Slimming centres booming,” screams one headline; in the same breath another talks about the “rising graph on junk food and obesity in Indian children.”

“Indian television is regressing with no stories outside the traditional Indian family values” rues a social commentator. And yet ... the very same Saas’s and Bahus are getting more glamorous, made up, younger, and attractive. So much so that even Sarat Babu’s “Devdas” went designer.

“Plummeting consumer confidence graphs” lament economists. And one is also waking upto “emerging trends on experimentative cuisine, eating out, holidaying and technology”.

And underpinning all these paradoxes is the clamour for the word that has come to be referred – part disparaging, part acknowledging – as the ‘I’ word ... Insights.

Today, the ‘I’ word has become a little bit of a misnomer in the corporate circles. Colleagues cringe, clients wince and agencies try to keep a straight face when mouthing the word.

And the wonder is that it has travelled beyond the corporate echelons and made inroads into as varied a field as theatre, image economy and nursery schools (one of the new age schools talks about its USP: insights into the child world and psyche!). In the true Indian corporate tradition, the word is in danger of become a caricature - remember “paradigm shift”?

There is not a brief that does not ask for insight, nor an agency that does not tout its credentials on delivering insight. So much so that planning tools for communication now have a proviso on consumer insight.

So, is insight much ado about nothing? As with all big ideas there will always be conflicting schools of thoughts. But what is more significant is that even among the believers, there exist several myths and pitfalls about Insights. The most common of these:

Insight is just another name for good work
Typically this comes from the ‘old school’: “looks like all that was being done before the ‘I’ word debuted was rubbish and meaningless – we did some great work, without going blue in face, tom-tomming the insight”. True!

But by reducing insights to just ‘good work,’ one is committing the first fallacy on insights: reducing it to a regular ‘quality’ measure rather than as an output in itself. Thus while ‘good’ is necessary, it is not sufficient to define or qualify an output as an insight.

Insight is a process, not an output
The argument goes like this: “There is insight in everything [a la Kenzo] – from ordering office stationary to the latest promotions offer to the new communication idea – it’s a way of life with us.” True again!
In a sense insights do have the potential value to pervade all aspects of functioning from the most strategic to the most tactical. However, the fallacy here is to liken insights to just a better way of doing things. Which defeats the very purpose of going looking for specific insights to solve bottlenecks and problems.

Insights as a divine invocation
The spiel: “Insight is a flash of intuition. We can only prevail and invoke it hoping that we are enlightened ... there is no guarantee that we will be blessed” – this comes not from disbelievers, but from those very consultants honing their reputation as Insight Gurus! – And strangely, not completely untrue.

However, while insights do bring, in an almost sublime sense, enlightenment (there is very little that is inexplicable or unpredictable once you have got this insight into a person’s psyche), it does not require mystical or random ways to seek it.

So what is insight?
Is it a religion to be imbibed at the feet of numinous gurus; is it a formula that one can’t go wrong with; is it a calling some are born with; or is it just another gimmick the latest in a series of marketing jargon hoax?

Let’s first have a look of what is the common currency for insight. The most basic definition/expectation/ expression/refrain is “tells me something I did not know”. And if we now look at the essence of resistance to insights we find that a lot of it has to do with this meaning: “more things change the more they are same”, “cannot discover something that is not there”, “regressing to the realm of irrational”, “touchy feely nonsense”.

And even those who pay obeisance to insights sometimes unwittingly perpetrate these perceptions. Witness the mega presentation on insights output – a marathon 7-hour session where one timid soul eventually ventures to ask what are the enumerated insights finally! Only to be shouted down and scoffed at: after all if it was something so concrete and definable, it WOULD AND COULD NOT be an insight!
So having discovered the ‘I’ word, integrated it into our marketing thinking and now re-instating the consumer as the repository of all wisdom leading to insights, how successful and effective have we been in benefiting from insights?

Here’s what Susan Fournier of Harvard Business School has to say: “If companies want to restore growth to their brands, they have to drop the one-size-fits-all, mass-marketing approach and find out how they can make their brands more meaningful to different kinds of people. They tend to want to understand their brands when what they really need to do is understand consumer lives and fit their brands into them...they need to be trend watchers, ethnographers, they need to be more culturally savvy.”

Let’s revisit our paradoxes again. What does all of it have to do with insight? Simple. The first unravelling of the mystery happens when we acknowledge that almost all of the above is likely to co-exist happily within the same entity that we call the Great Indian Consumer. And the ‘paradoxes’ seem so because each analyst/ marketer/commentator is looking at that window in the consumer’s psyche, which he thinks is relevant to his business.

And it is in these paradoxes that you begin to get the essence of what is insight. At the core of any insight must be its power to explain - even the most seemingly inexplicable phenomenon.
The fundamentals of insight thus are rooted in three basic tenets – and this is never truer for anything as much as it is for understanding the consumer.

