The Insight Discipline

Crafting New Marketplace Understanding that Makes a Difference

Liam Fahey

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781839827334
• eBook ISBN:
  9781839827327
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Consumer Behaviour
• Index: Business

In this re-published book The Insight Discipline: Crafting New Marketplace Understanding That Makes a Difference, Liam Fahey details the analysis methods and modes of deliberations required to overcome data challenges and create an insight-driven culture. He lays out the business case for why leaders must emphasize the goal of attaining new insight if they want to gain maximum value from analysis.

The Insight Discipline provides you with a comprehensive guide to what it takes to craft marketplace insight that extends beyond the typical analysis findings. Plus, you'll see how to use new insight to influence thinking, decisions and action at any organizational level.

This book forms part of the American Marketing Association (AMA) Leadership series: 7 Big Problems of Marketing.

1

THE INSIGHT DISCIPLINE

Take a look around your organization. I’m willing to bet that every department, team, or function conducts a relentless stream of analysis, generating innumerable outputs. Your colleagues undoubtedly condense masses of data into tables, diagrams, and spreadsheets and, ultimately, PowerPoint presentations. Collectively, these outputs provide rich descriptions of what’s happening in the marketplace, from customer behaviors and competitor strategies, to industry change, technology disruptions, and demographic shifts. Yet if my experience in companies around the world is typical of your organization, they provide very little insight that actually can be used to grow your business. Let me illuminate this problem with a story about a small business unit in a large conglomerate, which I’ll call CommodityCo.¹

The executive team of one division in the company believed that it fully understood the marketplace in and around its key commodity product. They developed a change dashboard to help “keep on top” of marketplace change. They monitored and analyzed rivals’ quarterly product sales and changes in their marketing, sales, and promotion strategies; purchases by key customers; occasional migration of customers from one rival to another; and change in customer buying criteria. Their key findings included differences in rivals’ strategies or changes in their sales, change in customer purchase volumes, and the purported rationales for customer migration.

But one executive increasingly felt that if the company’s belief that it fully understood the marketplace proved untrue, it might lead to devastating consequences – CommodityCo would be victimized by changes in the behavior of its competitors or its customers. He convinced his colleagues to assemble an analysis team to conduct a comprehensive assessment of all facets of the marketplace.

When the analysis team presented their preliminary outputs, the executive shared his concerns and posed two questions:

You’ve collected a lot of data, conducted all this analysis, generated all these outputs, and devoted significant time and resources to getting it all done. That said, tell me two things: what are your key insights into this competitive space? And how are they relevant and important to our current and future strategy and operations?

In short, the analysis team had generated reams of data, but no insight. They provided no new understanding of the CommodityCo’s customers, competitors, or marketplace changes. Given a second opportunity to conduct the analysis, as I’ll explain later in this chapter, the team generated multiple insights, not the least of which was the realization that their historic commodity product was indistinguishable from its rivals, even after wrapping a genuine customer offer (including technical support, inventory control, and rapid repair service) around it.

The analysis team drew two broad implications that ran counter to the company’s prior way of operating: CommodityCo needed to change its product development process to develop products more quickly and it required a new, go-to-market approach tailored to customer segments.

Over a two-year period, the company developed a new marketplace strategy built around new product generation and customized offers to channel and customer segments. As a result, it was able to leapfrog its rivals in product launches, technology reputation, customer satisfaction, and market share gains, causing some competitors to withdraw from the market.

GETTING TO INSIGHT

The executive’s questions suggest that crafting and leveraging marketplace² insight should be the focus of analysis. They further indicate that insights into the world outside the organization aren’t ends in themselves, no matter how brilliantly discerned or elegantly articulated. This focus and the insights derived must enable superior thinking, decisions, and action. Unfortunately, many firms generate masses of data but relatively little insight. Rare is the company that goes beyond the “findings” of any analysis project to craft a small set of crucial insights – the keen new understandings that significantly influence what a set of managers think about and how they think, the decisions they make and the actions they take.

