The 4 Stages of Evolving your Insights Function

Having recently attended an inspiring Consumer Insights Summit in Madison, Wisconsin, I reached out to a few clients to ask them what their key takeaways were.

I recently shared the first of three interesting takeaways ‘The True Definition of an Insight’. Here is the second takeaway:

‘The 4 Stages of Evolving your Insights Function’...

How evolved is your insights team relative to other organizations?

There are different levels of sophistication that an insights team can achieve and this impacts how much influence they have within their organization.

At a recent summit, Mario Simon from BCG offered an excellent framework in mapping out the evolutionary path of an insights team and suggested that even if you are still in the early stages of your evolution (i.e. Stage 1 or 2), there are steps you can take to evolve to the higher stages (Stage 3 or 4) and have more impact and influence within your organization.

Each Stage shows an evolution of how the insights team is perceived by their stakeholders:

1.  Internal Market Research Provider (Stage 1)

2.  Business Contributor (Stage 2)

3.  Strategic Insights Partner (Stage 3)

4.  Source of Competitive Advantage (Stage 4)

At one end of the evolutionary scale, Stage 1, the insights team is led by the organization and is reactive, tactical, and very activity focused. It conducts “research” projects based on the requests of its stakeholders and is perceived as an “internal market research provider”.

Contrast this with the other side of the spectrum, Stage 4, where the insights team now leads the organization, and is proactive, strategic, and growth focused. The team delivers knowledge that accelerates short and long term brand growth and is perceived by stakeholders and the organization to be a “source of competitive advantage”.

The most interesting stat related to this framework was that only 20% of organizations feel that they are at Stage 3 or 4. That said, this has doubled from 10% of organizations that felt this way in 2009. We still have a long way to go as an industry, but we are headed in the right direction. The call to action from this discussion was finding ways to influence your own insights team evolution and ensure that it has a seat at the executive table and decision making aperture.

So which stage is your organization at and what are you doing to ensure that your insights team evolves to go beyond "having a seat at the table" and is seen as proactively leading the organization towards strategic growth?

 Check in shortly for Takeaway 3, 'Marketers Must Embrace and Adapt to Transience'.

Author: Jonathan La Greca

About Hotspex: Voted among the top global insights consultancies for 4 years in a row, Hotspex is working with 15 of Top 20 advertisers in over 30 countries to apply cutting edge behavioral and marketing sciences. We apply System 1 implicit and System 2 explicit measurement in a holistic manner to uncover conscious and non-conscious drivers to understand WHY consumers behave the way they do.

From there, we apply marketing sciences, including the Laws of Growth, to help marketers determine HOW to apply consumer understanding to accelerate brand growth across a variety of brand strategy, communications, and shopper-based design challenges.