Oh, the Humanity: The Power of Human Insights
What are human insights and why are they important for my brand?
What types of research do I need to do to find an insight?
How do I narrow in on a human insight?
Data can tell you a lot about your target audience, like demographics, habits, and trends. But, there’s a whole side of your audience that data can’t tap into.
That data-resistant side is exactly what makes human beings, well, human. That is, the people in your target audience have desires, wants, needs, fears, emotions, and ideas that can’t be measured with numbers and stats.
By exploring this side of your audience, you can discover a human insight – AKA a fundamental truth motivating people’s behavior. A human insight can help you create products and services that fulfill your audience’s needs and fit into their lives.
Before you can find a human insight, you need to study your target audience. Start by dividing your audience into segments. Then choose one to observe.
Why segment? Because your target audience might include different types of people, with each group having its own desires, needs, and emotions. And there’s simply no such thing as a one-size-fits-all human insight.
For example, a laundry detergent brand could have customers who are parents, college students, and single city-dwellers. Since each group has different lifestyles, the brand might decide to first focus on observing parents.
Once you have a segment, find a selection of people who represent it, AKA a sample audience. These will be the people you’ll observe to find a human insight.
Your sample audience should include at least 15 people who cover a broad spectrum of your customer segment. The laundry detergent brand, for example, might include parents of babies, pre-teens, and teenagers.
Add some “wild cards” in there, too (like the detergent brand adding a parent whose 30-year-old son has moved back home and a parent with 10 children). They might reveal new ways to use your product, or tell you why they won’t use it.
Next, it’s time to put on your anthropologist hat and observe members of your sample audience in their natural environment.
Study how they use your product or, if yours hasn’t launched yet, a product that fulfills a similar need. For example, the laundry detergent brand would observe how parents use their detergent at home or at the laundromat.
Actually seeing your audience interact with your product is an incredibly important research step. It can reveal subconscious behaviors that your audience isn’t aware they’re doing.
Along with observing your sample audience, interview them. Ask them very specific questions about how they used your product in the past week or month. The more specific you are, the more insightful their answers will be.
The detergent brand might ask how many times members of their audience washed clothes and used detergent in the past month, on which days, if any event caused them to do more laundry than normal during certain weeks, etc.
LISTEN UP
After observing your sample audience, search for human insights. To do this, find the tension, create hypotheses, and test those hypotheses. Then, once you have an insight, build a business case for it.
Finding the tension means searching for an issue or desire that your products haven’t fulfilled for your audience yet.
Use your audience observations to figure out what your segment cares about in their life (health, friends, role in the family, entertainment, etc.), where your brand’s category comes into this, and what role your product plays.
For example, the detergent brand’s audience cares about their families’ health and being good parents. The brand’s category of personal care keeps families well-cared for. The detergent brand’s product keeps clothing neat and clean.
Then look at the context in which your audience segment uses your product. What times of day, year, or lifestage do they use it? Are there any specific activities, events, or other variables that coincide with or cause them to use it?
Ask yourself how your audience might feel during these times and activities. Think about what they want your product to help them achieve and what emotions this might stir in them. That’s the tension.
The detergent brand might land on this tension: Parents want their family to always look presentable but feel annoyed that washing clothes is such a hassle.
Once you found the tension, create hypotheses about how your product, service, or marketing can help ease this tension for your audience.
The detergent brand might realize their packaging is bulky, awkward, and dispenses liquid detergent too fast. This often causes messy spills. They also note that their audience’s lives are hectic and filled with chores and errands.
The brand hypothesizes that changing their packaging to include a smaller dispenser and a more compact design will give parents the impression that laundry day is easier and one of their less stressful chores.
Now it’s time to test your hypotheses with focus groups, surveys, and other methods. This will help you refine them and narrow in on a true human insight.
People often have big emotional responses to what you’re showing them in testing, which can lead to surprising revelations. These revelations will help you find a small insight that could have a huge impact on your brand.
For example, the detergent brand might discover that parents’ frustration with chores like laundry has a deeper root: They often feel they have no control over their hectic lives. So, even the tiniest moment of control greatly boosts their mood.
From this, the brand can narrow in on a solution that might give parents that tiny moment of organization and control: small, convenient detergent pods that they can quickly drop into a laundry load with no mess or hassle.
Finally, take the human insight you’ve uncovered and build a business case behind it. How will it help you improve your growth and profits?
Make sure there’s a big enough market for your human insight to have a positive economic impact on your brand. Basically, take the research into human emotions you just did and back it up with cold, hard data.
Also, explore whether your human insight will require a product redesign, a completely new product, or a new way of marketing your existing product. How will these changes result in a positive return on investment (ROI)?
DO THIS NOW
Now that you know how powerful human insights can be, let’s create a thought starter that will help focus you as you’re uncovering your own insight.
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KEY TAKEAWAYS
By uncovering a human insight, you can create products or services that fulfill the needs of your target audience.
To help find an insight, segment your audience, interview a sample of them, and observe them using your product or service.
To generate a human insight, find the tension, create and test hypotheses, and build business cases to support them.