Marketing Insights Adds Value by Confirming Experience-based Truths With Data
Sorin Patilinet
Marketing Effectiveness Global Leader, Mars | Keynote Speaker | Startup Advisor & Investor | Guest Lecturer at Wharton Business School | Columnist for MarketingWeek
Insight is the ability to gain an accurate and deep understanding of someone or something.
When marketers are most impactful, they work on insight to solve a pain point or opportunity for a customer.
That’s why the marketing insight function is as old as marketing, if not older.
However, times are changing; the role of insights functions (or research) is transformed under the positive pressure of widely available data and improved analytic models. Soon, the function's name could change, and the reporting line in the organization might adapt, but the core of understanding the consumer deeply will remain.
In a decade, the insights function will have a different name and evolve past marketing, adding value through experience-fueled truths about people confirmed by data.
I started my marketing research career after years as a brand marketer. I was not the typical market researcher—trained in the trenches of Kantar, Ipsos, or Nielsen—but in contrast, most of my colleagues were. My marketing research starting point was zero, and I had to catch up fast. I missed the past experiences that so many of my colleagues had. To my advantage?
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Prior experiences are fundamental to a market researcher’s success story. Yes, technologies change, more data sources are available, and machine processing power makes AI a friend of our job, but the fundamentals of how people think are more stable than one might think. It’s a social science, after all.
Your past experiences generate the consumer truths you are searching for and constantly trying to prove right with data. These are the replicable golden nuggets about your consumers. Data is here to help, but more data doesn’t always do so. Technology is here to inspire new ways of getting to that nugget, but neither is the nugget.
Experience-based truths are.
In a decade from now, while the accountability of the insight will stay with the researcher, the scope of our roles will move beyond marketing, enabled by automation and deeper truths to discover. With more data, past experiences and replicable hypotheses will be more relevant. That’s why I am confident that the marketing research function will have a glorious future.
My bet from ten years ago, to build a consumer-knowledge career, sounds even better today.
INSIGHTS = EXPERIENCE-BASED TRUTHS CONFIRMED BY DATA
Insights // Marketing // Innovation
4 个月I do not bet but hope that decision makers will increasingly use insights! However I only partially agree with you Sorin Patilinet, insights are not only be experience based data but also discoveries and lights in an ocean of pseudo-certainties
Customer Advocacy
4 个月Sorin Patilinet Totally agree with you here. But taking one step back, we are still facing a lack of awareness, especially among decision-makers. Joanna Dumont's presentation at Insights Lions in Cannes was a great reminder to me that "Insights aren’t making it through to the decision-makers for action," with 5 out of 8 decision-makers not using insights, leading to more than 60% of Insight and Analytics investment being wasted each year. To me these numbers are quite alarming so I would love to get your perspective on what can be done to increase awareness and ensure decision-makers recognize and utilize the value of insights? Aaaand yes, I realize this could fill an entire evening... sorry ;-)
Senior Analytics & Insight Strategy Executive Ex- Mars Ex- Unilever ? Solving complexity through Technology, Processes and People ??????
4 个月Sorin Patilinet Completely agree. The skil set becomes more valuable with more data to pick through. All senior roles in the future will need to have demonstrated this critical competence, to progress.
Marketing Director CZ & SK at Tchibo
4 个月Knowing something after our AI training and the logic behind: 1