The document provides a 5-step guide to generating insights from data: 1. Define what needs to be understood from the data 2. Identify barriers that could prevent insights such as selection and confirmation bias 3. Develop customer empathy through research to understand motivations 4. Take a step back before finalizing insights to ensure they are useful and consistent 5. Validate insights through research to ensure they differentiate and motivate the audience

1. The Market Artist
marketartist@gmail.com
201-461-3206
linkedin.com/in/themarketartist
Data Into Insights
Making Information Work Harder for
Your Brand
October 2016

2. The Market Artist 2
Generating Insightfrom Data
Many marketers have data at their disposal, but are not sure if the information is really helpful. Here is a simple step-by-step
guide that will help you to answer that question.
What is an insight?
To have insight is to see past the surface: to perceive not just what is happening but also what motivates, separates, and
connects. The key difference between data and insight is that while data provides information, insight delivers understanding.
And for marketers there’s another difference: insights should create a competitive advantage—help to perceive the market in
a new way, to spot a trend before others do, or create a deeper bond with the target.
In a competitive and noisy marketplace, identifying differentiating insights is a real challenge. Take it step-by-step, forcing a
thorough and deep ideation process.
Step 1: Define what you need to understand.
Define clearly what you need to understand. For example, is it why something has changed? Why it’s difficult to surpass a
competitor? Whether a new offering would be successful? That will not only focus your search for insights, it will help you to
(1) sort the data into what is relevant and what is not, and (2) identify gaps in the information that’s available to generate
insights—so that you can make a plan to find it.
Step 2: Identify barriers to insight.
The most common barriers to insight are behavioral—i.e., marketer behaviors! One of the most common is selection bias:
narrowing the focus of investigation to easily available data. This forces you to fill in the blanks in that data with assumptions
instead of insights (e.g., about “why” measured behaviors occurred).
The worst is probably confirmation bias (in which we seek only data that verifies existing ideas). Within an industry,
preconceptions typically become so established that they are treated as facts, even though they are really assumptions. For
example, marketing clichés like “millenials” or “soccer moms” are the opposite of insights—they’re generalizations that keep
marketers from really seeing the people they are marketing to. Other barriers are legitimate problems in data collection, such
as the cost of generating insights, fast-changing market conditions, and difficulties in linking causes with effects. Whatever the
barriers, understanding them will help the investigator to screen out basic errors in interpretation.
Step 3: Develop Customer Empathy.
Insights are most powerful when they draw on a full, emotional, rounded portrait of the audience. Empathizing with the
challenges people face in their lives as well as in their interactions with your organization will often spark new pathways for
understanding. Maybe your team will need to do customer interviews, or go out into the “real world” and just observe people
interacting with you. Or maybe you have research studies available to you already that can help you create a few well-rounded
target profiles. Use these tools as the foundation of your insights—“why” would the people you’ve come to understand do the
things you’ve been able to observe in the data?
Step 4: Step back before you settle on an answer.
Be cautious about settling on insights; force yourself to take a step back and ask a few questions: How can I use this insight in
my communications with my audience? Does it change our perspective in useful ways? Do any of my insights seem to
contradict each other, or point us in different directions? See if you can reframe insights to resolve any problems and provide
more useful direction. If you have a creative team, let them create work based on a variety of insights and see what emerges. Is
it powerful? Is it good?
Step 5: Validate your insights.
You can conduct an attitudinal study to validate your insights and prioritize them. You can also test the insight-inspired
messaging against a control (e.g., your existing messages, or a competitor’s messages) to be sure your insight really
differentiates you and motivates your audience. If you’ve gotten the insights right, and really changed something, it should
show up in your research. You should observe emotions like surprise, “yes!!” or just “well, finally.” Then you’ll know you’ve got
it!

3. The Market Artist 3
The Market Artist
The Market Artist offers creative consulting services that turn insights into gold for your company. Strategy consulting
services include insight development, market research, brainstorming, and creative planning.
Techniques include:
 Empathic Ideation. Working with the client’s team to develop customer empathy using research inputs, role-playing, and
brainstorming to support strategic consensus
 Customer Experience Assessment. Exploration of the existing customer experience in client, competitor, and
complementary brand spaces, to identify best practices, opportunities, and potential pitfalls
 Value Exchange Modeling. Research-based exploration of value propositions that inspire the target audience to develop a
value-added relationship with the brand
 Messaging Maps. Messaging strategies that balance emotional and rational decision drivers across customer life-stages
If we can be of service to your company, please reach out to us at marketartist@gmail.com.