Every successful business out there started from the seed of an insight. Their business model is based on that initial insight. But once a business becomes established, that initial insight becomes irrelevant and so does their business model. One thing that limits innovation in established companies is that employees don’t have access to insights or worse yet, don’t know what an insight is to begin with. This is an ongoing problem as stated by a recent study by CapGemini which says that New Products Fail Due to Lack of Customer Insight. There you go!
For your next source of growth you need ‘new insights’, and good ones too. Because without good insights the chances of moving your ideas forward is slim. So what’s an insight? It’s an undeniable consumer or customer truth.
Great, but how do you identify them?
The ‘insight’ statement
Yesterday I listened in on Maddock Douglas’s ‘How to find the best insights’ webinar and they propose a very simple way of identifying them:
For example: I eat fast food (fact) because it’s convenient (why) but I end up regretting it.
That’s a potential insight for an idea. Next thing to do is ask the all-important ‘Why?’ various times to dig deeper and uncover the ‘real truth’. This is NOT the end of the search, there’s more to it than just putting a statement together but I thought of this as a useful starting point.
You won’t snatch these statements out of the sky, you’ll have to immerse yourself into people’s lives and observe them. Become them. Feel what they feel. Speak their language. It’s also important to understand that the people you’re observing won’t come out and tell you their ‘insight statement’ so you’ll have to put the pieces together and connect the dots between all the things you notice.
More to come! I’ll post the slides and audio from the webinar when I get them by next week, it’s really useful stuff
Update: Below is the full webinar on How to find the best insights. Enjoy!
How to Find the Best Insights webinar recording from Maddock Douglas, Inc. on Vimeo.