Insight is fine – but how do you make it effective?

Often, Insight Teams have to play a fine balancing act between fulfilling numerous internal stakeholder requests on the one hand, and proactively driving innovation and strategy within their organisations on the other. It can sometimes be difficult to prioritise workloads, manage stakeholder expectations, develop efficient processes and knowledge management systems, and deliver insight that will make a real impact; and yet that is the challenge for the 21^st Century Marketing Insight team.

"beyond” is GfK NOP’s new insight division, which has developed an Insight Effectiveness Audit to support our clients. The chief aim of this is to help organisations optimise performance across the six insight building blocks, each of which, if not working effectively, can prevent insight being created and reduce ability to drive change.

The Audit process consists of five stages:

1. Workshop/Interviews with the Insight team to better understand your team strategy and vision, roles and responsibilities, existing knowledge portfolio, processes and tools (and perceptions of performance against the six insight building blocks).

2. One-on-one Stakeholder interviews covering strategy, responsibilities and key issues faced, as well as an in-depth discussion on working with the Insight team and their performance within each of the six insight building blocks.

3. Action planning workshop to develop a roadmap of quick wins and longer term initiatives to improve performance.

4. Implementation support to develop appropriate best-practice tools and processes to ensure the Insight team is working efficiently and meeting stakeholder needs. This can include training to embed insight skills and behaviours.

5. 360° Insight online survey with internal stakeholders to measure performance of the Insight team (and the key drivers of performance) and define KPIs and actions on an ongoing basis

Case story – Mobile Operator, US

Business Situation:

The Market Research team was under increasing pressure to make a bigger impact in the business. They were inundated with research requests and were struggling to add value to the projects they were managing and spend sufficient time with stakeholders to implement change.

What did we do?

We carried out an in-depth audit of the role and performance of the team reviewing processes, tools and planned research portfolio as well as conduct interviews with a number of senior stakeholders across the organisation.

To help embed change, we ran a one-day action planning session producing a 2 year roadmap of actions and a knowledge portfolio to support the company’s strategic decision-making. We also developed an "insight bible” of best practice tools, processes and templates to help the team achieve its goals more speedily and develop greater visibility with stakeholders.

The outcome:

The team are making excellent progress towards a long term "insight” vision, changing their focus from being a pure Market Research team to one which is more consultative, using multiple knowledge sources and applying joining up thinking.

"The Insight Effectiveness Audit was a great process and very helpful. We’re moving forward with the recommendations for the ideal research projects to have in our portfolio and I regularly refer to the Market Research roadmap you developed. We now know what knowledge we require and have implemented a process to capture and share this around the company and aggregate it into insight”

Head of Research