action insights

Great insights are the start point for strong marketing plans and strategies. Insights (an unobvious truth about your consumer) are rare and a reward for combining robust data analytics with product usage observations, consumer experiences, deep domain knowledge and lateral linkages between consumer life motivations and brand intersects.
 
As a first step investing in the collection, analysis and modeling of big data is prudent. But data the journey to insights does not stop here. There is a need to dig deeper into consumer motivations, behaviors, product usage and experiences to reveal ‘actionable insights’ around which marketing strategies and plans can be built.
 
How can we convert big data into action insights ?
 

1. Understand the Context of the Business Goal : Before you begin the journey into actionable insights the problem definition – ‘what are you solving for?’, has to be tightly defined along with the context. “Brand X eCommerce sales have underperformed by 10% Vs Goal in Q1 (Business Problem) in the period that the promotions calendar has been modified/ pricing and marketing spends remaining fixed (Context) – where is the leaky bucket and what insights can we find to help sales recover by Q3?“.
2. Start with Small Data : With a tightly defined business problem pruning the data feeds to narrow the field surrounding the immediate problem helps. Think brand inputs-consumer trends-competitive actions-technical variables.
3. Segment : Data needs to be split into cohesive segments with common attributes to understand if there is a peculiar shift in one segment / a few segments that have contributed disproportionately to the business problem.
4. Answer for ‘Why’ : Every delta in data points to a behavior change. Every behavior change has a reason ‘why’. Answering for ‘why’ will then lead you isolate specific reasons, improvement areas and gaps that are actionable next steps.
5. Look for the Customer behind the Data: Not everything that’s true is revealed by data alone. If ‘why’ cannot be answered then its time to ask an actual consumer, observe and understand hidden motivations or patterns that lead to behavior change.

 
Gleaning actionable insights requires one last step – actioning the insight. The ability and willingness to action the insight findings balancing the resource constraints of  (time-money-opportunity cost) should be determined before you start the process of discovering the actionable insights. Amongst the list of resource constraints the one that tips the balance in more occasions than others is usually – time. Time taken for the analysis and decision making overflows into the time needed to start actioning the insights.  So be sure of the ability to action the insight before searching for the action insights.

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