The Nature of Insight
Written by Stephen Worrall on Thursday, 02 July 2009 15:27
So what is insight? I am sure you have seen the standard definitions "A hidden truth", "A penetrating discovery that unlocks growth", "seeing what everyone else has seen, thinking what no-one else has thought". Most agencies and researchers claim to be able to deliver insight at the drop of a hat. You would think that insights come along as often as London buses, that they just fall out of the research data without any effort. At Demograph we think a bit differently, we try to set the bar a bit higher, we believe that true ground breaking, business building, game changing insights are rare indeed and need to be coaxed from the research findings through creative, team based, category driven understanding. I remember a taxi conversation several years ago with a senior researcher of 30+ years experience, he reckoned to have had about three real insights in his whole career. These were ideas that took his brand in a completely new direction or opened up totally new business opportunities. By contrast I have been in agency debriefs that claim to deliver one insight per chart. Let’s be clear, robust methodology delivers findings, results that need to be interpreted and shaped through the human trait of insightfulness into something deeper, something nuanced something that generates a true eureka moment. As researchers we need to challenge ourselves every day to look for these golden nuggets and to ask ourselves whether we have really drilled down to the essence, to the heart of the research.
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