What are insights

In marketing, insights are an unmet consumer need or a consumption opportunity that products already on the market have not yet grasped. 

Essentially, an insight manages to see the situation "from the inside" in order to understand and resolve it better.

For a good marketing strategy, finding a strong insight is very important for the success of advertising, as it helps to discover how your target behaves and thinks. All that's left for you to do is work to satisfy these newly discovered needs!

An insight also defines quantitative data, which analyzes visits on a web page; a good service for this could be Google Analytics;

Insights have various characteristics:

• Understanding the real needs expressed and unexpressed by consumers;
• Determines the behavior of every individual who purchases products for personal use;
• Discovers what's in the mind and heart of the customer;
• It is a good marketing strategy that is established between a brand and its potential consumer.

How to identify an insight

To identify an insight, one must start with a deep analysis based on observation and intuition of a client's need.

It is crucial to be able to enter the mind of the consumer, observing all their steps and following them on a journey to be present at the moment they begin to take an interest in your brand.

To best identify an insight it is essential to follow several points:

• Listen: take advantage of social media, call to action and surveys to delve deep into what your target thinks about you and what they are truly looking for;
• Investigate: Analyze the behavior of your target through statistics;
• Put yourself in the customer's shoes and ask different questions: what would I do if I were a customer? What would I like to see? What do I really need?

Case Study Nestlé: The Dinner You Don't See!

There are many ways to define what an insight is, and above all, how to identify it. However, this concept is gaining a fundamental role in order to enter the minds of consumers and represents, moreover, a powerful strategy in advertising campaigns to achieve success.

In December 2016, Nestlé Spain utilized insights for their Christmas campaign "La cena que no ves", becoming a trending topic. They opted for a video that showcased a dinner with 4 families who met during Christmas to understand how the person who cooked felt.

The goal is to put oneself in the consumer's shoes and empathize with them, observing, listening, and investigating what connection can be established beyond price or product.

Once they understand what the consumer wants, they convey it in the advertising campaign to reach the user's mind.

Few brands manage to reach people through human emotions. The use of insights as a strategy allows creating an approach for the user, providing credibility and personality to the brand, moving away from pricing strategies and focusing on the new era of the "emotional" brand.

In conclusion, this new psychological perspective on the connection between brand and consumer uncovers the new model of emotional branding, focusing on "uncovering" hidden needs and understanding the consumer as a person, moving away from the idea of the consumer as a mere material object.

Therefore, the brand aimed to hit this target and launched an advertising campaign where its products never appear and worked on an insight where the brand managed to position itself at the top during the holiday season.