How to navigate the insights paradigm shift

Recently, the Insights Association Canadian Advisory Council hosted The Insights Paradigm Shift conference in Toronto, a fantastic day of thought-provoking keynotes and panel discussions with industry leaders. The goal was to bring together 150 insights and analytics, marketing, and business leaders together with an agenda to help the audience navigate the paradigm shift currently transforming the world of insights.

Here are the top insights I took away from the day's keynotes and panelists on how to best navigate the insights paradigm shift:

1. Become business indispensable.

Is intelligence embedded into your core strategy? Are insights weaved into the fabric of how your organization makes decisions? Are they driving growth for your company?  

Ashik Bhat, Vice President of Sales at Labatt Breweries of Canada, shared how his team starts with understanding the unique challenges of both Labatt’s consumers’ lives, as well as Labatt’s customers’ (retail) and key stakeholders’ (sales reps) business – a true 360 lens.   And whether their challenges relate to driving traffic, growing revenue, education, efficiency, ease of navigation, and/or local nuance, the goal for insights is to address those challenges head on in order to give a competitive edge and drive value to the business. 

One way Labatt is doing this is using AI to drive account level assortment insights, correlating data from many different sources (Stats Can, transactional data, sales output data) to create hyper specific assortments at the store level, delivered in real time to sales reps. This helps retailers optimize their SKU and brand assortment, driving volume and incrementality by aligning the store and consumer set. It also saves time with fast and relevant insights and recommendations on demand, creating efficiency for sales teams.

Ashik asserted that insights leaders need to go beyond being consumer experts to become business leaders with total commercial thinking. This requires breaking out of silos, integrating different data sources, and becoming better story tellers who push past delivering research to driving action through insights and data. Win by powering the business with the right insights at the right time and don’t be shy to tell the business what to do! 

Andrew Go from Home Depot shared his company’s journey to grow analytics and data science capabilities at scale, citing Simon Sinek’s The Golden Circle and starting with the why as being the key. Yes, analytics and data science will jump into the how and what, but first we need to answer, why. Andrew also articulated that the data must provide additional context, and not just be watermelon metrics that are green on the outside, but red on the inside from cherry picking insights. Business need a total customer/consumer view that requires sharing cross functional insights beyond silos to tell the right story that will unlock the value of data and insights.

2. Democratize data.

Several presenters talked about the desire for insights and analytics professionals to better collaborate with key stakeholders in order to share cross functional insights to tell the story. 

Business stakeholders want to be part of the process and get an early purview into the data. They don’t want or need it to be perfect – they want the right insights at the right time to help drive business strategy and decisions. And it is these stakeholders who hold the business understanding that is necessary to help contextualize and unlock the relevance and value of the recommendations stemming from the data and insights. 

Insights leaders need to bring key stakeholders along the insights journey. Steve Olson from Nestlé spoke about his desire to work closely with his research partners through the analysis period. He is looking for his research partners to be more collaborative and less transactional, to work together to make progress on key insights versus the research agency connecting at the beginning and the end, and sometimes along the way, going down rabbit holes in isolation.

Steve also reminded the audience how much marketing culture increasingly values feelings as much as facts and this is a huge opportunity for insights leaders to bring insights to life. One effective way is getting key business stakeholders involved in hearing consumers and customers directly, whether it be via consumer connects, immersions, video verbatim, etc. I’ve seen this play out many times - the stats tell a clear story, but it is that one key verbatim from the respondent directly that brings the aha moment to business leaders digesting the insights.

3. Embrace and humanize tech.

There is no doubt that the plethora of data available to us as well as tech innovations like AI, automation, and Blockchain are underpinning the paradigm shift at play. However, never has there been a bigger need to humanize all this data. Tech is an enabler and we need to upskill our insights teams to embrace it. 

BMO’s CMO, Maja Neable summed up the current state well: tech-based companies are growing, self-serve DIY solutions are being rapidly adopted, data integration across behavioural and company data is increasing, and there is more demand to quantify the financial value of insights. 

On the client side, Labatt and Home Depot use self-serve dashboards and platforms to optimize assortment planning and pricing. BMO’s Marketing team have access to a DIY research platform for testing digital content efficiently.  Steve Olson from Nestlé spoke about developing new technology capabilities and experimenting with data and methods that consider user design and interfacing, automation with customization, and figuring out if you can scale what was previously unscalable, e.g., text analytics, picture classification.

