Article Content:

    What Is Insight in Marketing?

    The Importance of Insight in Marketing

    How to Gather Insight in Marketing?

    Case Studies of Outstanding Insights

The world of advertising and marketing is like a dense, sprawling jungle. Imagine you're lost in that jungle: You're desperately searching for a way out, drenched in sweat, and growing more exhausted by the minute. Suddenly, a beam of light breaks through, and you spot a narrow trail leading out. That trail represents Insight in Marketing – the "magic" key that can guide your marketing campaign to success.

So, what exactly is Insight in Marketing?

Insight in marketing goes beyond simply collecting data. It involves the careful analysis and discovery of hidden truths about customers—truths that encompass their needs, desires, behaviors, and motivations. These insights unlock the secrets buried deep in consumers' minds and influence their purchasing decisions. Armed with these revelations, businesses can craft marketing strategies that resonate with their target audience, striking the right emotional chords and driving impactful results.

The Importance of Insight in Marketing

Insight in marketing is primarily about understanding the customer—who they are, what they like, what they dislike, what they're seeking, and how your marketing campaign conveys that your brand can fulfill those desires.

Influencing Customer Behavior

Marketing revolves around influencing customer behavior. It’s the art of transforming a product or service from something unknown into something people feel they need. The key to achieving this lies in vital marketing insights—data and feedback that guide businesses toward crafting the most effective messages.

For example, running A/B tests on a series of marketing emails based on a set of assumptions helps businesses determine which emails perform best in terms of open rates and readership. Or perhaps a company finds that most of its social media followers fall within the 18-24 age range, directly shaping the type of marketing activities it invests in.

Meeting Customer Needs

The information you gather about customer behavior, sales data, and even socio-economic factors can help you design marketing campaigns that uncover and serve a specific need.

For instance, if you're selling accounting software and you know most businesses purchase or renew their licenses in September, you can ramp up your marketing spend during that time to maximize impact. Doing so positions your brand to meet a demand at its peak.

Shaping Products and Services

Feedback from previous marketing campaigns can play a crucial role in shaping the future of your products or services. Monitoring customer sentiment and opinions on social media, for example, may reveal a clear demand for a specific feature or product variation.

This kind of insight is "gold" because it pinpoints real customer needs that can be better served in the future.

How to Gather Marketing Insights?

Marketing insights can come from a variety of sources because marketing strategies are influenced by data and knowledge from a wide range of areas, from individual feedback to large-scale socio-economic factors. Here are a few methods to get started:

Customer Feedback

Collecting customer feedback is one of the most powerful ways to gather marketing insights because it provides direct information from customers, as opposed to making inferences from data. Marketers often use focus groups or field research to gather customer opinions and interactions. Additionally, customer surveys—like NPS and CSAT—are excellent tools for capturing customer sentiment that can shape your marketing strategy.

Here are a few methods to gather quality feedback from customers:

Listening to Customers on Social Media and Support Channels

Using a customer experience management system that scans everything from third-party review sites to social media posts and customer support calls is crucial for understanding how your marketing campaigns are being received by customers.

These feedback conversations occur throughout the campaign and on a large scale, so using software that aggregates all of these data sources into actionable insights is essential.

Digital Analytics

Analytics can reveal how many people engaged with a digital campaign on social media, who opened a marketing email, and how much website traffic a campaign generated. However, to fully grasp the success of your marketing campaigns, you’ll need to engage in some data science to uncover the story behind the numbers. Smart marketers know how to use the right analytics tools to turn raw data into actionable insights—and apply what they've learned to future campaigns.

Case Studies of Outstanding Marketing Insights

AA: Bringing Emotions Back to Driving

• The Campaign:

The UK’s Automobile Association (AA) aimed to reverse long-term revenue declines and improve customer acquisition and retention. Initially, their strategy seemed typical—many businesses seek to address similar challenges. But AA made a bold move that caused some anxiety.

• The Insight:

They formed a new team to research their long-term outlook. What they uncovered painted a concerning picture: their market share and membership were declining, driven by a toxic mix of increased price sensitivity and waning relevance, which weakened their brand.

In response, they made a complete 180-degree shift, transitioning from a rational, performance-focused message to a much more emotional brand strategy. Functional messaging about their repair services was replaced with something softer and more inspiring: the joy of driving, summed up by the tagline, "Love that feeling?"

• The Result:

This shift from rational to emotional messaging proved pivotal for AA, allowing them to raise prices, stabilize revenue, and achieve a return of £2.23 for every £1 invested.

The key takeaway here is that leveraging the right data in the right way can lay the foundation for long-term success. Emotional advertising is often data-driven; only through deep, robust analysis can a business confidently adopt an emotional communication strategy.

The Big Issue: Change Your Coffee, Change the World

• The Campaign:

The Big Issue, a street magazine focused on ending homelessness, is published across four continents. Their "Change Please" campaign in the UK had a simple mission: encourage people to switch to The Big Issue's new coffee brand, Change Please, as a small step toward changing the world.

