Address by Irfan Ahmed , VP & Group Account Director :JWT Colombo
Covered by : Heshan Perera , JWT BlogCrew
First session of the Friday training’s at JWT got underway last Friday evening with Irfan speaking to everyone on the value of ‘Insights’.
What is an insight?
Irfan explained an Insight as a learning or an understanding related to the consumer. When used in communications, it will pierce deep into their souls thus evoking the strongest form of response. Now it is our responsibility then as advertisers and custodians of our brands to guide those reactions in a way that is beneficial to our brands.
With this, the definition of marketing was somewhat transformed by Irfan into “Planned manipulation of the target audiences behavior to evoke a desired response for making profit”. So now we can understand that an Insight is a Pithy nugget of understanding about human actions, preferences or desires that leads to more effective stimulus. Insights are crucial as, it is at the heart of what we do, and it leads to better communication and Innovations.”
Finding an Insight is not rocket science, it does not require you to read pages and pages of management books with the BCG Matrix, the GE matrix and a whole alphabet full of matrices. No, you only need to observe, listen and be topical. Insights can be found drawing on, attitudes, behaviors, inner motivations, world views, & relationships. The key to finding an insight is to put yourself in the customers’ shoes; you have to look at the world from the consumers’ perspective. A simple way to see if your understanding is in fact an Insight, is to put it through the 3 R’s Test.
1. Reality – Is there a deep truth in the Insight?
2. Relevance – Is the Insight relevant to your brand personality?
3. Resonates – Does the Insight strike a chord with the target audience?
Another thought shared by Irfan was that an Insight will not always be some sort of Holy Grail that is hidden so that only the most deserving of us can find it, sometimes revolutionary insights might be there in plain sight waiting to be identified.
Conflict is another area that was spoken about in detail as a great method to identify & unearth Insights. Any story worth telling is formed due to conflicts; conflicts are Yin & Yan the balance that keeps order. Conflicts occur in Human beings at the very heart of their being. Conflicts occur within us due to forced compromises between competing “Human Truths” and “Cultural Truths”.
Human truths are the fundamental needs & wants, hopes & dreams, and concerns & fears of people these conflict with Cultural truths of what is viewed as correct in society and what is done according to tradition.
“I want to look beautiful but I don’t want to be seen as vain” – Human Truth conflict
“ I Like to spend time on my grooming but I have to take care of my family first” – Human Truth conflicting with Cultural Truth
“ It pains when you get hurt but real men don’t cry” – Human Truth vs Cultural Truth
Now once the insight have been identified using conflicts how we manipulate it to fit the Brand Idea becomes crucial. By merging the Consumer Insight with the Brand offering we can come up with ground breaking creative ideas.
I would like to sign off with this nice Insight I came across, Maruti Suzuki in India positions its vehicles for the millions of Indians who are concerned about cost.
“ Maruti Suzuki, for a nation obsessed with mileage”
awesome, we r human, so we should find human insights in our every project we have. it’s not easy, but it is a very interesting & very very sucsessful.