Fig. 1.1: A Disciplined Approach to Insight Work.

This book gives you a blueprint for crafting and leveraging marketplace insight. In this chapter, I’ll introduce the notion of insight discipline and the four core phases of insight work (Fig. 1.1). I’ll also provide an overview of different levels of insight. Additionally, I’ll illustrate why a deliberate and methodical approach must reside at the heart of insight discipline. I’ll conclude by identifying a variety of desired insight attributes.

The executive’s questions further illuminate that insight is about understanding change³ in and around a competitive space and its business implications. Change gives rise to inevitable marketplace characteristics: uncertainty, turbulence, discontinuity, and, above all, ambiguity. Analyzing change in your rivals’ strategies, products, customer preferences, technologies, and governmental proclivities presents some daunting challenges. The future doesn’t yet exist. So any depiction of the transition from the present to the future is a cognitive construction. In other words, the future is a product of your mind.⁴

Consequently, how well your organization develops an understanding of the present and anticipates what the future might be depends entirely on your conceptual abilities. Change ensures that the world as you see it won’t hold together at some point in the future – and that day may be closer than you realize! Change therefore demands that you continually adapt your mental models⁵ of the world. As you gather new data, develop new information, encounter alternative viewpoints and perspectives, and confront new assumptions, you must ask whether your long-held concepts and mental frames are adequate to describe and explain the world around you now, or the world as it might be at some future time.

You can better address these challenges – and thus the questions posed by the CommodityCo executive – when you have a clear understanding of what insight is and what it isn’t; know how to craft and test an insight; and embed insight discipline throughout your organization.

WHAT IS INSIGHT?

Asking and answering the executive’s questions presumes that both the executive and the analysis team understand the concept of insight. But all too often that’s not the case. Ask any manager and their support staff to define insight or describe the focus of insight work or list the desired attributes of value-generating insight. Their answers will be all over the map.⁶ Although it’s typically presumed that everyone knows what insight is, confusion about the concept reigns supreme. The result is that analysis rarely focuses on crafting Insight. Instead, analysis findings are vague and seldom provide the value you need. So let me clearly define what I mean by insight.

At the broadest level, insight is a new understanding of some facet of marketplace change that makes a difference. This new understanding, as I’ll discuss later in this chapter, must represent a distinct break from your prior thinking. It must change how you see and think about the marketplace and, eventually, what you do.⁷ Following are three examples of insights that required market leaders to make a dramatic shift in their understanding of the current marketplace.

A competitor insight: A currently insignificant player in one product area, could, through a single acquisition and a change in direction in its research and development (R&D) investments, generate within three years a new customer solution that is a generation or two ahead of all current rivals in that product space.

Previously, a company I’ll call AbsoCo believed that smaller firms couldn’t exert any significant degree of product or solution change in their competitive space, or that a dramatic product breakthrough would occur within the next three years.⁸

AbsoCo’s R&D investment stream was considerably riskier than previously believed. The firm partnered with a technology source to revamp the product and immediately launched an action program to reconfigure its marketplace assumptions, prune its existing R&D portfolio, search for potential R&D partners, and identify opportunities in related product lines.

A customer insight: The customer didn’t understand the extent to which product operations could be improved due to inexperience in plant management and the absence of more sophisticated processes. Ac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1. The Insight Discipline
• 2. The 4I Diamond Framework
• 3. Structuring: Preparing for Insight Work
• 4. Sniffing: Deriving Preliminary Inferences
• 5. Shaping: Crafting Change Insight
• 6. Stipulating: Vouching and Validating Change Insight
• 7. Implication Insights: The Segue to Business Implications
• 8. Business Implications: Thinking, Decisions, Action
• 9. Insight Work: The Influence of Emotions
• 10. An Insight Culture: The Role of Leaders
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author
• Acknowledgments