If you asked me to give you one word to describe what I’ve learned in my junior year of college, I’d say “enlightening.” This year has been great, because instead of taking intro advertising courses, I’ve been learning skills that are more applicable to the real world.
In particular, these classes were Market Intelligence and Account Planning. And both classes involve using quantitative and qualitative research, respectively, to find what are called insights. They’ve been described to me as human truths, behavioral breakthroughs, and new, innovative ways of thinking. Since I’ve taken these classes, I’m always looking to think through the eyes of my target audience — walking a mile in their shoes. I’ve found market segmentation and brand/audience personas incredibly interesting. It’s just like solving a puzzle.
In my two classes, one of the first things that we covered was how to discern facts from insights. Insights definitely read like a fact, so what’s different about them?
The way I see it, both facts and insights explain a truth — however, insights are worded in a way that you can follow up with, “Why is this important?” and “What can we do about it?” that can directly influence the audience or product that the insight is about.
Drawing from an example that I learned in my advertising media class, a fact would be: “South Korea’s average amount of sleep is the lowest among the OECD.” The insight here is that “South Korean workers are fatigued because they can’t relax. They doze off, wake up, and doze off again… because they are afraid to miss their stop.” This insight was outlined in Burger King’s “Morning Like a King Campaign”, which won a Silver Lion Award at Cannes:
Although it’s gimmicky, I thought it was a pretty clever campaign.
Insights tap into the why, and give you a basis of how to approach a problem or campaign. They’re harder to come by, and take extra work to develop than a fact. Speaking from the perspective of my Market Intelligence class, I consider a fact to be all the individual cells of data that we crunched — our p-value is less than 0.05, our correlation coefficient is 0.7 — pretty strong. I would also consider a fact what these stats tell us: Because the correlation coefficient is 0.7, there is a strong correlation between x and y. But an insight might answer, “Why might there be a strong correlation?” The key word here is “might.” While insights explain a human truth, there’s no telling that it’s the guaranteed answer to our problem. It’s a well-educated guess, as much as it is an innovative breakthrough.
You know the expression, “Cold, Hard Facts?” I hear that, and I think it’s a good way to discern facts from insights as well. I like to think of insights as a kind of “soft fact.” It’s backed statistically through research, but it’s also developed through human inference. Is it entirely true, and will it solve our problems? It’s a strong “maybe.”
I think that the most important thing about insights is still that it helps us answer “why” in the way that facts cannot. Insights include context, and because of this, guides people to a preferred way of interacting with their audience.
And to explain it from a rocket’s perspective, the idea is the rocket, the facts are the fuel, and the insight is the launchpad.