On the data provider side, Chris Whitaker from Explorer Research showed how new technologies are enabling even better behavior testing through VR, GSR, and eye tracking, resulting in better predictive insights. And Pat Pellegrini from Vividata shared how their cross media and consumer insights measurement platform is built upon different data sets that are both active and passive.

The reality is, there are infinite new data sources every day that need to be unlocked, and it is integration, automation, and real-time which are key to using and applying insights to drive business. There is no doubt that giving stakeholders access to data and insights via automation drives insights faster, but there is also an additional important human element needed as the tech revolution cannot solve it all. 

Peter Haslett at Realeyes asserted that we need to make tech as human as possible. For example, he has seen when AI has made creative all look the same. AI makes it fast and easy, but human connection is there to build strong brands that differentiate and disrupt.

Paul Neto from Measure Protocol (a blockchain-powered economy for human-generated data) described the need to meld the multitude of disparate data sources that a company may have access to – a human still needs to meld them together to make sense and decisions from them.   Tech is about processing/accessing data sets. Now we need to get back to humanizing the data. 

Laura Craig from CRIS (chatbot moderated conversations) agreed that organizations need to make decisions faster and move to market faster.  And tech delivers data fast, but it doesn’t talk. Laura said that we need to understand the organizations – go back to the whys, understand the data and communicate what it means. 

Insights and analytics are some of the hottest, in demand skills in the market. Organizations are desperate for someone to bring all their data sources together in a way that generates insights and shines a story that will drive their business forward accordingly. We heard it loud and clear by the keynote speakers – from CMO to CSO – business leaders want to hear opinions from insights leaders. Insights need to move beyond sourcing and reporting on data to integrating and socializing it, having an opinion and taking a stand.

4. Turn data driven into action obsessed.

Speed and integration of insights are greater than perfection. Ashik Bhat from Labatt described one of their core team values is speed to action - “The goal is for 80% of the plan to be perfect and move at 100% speed”.

This also ties into the previous insights relating to moving beyond silos to integrate data sources to help embed intelligence efficiently. It also means collaborating with stakeholders throughout the insights journey, not just at the beginning/end, and being a killer storyteller who looks to leverage feelings as much as the facts to influence business decisions and actions with a confident POV. It also means not self-censoring and having courageous conversations that apply insights in a timely manner to drive business decisions and actions. 

The best stories organizations should be telling lie in the intersection between what people are interested in, want to see, or need to know and what an organization wants to communicate regarding their purpose, products, and passion points. In simpler words, we need to better connect our brand stories. Nicholas Boles and James Lachno from Edelman outlined how they have baked data mining into their strategic process. It is built with a framework that continually focuses on driving the key outcome of creating fire content, from a strategic set up and opportunity briefing to collaborative planning, content development, and measurement. The collaborative planning session with the integrated team of client, client strategists, insights, and agency partners enables and encourages content ideas to come from all key stakeholders involved - no hiding behind the data here!

When it comes to measuring ROI, Hilary Borndal from Kantar & Nick Neculescu from World Vision Canada outlined the tension from a Kantar study that 90% of marketers find measuring and proving ROI to be an important challenge. Marketers want balanced measurement of short- and long-term ROI, and there is opportunity to use advancements in analytics to consider which lens to review each vehicle through by the role it plays. Channel strategy and media tactics need to be tailored to address business objectives. And creative remains queen in driving performance – another proof point that embedding intelligence both towards fueling and measuring short- and long-term brand drivers and ROI is smart strategy.

BMO’s Maja Neable shared that the key is to act on the data with the aim to improve and that integration, automation, and real time are key to using and applying insights. “Do something is the key important take away for any research. Once you have the data, act on it with the aim to improve.” 

Final thoughts

As Ian Ash from Dig Insights laid it out - whether it’s consultancies investing in big data, automation getting more funding, greater consolidation in mainstream market research, panel companies increasing acquisition of more affordable DIY/Automation, clients like McDonalds, Unilever, and Visa building internal capes and acquiring analytics and data science firms, or companies merging data from market research and data science into holistic approaches, or gaining efficiencies from AI or Blockchain, big data and tech are driving significant change.

The marketing, business and insights leaders who are navigating the paradigm shift are redefining their insights and analytics– from the function itself and the evolving analytical toolkit, to how insights are being leveraged differently to not just inform, but set and drive business strategy and actions.