1. Insight is like a quasar: it is diagnostic and explanatory which means it tells you what forces are at play and why something happens and when it will not happen.
And this is most evident when one has encountered an insight - it explains so much more that just the phenomenon you were studying. It is alike the casual map on the consumer psyche, helping you predict behaviour.

Look at our ‘paradoxes’... when one looks at all of them from their source point, that is the consumer, things change:
* Health is more a “moment of need” than a way of life. So the same individual has needs that straddle health and indulgence. Imagine the impact this has for marketers who go segmenting people as health conscious or not health conscious!

* For all practical purposes, Indian homes are still single TV households and all media consumption for the woman happens in a ‘public’ viewing context regulated by her husband and family. Think of how this will stack up against all the aspirations/trends/expectations of the new emerging Indian woman findings!

* The average Indian teenager still spends only as less as 1/8th of his waking hours in unrestricted, ‘cool’ out-of-home activities. Indian youth culture, anybody?

* One of the biggest highlights of the human genome project: according to early results of the mapping of the human DNA strand, all human genetic codes are about 99.99% alike. Further endorsed by the number of patented gene types: contrary to expectations ranging from 50,000 – 1,40,000, it is a compact 32,000.

How do all these trivia help? What it’s telling us is that when we get to depths of human psyche and understand the overall prototype of how men/women relate to the world around them, how they reconcile this with their bio-genetic drives and how all this is likely to get expressed as behaviour, one has got to basic rudiments of uncovering insights. When one has gotten under the skin of a person to that extent, one is also powered to touch him/her at the core.

2. We now come to the second of the defining traits for insights and the ways of harnessing insights: making connections between relatively unrelated aspects. And in case of marketing, the canvass and starting point is really the consumer as an individual.

While this does sound simple, it cannot be rendered if one does not have commitment to this basic principle. In a near religious fervour, it means keeping the scope for insights mining completely open and blue sky, not precluding or excluding any aspect of the consumer from this potential for connections and going into all aspects of the consumer psyche with equal passion and gusto. The connections, and insights from the connections emerge only after considerable churning of all that one has picked about the consumer and his life.

A lot of these “insights” mean little at random. But as a part of the larger mosaic tapestry on the consumer psyche, they start yielding a million opportunities.

Example: in most lower income households one does witness severe gender persecution: wives as well as girl children. This ‘misery’ bonding between mother and daughter is also anchored around the need for the daughter and vicariously through her – the mother coming out of it. Nice, good-to-know information, most will say.

Till you link this to a beauty brand and offer grooming enhancement as a means to upgrade. In all furore over the Fair & Lovely ad campaign, I found very few voices that looked at it all from the consumers point of view – represented by the girl in the ad who is supposedly been subjected to all this gender atrocity. The communication worked and was powerful because of the insight powering it, helping make connections not available through conventional understanding. And it was something every girl coming from similar households could recognise, acknowledge and connect with.

The power of Insights thus lies in its ability to show you ways to connect with your consumer in such a powerful way that it replaces all the rational knowledge. This was something that William Bernbach talked about long ago: “Nothing is so powerful as an Insight into human nature - what compulsions drive a man, what instincts dominate his action - if you know these things about a man, you can touch him at the core of his being”.

And this is making a big comeback today: “love bites”, “reenchantment”, “emotional eco-system”, “archetypes”, “brand mythology” and “popular culture”.

These are no longer intellectual self-indulgence from creative persons in an agency or from movie moguls and theatre workshops or even from instant fix pop psychologists. All of these are the latest buzz words used in hard nosed board room meetings – on discussions ranging from growth strategy to restructuring to equity evaluation on brands.

3. Which brings us to the last and most pertinent point on insights: Insights are not revelations that come by serendipitously but an output of scientific and structured quest. Once we recognise that Insights are not another name for good work, Insights have to be the causal map and framework for any phenomena under study, and that Insights help you forge an enduring, emotional and non-rational relationship with your consumer – the need to go seeking Insights becomes not just important but urgent.

I would put quest for Insights up there on the company’s agenda along with other systemic quests like customer satisfaction, CRM/ERP processes and even brand health tracking.

Insights needs commitment, passion and a buy-in from the management, After all, it needs conviction and courage to not get impatient with what looks like tomes of trivia on consumer before one arrives at an inventory of Insights. I would in fact liken the Insights quest to a pilgrimage: arduous, not obvious in terms of its pay-offs but never, repeat never, futile. The experience of the revelation could not have come without all the preceding efforts.

So what would be the scientific and structured tenets for seeking insights?
* Insights agenda must come top-down, with co-option from the highest decision making level. Only this can bring in the conviction and commitment.
* Start from the consumer and not from your objective
* Inventory all that you know and all that you cannot explain for your market/brand/consumer segments
* Anchor the insights to the problems that have to be addressed at your end
* Finally, do ask for that list of insights – it will help you plan the myriad ways in which you can use each one of them.
Of course – all of that is just to set the framework for Insights quest. The process? That’s another story. But as they say, well begun is half the work done!!!

Feeback on this article may be emailed to:
smeditor@indiatimes.com