I love this quote from Stephen Hawking: “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it’s the illusion of having knowledge.” If you replace the word “knowledge” with “insight,” it perfectly addresses marketing today.
The word insight is one of the most misused and misunderstood terms in marketing, but it’s also one of the most important. Insights are the key to success for brands and retailers in the long term. The more deeply you understand the emotional drivers of your shoppers’ behaviors, the more successful you will become.
But first, you must understand the difference between a “generalization” and an “insight.”
Often, it’s easier to understand what something is by first stating what it isn’t, and insights aren’t generalizations. A generalization, in dictionary terms, is a general statement, law, principle or proposition. Now compare that to the definition of an insight: the act or result of apprehending the inner nature of things.
Hopefully you can see that there is a significant difference between generalizations and insights. Generalizations are so well understood and accepted as truth that they can be called a law or principle. If we recognize that insights are meant to inspire, not inform, how inspiring can something be if it’s that broadly accepted as true?
There are two types of insights that we must understand, consumer and shopper:
▶ A shopper insight is a statement revealing the emotional and behavioral barriers you must overcome in order to inspire the desired shopping behavior;
▶ A consumer insight is a statement revealing a deep understanding of your consumers’ emotional truths that explain their behaviors, containing the power to overcome their emotional and behavioral barriers and inspire the desired behavior.
Let’s say you are a convenience store chain and you have a strategic initiative to drive an incremental healthy-snack purchase during the midmorning occasion among 25- to 45-year-old men. First, identify how your shopper is currently behaving and his emotional and behavioral barriers, and then express it through a shopper insight. For example:
“When I stop at a convenience store I’m usually on my way to somewhere specific, so I get what I came for and then leave. I’m focused and distracted at the same time. That’s not to say that I can’t be persuaded to get something additional as long as it meets an immediate need.”
Your emotional hurdle is “focused and distracted,” which is creating the behavioral hurdle “I get what I came for and then leave.” Now identify the emotional truths you are going to leverage in your communications so you connect with the shopper emotionally, overcoming their barriers to inspire them to make an additional purchase. That’s a consumer insight, and it might look something like this:
“How I start my morning plays a huge role in whether I have a good day or not, especially what I eat for breakfast. A healthy breakfast (protein) means a good level of energy until lunch; a not-so-healthy breakfast (carbs) means that ‘midmorning nap’ feeling around 10:30. Sometimes I’m so busy I forget to grab a pick-me-up snack. Since I started the day poorly, I prefer the snack be on the healthier side. I don’t like stacking carbs on carbs to get me through my morning.”
Imagine the in-store communications this would lead to, placed on a special display featuring healthy snacks located between the coffee area and the checkout. It would connect emotionally with these shoppers, inspiring them to make that additional purchase.
True understanding of insights is one of the biggest white spaces in marketing today. You must recognize that buying our shoppers’ behaviors using price promotion will no longer deliver sustainable, profitable growth. It is only through inspiring our shoppers with real emotional insights that brands and retailers can win against their competitors and still increase profit.
Shopper Intelligence helps clients bring emotional meaning to their brands through insights that reflect the emotional truths that drive consumers’ and shoppers’ behaviors. It then translates these insights into strategies and communications that build real emotional and behavioral loyalty. Christopher Brace will be presenting on shopper intelligence expertise at CSP’s Convenience Retailing University, Feb. 4-6 in Dallas (www.convenienceretailing.com).
Members help make our journalism possible. Become a CSP member today and unlock exclusive benefits, including unlimited access to all of our content. Sign up here.