*PRIVATE* Insight Leaders Interviews Summary Oct 2020

Well, this is what I thought was interesting from all of our conversations. First, here's the 10 people I spoke to. You're in here somewhere. All cleverly anonymized, but a mixture of entertainment and retail, luxury goods and a few different roles, broadly speaking, kind of people who run insight teams or have senior roles in the insight teams at least. And the first theme I picked up on was quite a lot of uncertainty. It was quite rare to find someone who was super confident that they were working on all the right things and they were doing everything properly. A lot of people ask themselves, am I working on the right things? What are the things I should be working on? What are my peers working on? So this is the answer to that question. Okay. After talking to everybody about all the different things they're working on, I came up with a list of 17 things I think people work on to some degree or other. Some of these lots people work on, some not very many. Every one of these is something that somebody's working on in terms of using insight to help make business decisions. And the there's a bunch around strategy which are more like bigger picture, growth driven, growth driving opportunities. There's a bunch around a particular product or a service, developing a new one maybe, or optimizing an existing one. There's a bunch around driving lifetime value from existing customers, bunch around marketing, and a bunch around sales. I'm not going to go into this in any detail now, except to say that I think that having a list of all the available things that you could do is probably a useful exercise. And after I got off the phone with you and with everybody else, I gave a score in my mind based on our conversation so lightly of one to five for each of these 17 jobs to see which I thought were most important to you. And here's the ranking of which were most important to more people. Increasing engagement of existing customers is number one and customer acquisition is number two. But they're pretty close, obviously. And then new product and service innovation, or the one that's right next to it, measuring performance of a new product or service launch, also came out really, really highly. So they were some of the ones where a lot of people said, yeah, this is really, really important to me. And conversely, I think it's interesting to look at the bottom of the list. What did not very many people think were important because this is where there might be opportunities for you, but finding more opportunities to sell your products or to partner with somebody who can sell your product, maybe finding new distribution channels or optimizing them Improved sales pitches to get your product into distributors or other sales channels maybe and then improve creative, some of the ones where some people are working on it, but it wasn't generally a pattern. So I don't know where the opportunities are for you, but I think making this list of 17 and then thinking about which ones you're really good at, which ones you could get really good at and would make a big difference, and which ones you just write off because it's not for you, doesn't matter if you do that thing. I think would be a really useful exercise. But 17 is not necessarily the right number for your business. So here's one I made earlier. Instead of 17 here, there's 30. This is for an entertainment business that I was working with where it just goes into a lot more detail around their process. So here's 30 ways this entertainment business could use insight to make a difference. And they're working through now thinking, all right, which of these are the big opportunities? Here's where we got to so far on that, which is five stars is like a big opportunity to use insight to make a difference. And one star is like, don't bother, it's not going to help anybody if we sort that one out. So where might be good to think through. Where are your unmet needs that are really high impact? What does your diagram look like? Where are the opportunities for you? If you want to adapt to that version, help yourself to these slides. But also there's a link here to a Google Sheets version that you can edit and add your kind of notes and thoughts and ideas and rank and sort and all sorts of fun things. And here's a version I made for a company that's closer to an FMCG company that I'm working with, where actually I think there's a big difference here between a bunch of things on the left, the first 10 things that they could use insight for, which are all insight related. And then on the right hand side, four things that they could use, I should say data for or analytics for four things they could use it for, which aren't really about insight, they're much more about operational optimization, just making good business decisions in a relatively algorithmic way. So left hand side insight learning, right hand side data analytics, but for more operational uses. So I don't know what the right diagram is for your business, but maybe some of these will help. So in summary then, lots of uncertainty. Am I working on the right things? My recommendation after this conversation, like come up with your list. Use one of these crazy Diagrams or build your own. What are all the things that you could work on in your business to deliver great insight for and think about where the really high, high impact opportunities are next? I've got a business problem to solve and there's loads of different ways I could solve it. Like what's the best way to solve it? Particularly which data set is the best one to use? Transaction data, social media data or research data, which I think are basically the three types of data. Any other data set kind of has a similar behavior to one of these three. And I asked everybody, directly or indirectly how important each data set was and here's the conclusions. So transaction data, if you have it, the gold standard for everybody, five out of five and really, really important kind of goes without saying, but I was surprised at how universally high that was. Social media data, much more mixed. A couple of people have really worked out how to use it in a great way and think it's critical to their business. 