Brands that put their consumers at the center of their company develop lasting relationships with them. They have higher brand loyalty and higher levels of engagement. Consumers who feel listened to also advocate for your brand. It makes a lot of sense to put consumers at the center of your business.

As a strategist, my goal is to understand consumers, identify consumer insights and articulate opportunities for brands to leverage these insights. Insights are the building blocks for your brand and the starting point for all brand strategy, communications and innovation. So what if you want to start a branding initiative for your brand? Where do you start? You start with a consumer insight.

So, what is an insight?

An insight connects your brand to your consumers. It’s the reason and the key that grants permission for the brand to be in your consumer’s life.

An insight is: A deep and penetrating truth about your consumer that is both meaningful to his/her life and one that your brand can help fulfill

An insight doesn’t have to be earth-shattering or new. It can be surprisingly simple. When you hear an insight, it will ring true to your consumer. It may not have been articulated before, but when they hear it, they will say, “I never thought of it that way….but yes, it’s true.” An insight is what most marketers call an Aha moment. When identified and appropriately leveraged, an insight can have monumental impact.

It’s important to make a distinction between insights and observations. Observations are actions you see and insights are the why’s beneath the action. Here’s an example of an observation versus an insight in the laundry category:

Observation: Kids are always getting dirty. While it gets exhausting for mom to do laundry, she does it because she cares about her kids.

Insight: Dirt is good. It’s a mark of an active and imaginative childhood. So let them get dirty!

Persil, Unilever’s laundry detergent brand in England, uncovered this distinctive insight and developed a brand campaign that leveraged this insight. It’s website articulates why they believe dirt is good: "Without dirt there would be no experience. Dirt is the mark of adventure…Hands-on experience, discovery, and trial and error are vital to every child’s healthy happy development.” Persil’s role in consumers’ lives is to take care of the toughest stains so that moms can concentrate on the important stuff.

To see how Persil brings this insight to life, here is a 2015 advertisement for Small & Mighty:

Persil Removes Tough Stains in a Quick Wash

Why is this insight so significant? When this campaign was launched, other laundry detergents were focusing on how much better their products cleaned clothes – like getting your whites whiter and your colors brighter. Persil turned the conversation around by focusing on the benefits of letting your children get dirty. It gave moms a completely different way to look at laundry care and offered the help they needed to not only get her kids’ clothes clean, but to enable their kids' active lifestyles.

Here’s another example of a great insight that will be familiar to everyone, from another Unilever brand – Dove. The Dove brand in the early days was marketed as a soap bar. If you remember, the soap contained ¼ moisturizing lotion which translated to the benefit of softer skin. As Dove started building a Masterbrand positioning that could cover an array of their innovation categories, they uncovered an insight that laid the foundation of the brand we see today. The brand tapped into the insight that “Real women know that beauty comes in all shapes, sizes and looks.”

This insight allowed Dove to cross categories and offer women an array of beauty products that lets their real selves shine through. The Dove brand evolved their positioning from a functional story (“a soap with ¼ moisturizing lotion”) to a stronger emotional story (“a beauty brand that lets your real self shine through”). The brand promotes ‘Real Beauty’ in ways that invite consumers into a conversation of what beauty means. It offers a line of products that are not only efficacious, but through association, make a greater statement on beauty. Dove’s initial 2004 campaign changed the conversation about beauty. Instead of using size 2 models with blue eyes and blond hair, Dove used real women with real curves. Here’s a short film by Ogilvy & Mather, Dove’s advertising agency, on the history of the Dove campaign in its early days:

A short film detailing the development of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty

As I mentioned before, insights don’t have to be new or breakthrough. When Dove tapped into this insight on beauty, women were being bombarded with unrealistic marketing imagery for decades. And while there have been a number of efforts to combat these unattainable beauty standards in the past, Dove was the only beauty brand that took on this social cause for further investigation and discussion. Everyone in the beauty category was promoting the perfection you can attain with its products. Dove turned everything on its head.

Now that you know what an insight is, how do you uncover a great insight? Well, you do one thing – get connected to your consumers through research. There are many different ways to conduct research, and it depends on the objectives of the research, the nature of your business, and the types of consumers you want to interact with. I’ll cover designing research studies in another post, but to give you a preview – one of the most powerful ways to gather compelling insights is to interact with consumers in an environment where they experience your brand.

For a brand in the cold and allergy category, I went into consumers’ homes and interviewed them about their lives. I had in-depth discussions on how they live with their allergies and what happens when they get a cold. I also peeked into their medicine cabinets to see what brands they were using, and learned how and when products were used. I learned about the role of the brand and how much allergy sufferers relied on the brand to get through their daily lives. I uncovered several insights about allergy sufferers that the brand team used in a workshop to help develop different brand positionings. The positioning areas that were developed wouldn't have been possible without an in-depth look at their consumers' lives.

Always go and talk to consumers before developing a brand positioning or working on an innovation project. I always recommend this to my clients – whether they are big company with deep pockets or a small entrepreneurial company with a limited budget. The research can be range in scope from interviewing potential consumers on the phone to doing a more in-depth study like the one I mentioned above. You can also just observe your consumers. Once I helped a friend position her cupcake shop in New York City. Her idea was to create a very feminine, girly cupcake shop. I told her to sit outside various cupcake shops in the City and observe who was coming in the door. When she realized that half of cupcake buyers were men, she changed her strategy and designed a unique, upscale shop featuring cupcakes and beer/wine pairings.

Understanding your consumer is the best way to uncover relevant insights to build a brand positioning. In future posts, I will cover how to take an insight and articulate a brand positioning. Until then, have an insightful day!

Branding Starts Here: The Insight