Recently, a team of Simpactful partners gathered to compare notes on what we see as one of the major outages in the Consumer Products industry today. Clients across the board are looking for ways to build bigger brands by amplifying Marketing dollars, driving volume growth, reinventing channel and shopping experiences, or creating blockbuster innovations. One common outage we are seeing is a lack of quality insights.
Collectively, our Simpactful team and partners have witnessed how well-crafted insights can inspire blockbuster innovation, smarter category growth strategies and shelving solutions, as well as breakthrough creativity. These powerful insights have transformed the industry, leading to the creation of Swiffer and White Claw, Netflix’s planned launch of “Experience Houses,” and Diaper.com’s creation of a diaper subscription service in 2005 (which eventually garnered a buyout from Amazon). Insights also inspired the overarching “It has to be Heinz” 360 Campaign, which recently won a Grand Prix award at Cannes. Haven’t heard the hype? You can find a great overview video here: Grand Prix Cannes Creative Effectiveness: It Has To Be Heinz (youtube.com).
Our experience has taught us that the insights driving great innovation, powerful business ideas, effective channel execution, and Cannes-worthy winning creative don’t typically stem from consumer feedback in focus groups (although we’ve certainly consumed our fair share of gummy bears and Peanut M&M’s in those settings!). The reason is simple: In such environments, teams can only extract the conscious information that consumers can articulate. Leading experts like Byron Sharp, Dan Ariely, and Daniel Kahneman have shown us that most purchase and usage decisions are made unconsciously based on what feels right. To design innovation, creative, and brand experiences that resonate with these decision systems, a profound understanding of how our minds operate when we’re not actively engaged is crucial.
So, what exactly is a business insight and how are they discovered? The term “insight” suggests a process that combines observation with introspective analysis to uncover rich opportunities for business growth. Teams that generate profound insights typically delve deep into multiple dimensions of the business challenges they’re addressing and the action they want shoppers or consumers to take. These insights tap into an understanding of the Category, Channel, Competition, purchase drivers and dissatisfiers, technical product, packaging solutions, conscious and unconscious shopper and consumer habits, the company, supplier, retailer, or industry business models, human needs, compensating behaviors, beliefs about problems or solutions, and the unwritten rules of the category.
The next challenge is articulating the learnings in a concise, “Simpactful” way. There is an art to crafting insights that are simple yet inspire action from the recipient. Depending on the situation, this could be an SVP at a key retailer, the General Manager of a Business Unit, a Packing Engineer, a Perfumier, a Fixturing Agency, or even an Advertising Copywriter.
Simpactful’s skilled Consumer, Market, Insights, and Analytics practitioners have helped client teams build robust learning plans that combine ethnographic research, market and competitive analyses, observational learning, technical understanding, or even social trends. These experts have also completed comprehensive analyses of macroeconomic conditions as well as Category, Channel, and Competitive deep dives. Insight workshops can bring together multi-functional resources to look at the information gathered through various lenses and to create inspiring and enduring insights using a simple framework. The resulting output can be used to guide projects through execution.
Want to learn more about our Insight capabilities? Simpactful can help you! Our team of Marketing, In-Store, Retail Insight, and Analytics experts would be happy to roll up our sleeves with you to tackle a specific project need or to help your organization develop the capability to develop world-class insights! Contact our team today at contact@simpactful.com or 925-234-6394.
