How to Drive Action from Insights in 3 Steps
While many brands use big data to derive key insights, there is often a struggle to turn those insights into tangible action. Indeed, many experts agree that actionable insights can be the missing link that companies need to spur innovation and to ultimately take a business to the next level. It is this disconnect between insights and action that Trend Hunter -- the world’s number one trend-spotting platform -- has observed by working with some of the world’s most powerful brands. As a result, Trend Hunter has pinpointed three initial steps that brands must take in order to start driving real action from insights.
Of course, before examining how brands can turn insights into action, it is important to understand just exactly what insights are. Unlike data (raw, unprocessed facts) and information (prepared data), insights are conclusions drawn by analyzing information. At Trend Hunter, insights are derived by mining through crowdsourced data and trends collected from all over the world, in order to understand the overarching ideas that influence decisions and drive change. With these insights in hand, the next step is to turn each idea into action. Ahead are three key strategies that can be used to make this leap:
1) Identify Insights that Align With Your Business Goals
One of the first steps in turning insights into action is to identify those insights that directly align with your business goals. In other words, not every insight you identify will be useful to you, meaning that it is necessary to start by only working with the insights that actually match the needs of your business. For instance, Trend Hunter recently identified the resurgence of full-fat foods as a key insight in the food sector. While this insight can be useful to food brands with the goal of creating nutrition-forward products, it may be insignificant to brands creating convenience-focused foods. As this example reveals, it is important to start with strategically-aligned insights, as those are the only insights that will have a relevant and tangible influence on your business.
2) Consider the Bigger Picture
Even if you have identified a number of key insights that are perfectly aligned with your business goals, these ideas will be meaningless -- and may even create confusion and skepticism -- unless they are placed within the proper context. This means that each insight should be considered within a broader framework that outlines the problem at hand, the solution and the next steps. It is this clear narrative that will paint a picture of what the future could look like and how the insight could be used to drive new ideas. Going back to the example of the rise of full-fat foods, this insight can only be useful when one understands the impact of the fitness world on the dietary choices of increasingly wellness-minded consumers. It is only once you have this kind of context that an insight can provide a clear direction for the next steps to take.
3) Embed Insights into Operational Processes
Once you have selected the most appropriate insights and considered them within the broader context, the final step is to translate this information into action. This means embedding insights into the operational process by shifting into decision-making mode. In other words, you need to go beyond simply thinking about how each insight can be used, and instead create an action plan for the next steps. Only by ensuring that insights are part of your business’ operational process and seen through to completion, will you ensure that these insights actually have a tangible outcome on your business. Returning once again to Trend Hunter’s observation about the rise of fatty foods, a brand would need to make a decision about creating a new product that incorporates the use of healthy fats and see that action through to the end, in order to ensure that the insight had a tangible outcome. While it may seem obvious that you must make the leap from observing insights to creating an action plan for next steps, it is this stage that many brands find themselves stuck in when insights are not considered an integral part of the operational process.
For those who are in the early stages of using insights to drive innovation, these three steps provide a valuable blueprint for getting started. For a more in-depth understanding of how to use insights to spur new ideas, join Trend Hunter -- and top brands such as Starbucks, Samsung and Netflix -- for its annual business innovation conference, Future Festival.
