Disruptive CMO Marketing

Raise your game at generating INSIGHTS

Potential for change is the reason great innovators get goose bumps from great insights, which hurl open the gates to new possibilities that weren’t viable before.

One of the most powerful thing is to listen for the thing that is normally not being said. Occasionally it is being said. Usually the best insights come from mixing a consumer truth, a brand truth, a commercial truth and a marketing truth. For technology brand you can add user experience truth. For advertising it might be a storytelling truth.

So, lets start with a definition?

How to make creative decisions for high tech products

In general it is already difficult to make consistent great creative decisions. I believe in a number of ways to ensure this happens:

1. Provide ownership and autonomy to the leaders of the creative projects
This allows for a vision to come through without it being watered down. It allows for a cohesive piece to be developed

2. Involve a number of different people in making important decisions.
This is not contrary to #1  but rather a feedback mechanism. No one has all the answers and there are so many different scenarios that are possible that it is necessary to expose creative work to a wide variety of people. It is still up to the leaders to decide what to do with the information.

3. Ensure various processes are being used to evaluate the work.

Maximize consumer insights with your sales department

With the right training sales people should become a natural source for first hand consumer insights. They need to look at three elements:
- insights generated from consumer contact
- insights generated from shoppers
- generating insights based on sales or customer analysis

Insights generated from consumer contacts
This is of course the biggest and easiest to formalize the generated insights. First, a process needs to be in place where interesting feedback from both outlet staff and shopping consumers, get captured into the sales report. Balance need to be kept to avoid too much paper filling. You could set weekly objectives like ask these questions to 10 people in your category aile and provide a summary of the feedback by end of week. This can easily be integrated into the handheld programs.

Generating insights based on sales or customer analysis
There are several information points available to the sales department: discussions with retailers, retailers' data, regional analysis and coporate generated insights. The trick is to provide them the relevant cut of the data or insights. Not the research report. In addition, the data needs to be cut by preference for their region. National averages may be interesting to know, but becomes much more powerful when compared to their local performance.
The national account teams or regional sales teams can also provide better insights into how a certain program worked in different channels so the insights are channel specific. They link consumer insights to channel specific shopping insights to the sales consumer drivers.

It is important to have a structured approach. This means fixed meetings, consumer insights need to be part of sales planning data as well as objective setting to the right sales consumer drivers. Key is that they feel responsible for influencing consumers and that they don't think this is for the marketing teams.