Unit 02 | Topics

2. Critical Thinking: Gaining Consumer Insight

Can you imagine a true transformative leader who did not think for her or himself? Has a brilliant, creative designer ever accepted the norm as truth? To make a remarkable design, you need to design in the difference, and that requires critical thinking.

To be effective, you need to utilize deep critical-thinking skills as you look for needs to fulfill in consumers, customers, and the world. A fundamental aspect of critical thinking is to ask why. To gain insights from consumers, you need to ask that question but go way beyond it to get real meaning and insights.

What Is an “Actionable Consumer Insight”?

An actionable consumer insight is a not-yet-obvious discovery about the target consumer that enables you to establish a connection between a brand or an innovation and the consumer’s life. When you state the insight, it should elicit the emotional reaction of “you obviously understand me” from the consumer. But how can you gain this insight?

You can depend on other people’s research and information, but in order to really tap into your consumer, you must first understand the consumer yourself. Get to know your target consumers. Use critical thinking to gain insight, and use that insight to create something that they really need and want. Note that just asking consumers what they want is usually useless; they are generally really poor at describing what innovation they want until they see it. However, you can gain insights on what they need and make judgments based on previous diffusions of innovations.

Three orange circles with plus signs in between them. The first circle is labeled “consumer truth” with the phrases “I want,” “I believe,” and “I am” written inside of it. The second circle is labeled “motivation” with the phrases “because,” “so that,” and “since” inside of it. The third circle is labeled “tension” with the phrases “however,” “yet,” and “but” inside of it.
Fig. 3: Insight Recipe

You can think of the process as deeply understanding your target consumers in three dimensions: What is true for the consumers, how are they motivated, and what are the tensions they are dealing with as they consider the first two (Figure 3)?

Having target consumers say to you, “you obviously understand me” is the ultimate goal. This is a sign that you did something right. Don’t wait for consumers to explicitly express their needs.

Looking at gaining consumer insight from these angles could give you the answers you need to solve these problems.

Step 1: Capture “Truths”

Identify all the needs, wants, and beliefs of your prime prospects. During insight development, go for QUANTITY first, and ensure QUALITY later. Insights, per se, are not precious—they are a tool to get to great ideas. Write their opinions down in consumer language and from the consumers’ or customers’ points of view: I want, I feel, I believe, I am, I can’t, etc. The sources of these truths could be judgment, qualitative or quantitative data, or even your own personal experiences of the category or market.

Step 2: Uncover “Motivations”

Dig deep to identify the underlying motivations behind your prime prospects’ wants and needs. Ask WHY three times. In doing so, the team will push beyond the obvious and get to motivations that are not-yet obvious:

Teams often struggle with how to discover unarticulated and underlying motivations. Try to be empathetic—in doing so, you are giving team members permission to articulate motivations their consumers may not have overtly stated but what members believe may be the underlying motivations. The goal is not to invent motivations but to articulate what the consumers may be unable to.

Step 3: Identify Real “Tensions”

Select “truth + motivation” combinations that seem true but nonobvious, and identify tensions behind them.

Select a “truth + motivation” combination the team believes is TRUE, most important, nonobvious, and relevant to the prime prospect. Then, begin brainstorming tensions against it. Repeat for other “truth + motivation” combinations.

Next, you want to start to assess some of the more interesting insights that could lead to an innovation. This can be done by answering the following five questions (Figure 3):

A circle labeled “insight” with boxes that are labeled “tension involved,” “not obvious,” “true,” “touches the heart,” and “triggers action” surrounding it.
Fig. 4: Insight Strength Finder

Examples of Strong Insights

Three different insights on different topics. The first is on at-home hair colors, the second is on gaming, and the third is on being a small business owner.
Fig. 5: Strong Insights

Note that these insights do a good job of discovering the not-yet-obvious motivations and tensions of the target consumers. Clearly, these teams knew their target consumers very well and did a good job peeling back the meaning behind the consumers’ words and actions. Note that all of these insights are very actionable, meaning you can envision how you might act on these insights—whether that be in innovation, communication, or go-to-market ideas.

The following are seven ways to effective insights through the lens of the three-step model from Figure 3.

You can use the model at different stages of the innovation process, but it is typically done upfront.

Here is a start on the process.

Team Formation

Immerse and Review

Tip: Leverage the insight recipe (Figure 4) as a framework for audit and immersion. It is a planning, note-taking, and debriefing tool.

Insight Discovery

Tip:Plan for an approximately 50/50 time-investment between immersion and insight discovery.

Implications

Tip: Brainstorm insight-inspired implications and possibilities.

Move to Action