The Insight Book: Enhancing your creativity by learning to see things differently

By Anthony Tasgal

More than ever, people crave new ideas, new ways of seeing and interpreting behaviour; of changing their companies and lives and of being more creative. Insight today has become an essential tool for seeing things differently and more deeply to enable you to understand better the trends and changes going on around you and your work/business.

This book is an entertaining, instructive and accessible guide to understanding and deploying insight to see things differently and find creativity from all sources and in all places. Insight has become an important way to gain a deeper understanding of how your customers think and feel about your products and services.

Part of the Concise Advice series of short and powerful guides, the book explains what insight is, why insight is so important (and yet so poorly misunderstood and under-used), and how can we nurture and develop it in our work and even personal lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: LID Publishing
• Release date: Mar 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9781911687399

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Why a book on insight?

Well, shelves have hardly been groaning beneath the weight of tomes on the matter. And yet, it remains one of the hottest and most debated topics in marketing, communications and research. So, you can hardly complain that it’s ‘just another book on insight’ (unlike, say, books on the brain, consciousness, social media, baking or mindfulness).

In fact, everywhere you look in the business world, insight has taken on the aura of an elusive Holy Grail. Research departments have rebranded themselves as insight departments, while conferences and events dedicated to understanding and promulgating insight have sprung up globally, promising new generations of practitioners that they can grow up learning what it is and how to spot or discover it.

There’s been greater focus on insight with the advent of Big Data (essentially, the concept of crunching ‘lots of data’). Shouldn’t that, in and of itself, give us insight in droves? Well, no.

There’s simply no automatic process whereby data gives insight; no effortless shift from data to ‘ta-da!’

So, how can insight be both over-hyped and under-appreciated?

Is it just something researchers need to justify their existence to their marketing counterparts or the Board? Have ad agencies become unhealthily obsessed with it, in the search for pitch-winning strategies? Could it be the secret to transforming the fortunes of their clients’ brands? Or is it the new currency of brands, marketing and communications — the Bitcoin of branding? And, hey, who doesn’t want in on a new currency?

Following our storytelling principle of the ‘Magic Number Three,’ we will explore the meaning, role and composition of insight in three sections.

First, in Part 1, we will provide a detailed overview of what actually constitutes an insight and why it’s considered so valuable. We’ll review definitions, explore the theory behind this elusive concept, and discuss some objections to all the hubbub.

Part 2 will delve into the insight casebook. With the assumption that understanding real-world case studies (practice) is a good way of pinning down the law (theory), we will look at a range of brands and campaigns that have embodied the notion of insight. Individually and collectively, this can help shape our understanding of insight.

Finally, Part 3 will offer some concrete guidance for Seekers After Insight. Namely, how can we be more likely to find it personally, and how can we build and sustain company cultures that deliver insight at the team level? Using that number again, we will examine this from the perspective of three Cs: characteristics, credos and cultures.

BLIZZARDS,

BUTTERFLIES

AND

BERNBACH

PART ONE

WHAT IS INSIGHT

– THEORY

1.

WHY THE DRIVE

FOR INSIGHT?

So, why are intrepid insight-hunters looking for this elusive vision? Why has insight become the coin of the realm for marketing people who don’t quite dare dip their toes into crypto?

Rightly or wrongly, the currency of insight has grown to Tesla levels, as clients and their agencies have sought out the wisdom and understanding it is widely thought (or expected) to offer.

It seems that successful insight can fulfil various needs.

At the generic business level, a good insight can be a way to transform a company. It can help relieve business pressures, and offer a new route to facing down brand strategy challenges.

At the global level, there may be a need to re-frame the brand (or entire category) due to changing social factors, needs or perceptions. Smoking would be the most obvious example in recent history, and sustainability is perhaps the most current.

I recall this being expressed by clients and the marketing press, with businesses feeling that their brand was ‘losing touch with consumers.’ This struck me as bizarre, and also rather disingenuous, as clients are obsessed with having enough data to understand their users.

I tend to see it as code for, ‘We’ve had enough of our agency and just need an excuse to fire them.’

This has often been in response to competitive threats from new market entrants, or other brands that have modified their offering, positioning or marketing activities.

Finally, the perceived need may be rooted in internal issues. Many times, in my former ad agency life, I witnessed a new client CEO, Director of Marketing or Sales VP fuelling the drive for insight.Without fail, this had several immediate consequences, often framed as, ‘I want to review the agency, our relationship, the strategy and the ad campaign specifically.’

This almost never turned out well for the agency; we knew we would almost certainly be fired, usually after a specious inquest had been carried out. If not, the client would ask us to conduct a strategic analysis and theatrically unveil a miraculous new insight for them.

One way of looking at the transformative power of insight in business is through the lens of our old friend, hero and patron, Charles Darwin.

Darwin’s theory of evolution was largely based on what was known as incrementalism: the gradual, linear accumulation of small changes over the long history of the evolutionary record and human change.

A contrasting theory was one of ‘saltation,’ suggesting abrupt, nonlinear changes in the fossil record.

Language fans will spot the etymological links to sauter in French, saltar in Spanish and salire in Italian, all meaning to climb, leap or jump.

It also reminds comms folks of that well-known cornerstone of communication theory, ‘salience,’ or the ability for a brand or piece of messaging to jump out at us.

Darwin was a gradualist, and famously said, "Natura non facit saltum." (Nature doesn’t make jumps.)

In fact, the term punctuated equilibrium was coined by palaeontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge in 1972¹ to reflect that the fossil record did occasionally reveal violent bursts of change, rather than the relentless incrementalism of continuity that most other evolutionary biologists adhere to.

Though the supposition caused a lively debate among Darwin’s heirs — opponents sarcastically labelled it evolution by jerks — it did help explain in part the occasional leaps and bounds that punctuated long stretches of little change in the fossil record. (Gould’s pointed riposte, recasting it as Creeps vs. Jerks, showed an underestimated scientific sense of humour.)

This strikes me as a helpful analogy for thinking about how brands can be viewed, and where insight fits in.

Anyone who works at the branding coalface can attest to the fact that much brand strategy and implementation maps pretty neatly to the incrementalist approach. Brands develop a strategy and position, zero in on an audience, devise a communications approach and generally execute slowly and steadily against it.

But there are occasional irruptions of the unexpected that tilt the equilibrium, which can cause an upheaval to the category. As noted, these may be of external origin, but they can also be created by a brand, especially if it is a disruptor or ‘challenger.’

If you want to create saltation for your brand, company or culture, locating a transformative insight is a good place to start. (See Part 2 – The Casebook.)

Insight can also be invaluable in helping you grow and ‘scale.’ (A lot of people I find myself working with/for/alongside seem to be very intent on using this verb.)

The Risk Barrier

Gerd Gigerenzer² is a German psychologist, behavioural scientist, writer and educator affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. He has authored award-winning books that have been translated into 21 languages. These include Calculated Risks; Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious; and Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions. He’s also been involved in a protracted, public (and quite venomous) spat with Princeton University psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman and his late research partner, Amos Tversky, about the scope of heuristics — rules of thumb that can guide decision-making — and human biases.

In 2013’s Risk Savvy, Gigerenzer notes that there are too many lawyers in the US, which has the highest per capita percentage of attorneys of any country other than Israel.Among other implications, he looks at the impact this has on the medical profession. Here he gives the reader some very useful advice: don’t ask