The Human Guide to Insights
Quick Tips to Go Beyond the Data
What happens when the New York Mets go on a magical playoff run at the same time a new season of Love is Blind drops? Reason & Whimsy misses an edition, obviously. Apologies for all of you who were crying into your coffee last week. I’ll find a way to make it up to you.
This week (or was it last week?), I want to talk about “insights”
Back in the last decade, I worked on a pitch for a candy company. The assignment was reasonably interesting, but we were struggling to come up with something equally interesting to inform our strategy. As a category, confection is highly reliant on marketing, and as a result the lives and motivations of consumers have been examined, analyzed, debated, and deconstructed to the point that there’s almost nothing new left to find, like the leaves of barren cocoa plants.
In the end, we settled on a driving “insight” about the neurological power of horror content for teens. At the end of the meeting, one of the main clients said something like, “I’ve worked in this business for almost twenty years, so it’s very rare for me to hear something new and useful, but the insight you shared was definitely both.” It was a satisfying moment, but it also crystallized a lesson: the best way to win (and keep) a client is to tell that something useful that they didn’t already know.
As the marketing industry becomes increasingly data equivalized, the ability to unearth useful novelty from that data will create competitive advantages for both brands and agencies.
That might be the least original thought I’ve ever written. The more important question is HOW to turn mounds of data into real insight.
The DIKW pyramid is one of my favorite epistemological frameworks, which is especially useful for data or audience strategies.
Data- The raw, unfiltered stuff. Every measurable thing under the sun.
Information- That stuff, filtered and organized.
Knowledge- Conclusions drawn from that organized stuff.
Wisdom- The insightful, forward-looking application of those conclusions.
I like it as an organizing framework to sort all the things we have/know about a particular challenge or audience. At the top of the pyramid, you could replace Wisdom with Strategy or Insight.
Organizing is only half the job, but it does help set up the other half of the search for insight: Inspiration.
I love this quote from Emma Cookson:
“Great consumer insights are not - in my experience - discovered. They are thought of. Conceived in the mind of some smart, informed person. They are not found, they are intuited. They are not mined, they are identified and hypothesized.”
Like a cocoa bean without the roasting and whatever else turns it into chocolate, a data point without human imagination cannot be turned into anything useful.
Here are a few of the ways I look for inspiration to spur that imagination when trying to find that one unique and overwhelmingly important and profound thought that will not only change a brand’s business, but also, maybe, change the world.
Read A Lot
This could be deployed as a helpful tip for pretty much any intellectual challenge, I know. I’m not saying you should be devouring The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire when trying to find something interesting about candy buyers. But exploring new ideas helps unlock new ways to look at old ones. And the act of reading stimulates the brain in a different way (don’t ask me about the science) that I think helps identify unexpected connections between seemingly disparate thoughts. Even a quick scan of Substack or Medium posts might be enough to set your brain onto a fruitful path.
Look for Tensions, Contradictions, Paradoxes, Inconsistencies
Things that don’t make sense are a lot more interesting than things that do, because what almost always follows is the question of why and how we can change it.
“Teens consume more social media than Boomers.” “Frequent shoppers value the whole experience.” “Sufferers of chronic illnesses are always looking for new solutions.” These are all undeniably true, and at some point, each of these might have been noteworthy, but after a time they no longer even need to be said.
The easiest way to explore the weirder stuff is to think about butts. No, sorry, to think about BUTS. Take your statement of fact (ie “teens consume more social media than Boomers”) and add BUT statements to it (like “BUT on average communicate with fewer people each day”). Now you’ve got something potentially interesting and actionable.
Talk it Out
The biggest trap agencies fall into is trying to find insights in a data set, when the best way to find something unique is to talk about the data set. Create the time for a small group of people to discuss and raise additional questions.
This is a space to offer and test hypotheses, to bring your own personal experience into the exploration, and to debate what really matters.
Potentially even more powerful is to talk to someone who is completely disconnected to the business/challenge/client but might be an expert in something related to the audience. The distance from the immediate need is sometimes the new perspective that’s needed.
Think About the Human Condition
Regular readers will know how fond I am of seemingly random historical comparisons. This is because when it comes to our most basic needs and emotions, human needs have not changed much in the last 10,000 years. Not to go all Maslow on you, but exploring how changes in media or technology impact our core emotional, psychological, or even biological needs of an audience is a fast track to a great insight.
So think about how we responded as humans to analogs from our past, and you’ll likely find something unique to say about our present and future.
This Week’s Whimsies
Speaking of historical comparisons, I loved this piece comparing the printing press’s contribution to European witch hunts with today’s misinformation ecosystem.
This Substack post by Katie Harbath called “The Future of Our Information Environment” is worth it for the four-box chart on perceived value of digital content alone.
I’ve never quite gotten on board with the recent ad industry obsession with “attention,” because it always felt a little… obvious. Like insisting that a cheeseburger have cheese on it. But I figured I just wasn’t quite getting it, until I read this LinkedIn post that points out all the questions that don’t get addressed when treating attention as a metric.
Gen Z… hyperindiviualism… social media… mental health… Even though all the buzzwords are buzzing, I still found this interview with a 20-year old creator unique as a portal into the mind of both a generation and the creator profession.
I love the Monday Night Football ManningCast, both as a viewer (I hate listening to Troy Aikman on the main broadcast, and really enjoy the “just dudes watching football vibe” of the Manning brothers) and as an observer of media’s evolution. It feels like alternative feeds of content has been bubbling as potential for a while, but the ManningCast is the first real big hit. So I was intrigued by this piece that argues it’s the beginning of a wave of customized content for superfans.