• The Insight:

While the magazine industry might be struggling, the £8 billion coffee industry was thriving.

The Big Issue team identified a consumer insight: while someone might buy a magazine every two weeks, they purchase several cups of coffee a week. Additionally, people often pass by a Big Issue vendor on their way to queue at a major coffee chain. The Big Issue team recognized that sharing this simple truth could challenge consumers to care about homelessness.

• The Result:

This appeal to the heart succeeded, leading to a 5% year-over-year increase in sales and boosting revenue by £1 million for The Big Issue. It also highlighted the power of consumer insights in advertising—fueling creative thinking that enabled a magazine to launch a coffee brand and use it to drive social change.

Whirlpool: Putting Care First

• The Campaign:

Whirlpool’s "Care Counts" campaign revolved around a simple yet compelling idea: that behind every household chore is an act of love. It was a powerful concept that humanized the mundane task of doing laundry and gave Whirlpool a renewed brand purpose built on empathy, emotional connection, and the power of care.

• The Insight:

At the heart of this campaign was a shocking insight uncovered by the Care Counts team: prolonged absenteeism in U.S. schools meant millions of children were less likely to graduate.

High school dropouts face 70% higher unemployment rates, 70% greater likelihood of needing social assistance, and are eight times more likely to end up in prison. If that weren’t bad enough, a distressing part of the cause was simply this: 1 in 5 American children struggle to have clean clothes—and thousands of kids skip school each day because of the shame of not having clean clothes to wear.

• The Result:

Leveraging the power of customer insight to see the consequences when care fails, Whirlpool found a way to fulfill its brand purpose, making a significant real-world difference through something as simple as clean laundry. In its first year, the program washed over 2,300 loads of laundry in 17 schools. The results were remarkable: 90% of students improved their attendance, 95% became more motivated in the classroom, and 89% increased their participation.

Gorillas: Laughing Along with What London Wants

• The Campaign:

The on-demand grocery delivery app Gorillas launched in London in March 2021 and immediately began collecting data on the city's shopping habits. A year later, they used this data to create a humorous campaign called "Whatever London Wants," highlighting the preferences of different boroughs and using clever double entendres to make it engaging.

• The Insight:

Consumer data generated from Gorillas' first 12 months, during which 8 million products were delivered, revealed some amusing trends—such as London’s love for acid (in the form of lemons), pints (ice cream, not beer), and poppers (champagne bottles).
While the research didn't clarify why Londoners were so fond of bananas, their affection for the fruit remained strong regardless.
The resulting ads brought these insights to life, blending vibrant visuals and playful storytelling with the brand’s customer data.

• The Result:

Customer data can be an excellent tool for crafting fun, effective, and relatable brand campaigns—because they’re based on real insights. In Gorillas' case, consumers were entertained by the fact that someone had ordered 32 chocolate bars in a single delivery. This humorous yet grounded use of customer data added authenticity to the campaign.

KFC: Love at First Bite

• The Campaign:

KFC, the second-largest fast-food chain in the world, delights fried chicken lovers in over 150 countries. But even the biggest brands need to work hard to maintain their status. KFC’s latest campaign, "First Bite," launched in April 2022, centered on how people savor their food.

• The Insight:

KFC meticulously used customer research to identify the moment consumers most eagerly anticipate in their dining experience—the delicious first bite.
Armed with this "first bite" insight, KFC crafted a campaign that aimed to heighten the anticipation around this mouthwatering moment.

• The Result:

The result was a video ad that consumers could emotionally connect with. Even if they hadn’t experienced KFC’s chicken, they understood the anticipation of a favorite meal. This same moment was portrayed across outdoor billboards, digital ads, and print campaigns.

It’s interesting to compare this approach to Gorillas'—while Gorillas went for detailed specificity, KFC opted for a more universal appeal. Both strategies were powerfully driven by data and customer feedback.

LinkedIn: In Her Footsteps

• The Campaign:

As part of their national sponsorship for the UEFA Women's EURO 2022 tournament in England, LinkedIn, in partnership with VCCP, launched a campaign emphasizing the importance of role models in every field of life, both on and off the field.

• The Insight:

LinkedIn's research revealed a shocking—yet perhaps unsurprising—statistic:
76% of women expressed a desire for more visible role models they could relate to.
This consumer insight fueled their entire advertising approach. With the tournament being one of the summer's biggest sporting events, LinkedIn spotlighted a group of outstanding female leaders in football, showcasing their on-field achievements and the inspiring work they accomplished off the pitch.

• The Result:

The key message here: "It's easier to become what you can see." Role models are essential in shaping who we are and providing inspiration for others to pursue their dreams. The problem is that they aren't always visible. LinkedIn’s campaign placed female role models front and center—right where they belong.

Insight Marketing is a "magic tool" that helps you create effective and successful marketing campaigns. Take the time to research and gather Insight Marketing, and you’ll see your campaigns "break through" and achieve impressive business results.

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