Is there such a thing as a Universal Insight? – No! (Not unless you believe everyone thinks, acts and believes the exact same things) – Myth 3

I regularly engage with organisations where the #officeboor in senior management believes that they are on the lookout for a universal insight.

What does this mean?

The team is tasked with finding insights that everyone on earth believes and relates to.

If such a thing existed wouldn’t the world of business be deliciously convenient?

We could make one product, make one advert, make one sales aid and design one web page. We wouldn’t need to faff around with multiple PR releases or even packaging changes.

Best of all we’d never again need to spend precious resources on all that boring segmentation and targeting!

Unfortunately for that to actually happen, we’d need to imagine we operate in a soulless homogenous market place. We’d need to believe that all our customers value the exact same thing, hold the same priorities and speaks exactly the same way about them. Which is a little tricky to believe.

The #officeboor at the heart of Myth 3 is simply lazy. He or she wants to launch the lowest common denominator product with the least amount of effort and cost and convince colleagues everyone will buy it.

There is a clear difference between insights and needs. Sure everyone needs their children to be safe in the back of car, but not all cars are the same, not all children are the same age and not all countries have the same roads. Similarly, not all drivers perceive the balance of safety and risk the same!

An insight is a much more tailored and ‘granular’ definition of what someone values, thinks and feels than a ‘raw’ need. Any resulting Value Propositions will suffer if we compromise that reality in pursuit of an imaginary ‘universal insight’

Find out more about re-educating your #officeboor at MatShore.com

#valueproposition #marketingeffectiveness #consumerinsights

Leave a Comment