PH firms challenged to master ‘insighting’

Gary de Ocampo

First of 2 parts

Gary de Ocampo is the managing director of TNS Philippines, the largest customized market research company in the Philippines.

With a presence in more than 80 countries, TNS is part of Kantar, the data investment management division of WPP and one of the world’s largest insight, information and consultancy groups.

In this interview, de Ocampo, past president of the Market and Opinion Research Society of the Philippines (MORES), shares his views on the indispensable need for doing insighting.

Question: What is “insighting” and why is it important for a marketer or a businessperson to have insight?

Answer: “Insighting” is basically the process of understanding what consumers need or want.  It is getting to the heart of people’s thoughts, motivations and behaviors to inspire business opportunity.

In that simple definition, one can immediately understand why “insighting” is important—even necessary to most.  Any business exists to satisfy the needs of the consumers of its products and services.

How can a business know how to satisfy these needs if it does not know what these needs are in the first place?

“Insighting” serves as basis for business ideas that eventually become products or service offers.

Q: How do you get insight? Will you get it each time you meet the same customer?

A: Some people, like the late Steve Jobs, have this uncanny ability to understand what their target markets need and desire and effectively translate this understanding into winning products and services.  However, there are only a few of them around.  We get this notion that this ability is common only because these few are often much celebrated.

Most of us need help in order to gain consumer insight or understanding.  There are techniques available to us from market research practitioners who have spent years and years of developing, revising and refining tools and approaches using breakthrough discoveries in psychology, mathematics, statistics, behavioral economics and other fields.

We are constantly reminded that customers are human beings, and human beings are multi-faceted.  No one is purely archetypal.  Everyone has different needs in different occasions in different product or service categories.  I could be a control freak when it comes to medicines, but I could be very adventurous when it comes to technology.

Any “insighting” exercise should take into account this universal truth about human beings. Hardly any generalization can work anymore.

Q: How do you know you have the right insight?

A: A “right” insight makes intuitive sense and is validated by consumer experience. You know that you have stumbled upon a “right” insight when the learning springs you into action—whether it is for creating a new product or service, communicating the image positioning of a brand, designing the packaging or distribution system of your offering, or formulating a public policy.

The “right” insight is never just a piece of nice-to-know information.  A very simple way is to keep asking yourself “so what?” until it becomes clear to you that you need to act with a certain measure of urgency.  If “so what?” brings you nowhere, throw away your supposed insight.  It may be interesting only from a human curiosity point of view, but it could likely be rubbish as far as your marketing purpose is concerned.

Q: From among the many tensions or pain points, how do you know which one to focus on?

A: One way is to size up the market segment that has these pain points and try to estimate the incremental business potential of your innovation and product development targeted at addressing these tensions.  What is the size of the price?

However, we do take care not to dismiss immediately the pain points that are present only in small market segments.  It could be just that the other segments have yet to catch on.

Another is to assess how cluttered the market segment already is—is it a blue or red ocean?

Another is ranging the market need against your company’s capabilities.  Do you even have the license to operate in this segment? Do you have the expertise, credibility and resources to go into that space?

If ever we get to testing concepts to address pain points, we focus on which ones have the highest potential to bring in incremental volume.  What is the point in launching a new product or service that will just cannibalize your current portfolio?

In the end, value creation from addressing the pain point or tension must align with business goals.

Q: Can you have a good insight but a bad strategy?

A: Definitely, and unfortunately, this happens very often.  While good insight is the inspiration for the development of a good strategy, good consumer insight does not guarantee good strategy.

Good strategy has to do with a lot more hard work beyond stumbling upon good consumer insight.  There is the critical importance of having a sober and brutally frank assessment of a brand’s or organization’s strengths and weaknesses.  You cannot immediately go for increasing market share when your biggest problem is as basic as grossly ineffective product or inefficient production facilities.   You have to know where you are coming from to know and plan for what it will take to get to where you are headed.

Translating a good insight into a value-adding product or service will require that the brand is able to leverage well its company capabilities (which Henry Mintzberg defined to comprise: resource (what to use) + processes (how to use) + priorities (why use); deep appreciation of the macro environment; and market dynamics (including an understanding of competition).

Another critical part of a good strategy is effective cascade of understanding and the actual implementation.  This part is probably even more difficult.  Many a strategy has fallen by the wayside in this phase.  I have lost count of clients who had eureka moments when they came face-to-face with inspiring consumer insights.  With renewed energy and excitement, they went on to cascade the new learning, even restructured their respective organizations only to be disappointed and disheartened later on by hugely embarrassing failures.  A usual cause of poor implementation is lack of common understanding of the consumer insight that is the basis for the business strategy.  This is because it is easy for proponents to make the fatal assumption that it will be as easy for the rest of the organization to understand the consumer insight and strategy as it has been for them.

To be continued

Josiah Go is chair of marketing training company Mansmith and Fielders Inc. For his interviews with other thought leaders, follow his blog at www.josiahgo.com