5 out of 5. But most people really haven't. Most people, it's like a one or a two or a three maybe and so, and why? Well, I think it's not because it doesn't have the potential to be a five. I think it's because it doesn't yet deliver at that level. There's too many tools. They're each good for one or two things, but they're not good for other things. If you try and repurpose them, it's hard to know what to do, what's possible. There's like a ton of questions about how to do different things and what it's good for, what it's not. So I think this is a huge opportunity to overcome uncertainty, overcome this confusion around tools and to increase the role of social media analytics in solving business problems. And then survey data is also a really mixed bag. Like some people have it in their background, I think, and have been good at it in the past and therefore know how to use it. Whereas some people, I think it's just not their area of expertise and so they haven't properly embraced how to use it. So another area where I think there's an opportunity to get that score up, it could be 5 out of 5 for a lot more people, but it's easier to do on surveys because it's a well trodden path. Like we know what good looks like and it's much easier to see great examples and then copy them. Social media analytics, it's just harder to find those great examples and harder to work out what great looks like, so that's my conclusion next, to segment or not to segment, that is the question. And you know, I'm a big proponent of segmentation. It's transformative to me. So I wanted to check am I crazy or does everybody think this way? And you can segment transaction data, you can segment social media data and you can segment research data. So also I wanted to see where is your head at? Where's everyone's head at? On the value and the role of segmentation, particularly for these three data sets. And I won't read all these quotes now, please read them at your leisure. But these are some of the quotes that came out in the conversations about segmentation data, which really doubled down on my belief in it. So it's an essential feature if you want to understand an act. It helps you know what's really happening. Opportunities to do things differently. So action oriented insights. A few people talked about the common vernacular or use of it as language around the business, which I really believe in. And I'm glad I'm not crazy. And without it, we're in trouble. Or without it, we only have a simplistic view was a really nice quote as well. So a lot of different reasons that came out organically in conversation about why it's so important. Okay, so let's look at the scores. And I thought it was remarkable that for almost everybody and for almost every one of the three types of data that you could segment, it was either a yes, I'm already doing it, or it was a wish. Like, I wish I could do it, but I don't know how, or it's in progress, like it's being worked on now but not quite worked through. And so I didn't expect this. I expected that half the people would say yes and half people would say it's not important for me. And I expected that most people who said yes would say yes for only one data source. But no, almost everybody sees the value of segmenting all three different data sources. But there's still a long way to go. Even when it says yes, it's probably not perfect. There's probably a lot of improvement that would still be beneficial. As you can see, there's a lot of, oh, I wish I could do that. Well, there's a reasonable number of how I'm working on it, but you know, maybe it's not actually working yet. So I'm doubling down on segmentation as something that's critical. Thanks to all your feedback. It's just that there's a lot more handholding needed to help get there. And I think one thing that came out in some of the conversations was around the role of different segmentations and a belief that transaction data and maybe social media data are better for like tactical effectiveness, like day to day operational decisions. And maybe on the right hand side like the survey data and a little bit of social is really, really good for more strategic conversations and big growth conversations. I would argue that it can all be used for all of those things. It's hard to use surveys tactically and it's hard to use transaction data strategically, but they are possible. And so I think that just requires a bit more creativity. But I thought this was a really interesting thing to think about. And then the final thing that came up is this observation that particularly as it relates to segmentation, there's just many different skills that have to come together if we're going to launch a segmentation that actually has big business impact. And so I ended up drawing this diagram in response to some of our conversations rolling out an order. Every link has to be strong, otherwise the project will fail. And the links are, what data am I actually using? Like if it's transaction data, is it clean? If it's social media data, is it the right audience frame with the right filters, Are my variables normalized in the right way? If it's a survey data, am I asking the right questions and treating the variables in the right way? There is some nerd stuff required and that requires data, but also business knowledge, then actually coming up with audience segments like how many variables do I allow into the clustering? How many clusters do I come up with? 100? I've seen examples of that. Two or three, I've seen examples of that. I think three is too few, hundreds too many. But it depends on the business case and it's a good conversation. But getting the right number of variables, get the right number of variables and the right number of clusters, which requires analytic skills, then as some people mention in the quotes, but making sure that each cluster or each segment can have growth strategies built off the back of it. I've seen a lot of work which says, hey, here's a cluster, aren't they awesome, right? What do we do to drive growth from this segment, this cluster? So making sure there's growth strategies and there's some really nice examples of that. I've seen that's more strategic skills that are required, not necessarily insight skills. And then some people have said, well, I can see how to do all of that. But you know what, on my team, I don't have the right people to lead organizational change, which is to get the organization to understand, to accept, and to use the segmentation once it's built. So that takes real leadership skills and, you know, time and effort and expertise. And some people have said, look, I can. I want to do a segmentation. I can do almost everything. I just don't know if I can do that. So it felt like everybody has a gap in this chain or a weak link in this chain, but everything needs to be strong. I thought that was, like, a fascinating conversation, and that's it. So I hope some of that was useful. If you want to jump on a call with me to talk it through anymore or with everybody else who I talk to, then let me know and I'll set something up.