 2: Direct Line Group Fixer campaign

Insurance company Direct Line’s ‘Fixer’ campaign featured Winston Wolfe, the clean-up guy played by actor Harvey Keitel in the film Pulp Fiction. The multimedia campaign was born of the insight that insurance matters at the point of claim, and that people want hassle-free insurance with the assurance that they can get their lives quickly back on track. And who better than ‘the world’s most famous fixer’ to assure them of that!

Customer insight example 3: Dove’s Real Beauty campaign

A global study commissioned in 2004 by Unilver beauty brand Dove found that only 23% of women felt responsible for influencing their definition of beauty.

A decade later, nearly thrice as many women felt that way, according to Jennifer Bremmer, Unilever marketing director, who based her comment on findings by another study commissioned by the brand. The same survey also found that more than half of the women surveyed believed that social media plays a larger role than traditional media in defining beauty. 

How do you find insights?

If insights were obvious they would, in all likelihood, already be addressed and possibly owned by our competitors. We often need to work hard to find what lies…

  • beneath and behind what people say
  • between the lines of what people say
  • and what they sometimes cannot even articulate
  • insights are sometimes unlocked by piecing together inputs; for example, a qualitative study of competitor analysis

Moving beyond customer insight

It’s important to bear in mind that people cannot always tell us what they want or need, and generally they can’t anticipate future needs or desires. In this unit, we look at methods for understanding market trends and needs consumers may not recognise, or be able to articulate.

The key methods we will explore are: cultural insight, ethnographic research, and online analytics of search terms, and social media discourse.

We will help you understand when such methods are called for, and the value they can bring, particularly to provide foresight for product/ service development, and to tap into cultural truths for more resonant brand positioning and communications.

While it is important to understand what consumers think, it’s crucial to understand what influences how they think, to have a chance of changing how they think. We need to understand the context that they get their inspiration and knowledge from, the context that shapes their attitudes and behaviours without their being conscious of it.

Cultural insight

Let’s look at cultural insight. It’s strongly related to semiotics, and often undertaken by people who are trained in semiotic practice, but it’s not the same thing. It’s worth first explaining what semiotics is.

Cultural insight goes deeper and wider than this. It helps us understand how these signs and symbols we identify through semiotic practice work to create influences on culture, thereby influencing us on both an individual and a collective level.

What is the value of this?

No one can predict the future and consumers are no different. Why does this matter? Imagine that you’re developing a product that will take a couple of years to enter the market.

If you have based your thinking only on what consumers tell you they like and want today, you might not see a future opportunity, or understand how to go after it.

One of the most important advantages of cultural insight is that it provides a structure for understanding not just what’s dominant today but also what’s emerging, what’s on the cutting edge, what’s building up — ideas that haven’t yet been embraced by the mass market, but that soon might be.

Cultural insight is also invaluable for brand and communications development, both of which should ideally be driven by insight. However, speaking to people, or reviewing outputs from quantitative surveys is often not enough to spark an idea you can progress. 

Understanding cultural context is crucial in understanding the space brands can own, and how they can be differentiated in a way that is fresh and compelling, while still relevant. If we truly understand culture, we can better identify places our brands can go, before others get there.

So how does it work?

Cultural insight should be conducted by experts in the discipline. With their wealth of experience in interpreting culture, they are far better placed than you or I to understand a recessive trend, a dominant dynamic, or an emergent shift.

This largely involves desk research in which a cultural-insight specialist mainly interprets media, social media, and brand content. Research is enriched by field work, where the analyst might visit storefronts, restaurants, hoarding ads, even street art to experience culture first-hand, in order to provide insight.

Cultural insight will be guided by responding to a question, such as:

There are also AI-driven cultural-insight methods. These methods involve web scraping, using previously selected sources and identifying themes that relate to your interest through semantic and syntactic text analysis.

The value here is still achieved only through expert human interpretation, prioritisation, and labelling of emerging themes. What these platforms do, however, is accelerate what can initially be a labour-intensive process, making cultural insight more cost-efficient and accessible for brands. Discover.ai is one such example of an insight platform.

Social media analytics

Beyond this, social media analytics can provide an understanding of the themes, in terms of what people are saying, and what they are responding to, and can help you see key narratives and understand how people are responding to specific influences and influencers. This is done using a range of social media analytics platforms that again scrape the web (e.g.: looking at themes and trends in Twitter discourse).

There is also the potential to identify differences in language through AI-powered analytics of online discourse. The company Relative Insight has been created to identify differences in language between data-sets. This helps us understand if brands are speaking in a meaningfully different way on a topic vs. consumers, or if sentiment on an issue has changed significantly over time.

But the ability to understand cultural context shouldn’t be thought of as something that only happens through analysing our lives online, and through the materials we consume on the internet. We touched on ethnographic insight earlier, and this can play an important role in understanding people beyond what they tell us.

Ethnographic research

Ethnographic research involves observing people in situ.  Often it can and should entail interacting with people – asking them questions.  But the real value of ethnography lies in the observation and interpretation of context.  This might be how people navigate a transport system, or how they live in their homes.  We can pick up clues based on this context, and use it to enrich our insight beyond what people can tell us.

Online analytics search terms

Beyond this, social media analytics can provide an understanding of the themes, in terms of what people are saying, and what they are responding to, and can help you see key narratives and understand how people are responding to specific influences and influencers. This is done using a range of social media analytics platforms that again scrape the web (e.g.: looking at themes and trends in Twitter discourse)

Social media discourse

There is also the potential to identify differences in language through AI-powered analytics of online discourse. The company Relative Insight has been created to identify differences in language between data-sets. This helps us understand if brands are speaking in a meaningfully different way on a topic vs. consumers, or if sentiment on an issue has changed significantly over time.

But the ability to understand cultural context shouldn’t be thought of as something that only happens through analysing our lives online, and through the materials we consume on the internet. We touched on ethnographic insight earlier, and this can play an important role in understanding people beyond what they tell us.

Summary

Whatever methods you adopt and whatever your business needs are, ultimately it’s always important to bear in mind that as marketers it’s crucial we’re not just focused on today, but we’re looking ahead.  In identifying emergent narratives and trends, we can often unlock fresh insight into an idea that is relevant for our brand, and which we can use to differentiate it in the here and now. 

And ultimately one of our jobs as marketers should be to help our organisations future-proof themselves.  We live in fast-changing times, and we’re navigating many disruptions globally.  Part of our job is to sift through the noise and work out which changes are likely to matter to our businesses, and how.  And then what to do about it all.

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