5 ways to activate consumer insights

It’s summertime! For many of us, this is the time of year when things slow down. Projects are put on hold, colleagues go on holiday and if meetings can be postponed, they are! I think summer is a great time to reflect on the projects we have done, the rich consumer insights we found and the impact they had. To get you started, here are 3 questions to think about:
Did you find rich new consumer insights in the past year?
Did you share them extensively with your organization as well?
Did your efforts trigger meaningful actions?
If all 3 answers are yes, you’ve probably had a very successful year! In most cases however, the last question is often the hardest one and more difficult to manage. Why? Well, after writing detailed market research reports, presenting the consumer insights and organizing ideation sessions, people tend to forget about the consumer insight. The insights are locked away in a PowerPoint report and we move on to the next project.
5 ways to activate consumer insights
Hosting one workshop to generate ideas and translate actions is simply not enough. In order to trigger meaningful actions across teams, it’s important to bring insights to life through interaction. We do this by giving them a role in helping to (further) shape the insights. This way, an insight is ever evolving and kept fresh throughout time. Based on 10+ insight activation project collaborations, we identified 5 simple ways to involve different stakeholders across the organization and provide them with a role in (further) shaping the insight.

1. Harvest the collective mind

The activation already started before you found the insights. For example, at Telefonica we invited stakeholders to complete a SWOT exercise and add their predictions about the research outcomes. By inviting key stakeholders from different teams to share their learnings first, you can identify knowledge gaps and make sure that the insights you will find afterwards are ‘new’.

2. Share live updates from the field

Why wait with sharing inspiring stories you heard or saw during fieldwork? As part of the activation, share striking observations from the field as a teaser for the final insights report. For example, pharmaceutical company UCB launched their #Live Wall on the Studio to connect with 30 colleagues across different locations to share their ‘aha’ moments during fieldwork and have a discussion about them.

3. Create immersion experiences

After identifying the (validated) insights, the next step in activation is to let people recognize the insights and add their own observations to them. By doing so, we are creating more empathy with the consumers’ routines and frictions. This is exactly how Dannon approached insight activation. After having identified rich shopper insights, they realized it was actually much more relevant for a larger audience than just the shopper teams at Dannon. So they launched 6 Walls to put the employee in the shoes of the shopper in 6 different scenarios. For example, the #YoLittleOnes Wall. Parents face the challenge of constantly not giving in when their young children join them during grocery shopping. When the kids show good behavior in the store, parents often want to give them a treat. These young kids are often attracted by the colorful packaging of unhealthy snacks. Employees enriched this Wall by sharing their own personal stories, resulting in more consumer centricity outside of the market research team.
5 ways to activate consumer insights

4. Fuel project collaboration & ideation

Once you established empathy with consumer frictions and routines, this will form the perfect start to generate ideas to solve the business problem. For example, at Dorel Juvenile the goal was to innovate car seat solutions for toddlers. The project owner curated 5 key insights from different reports and invited over 70 people across the organization to collect observations and ideas to build on each other’s inspiration. This way, you don’t lose sight of the initial sparks of inspiration and insights.

5. Build an archive of insights

Finally, activating insights is about re-using insights. To make sure people throughout the organization know where to find the insights, we need to start building a central archive of insights that evolves over time. This will encourage people to use more insights in day-to-day projects and decisions.
5 ways to activate consumer insights
To combine these 5 ways to activate insights, involve all these people and keep them motivated, we developed the Insight Activation Studio. Through this collaboration platform, users are encouraged to discover insights, add own observations & ideas and join the dialogue around these sparks of inspiration. You can find out more about the Insight Activation Studio platform, use cases, demo and cases on www.insightactivationstudio.com.
I hope you have a great summer; let me know if you wish to further reflect or exchange thoughts on activating your insights!

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