Improving Insight’s Profile
By Insight Management Academy
- article
- Insight Transformation
- Market Data
- Data Analytics
- Full Service Research
- Customer Experience (CX) Feedback
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Part of the Corporate Insight Leaders Series of articles by James Wycherley, author of The Insight Leader’s Playbook, host of the Transforming Insight podcast, and CEO of the Insight Management Academy.
In my last article in this Corporate Insight Leaders series, I suggested that if you want to transform Insight and its impact in your organisation, you should write your own Insight leader’s playbook with a first chapter that explores Insight’s purpose. Why does your Insight team exist?
Many of the most transformational Insight leaders recognise a dual purpose for Insight: to identify value opportunities for their organisation and to help drive the change necessary to realise those opportunities.
However, whilst we should always start with an aspirational ambition for what Insight might achieve, we then have to recognise that it’s usually how the rest of the organisation sees us that will actually determine whether we succeed.
Therefore, the 2nd P of my Insight leader’s playbook is for Profile.
Does Your Insight Team’s Profile Enable It to Optimise Its Impact in Your Organisation?
When you develop your ideas for this chapter of your playbook, there are a number of key aspects to consider:
- What position does your Insight team occupy in your organisation’s hearts, minds and decision-making processes?
- How close are you and your colleagues to the most senior decision-makers?
- How well known are you and your team around the wider organisation, and how often do you hear others quote your work?
That gives us 3 of the IMA’s best practice territories to draw from when we think about our plans:
- Positioning
- Influence
- Communication
Insight Team Positioning
Traditionally, Insight leaders have recognised 4 ways to improve their position in the organisation, the first being to think about their team’s brand. I don’t mean visual branding or straplines, although both of these can play a role. I mean the broader marketing concept of a brand, the promise that other people think is associated with working with the Insight team. It’s important to recognise that anyone who has heard of the Insight team will have some assumptions about it already, but do you know what these are, and if you do, do they mirror the purpose you have outlined for Insight?
Dipping into the marketing lexicon again, the second way to improve your position is to consider others’ awareness of Insight. Some Insight leaders have introduced campaigns to increase awareness, showcasing key Insight outputs like segmentations on ‘Customer Days’ (like Hayley Ward did at both Marks & Spencer and Deliveroo in the UK) or taking over an area of the office to display customer feedback (like Jana Prahl did at Savage X Fenty in the US). Many Insight leaders have also recognised the value of ‘signature’ pieces to help showcase what Insight can contribute.
A third way is to focus more on reputation – does the actual experience of working with Insight managers, analysts and researchers help to reinforce the potential for Insight to make a difference as described in your vision or purpose? Do you have the processes and capability development in place to ensure that your most junior team members are role-modelling the right attributes? Or is there a tendency for your colleagues to say yes to everything and reinforce Insight’s historic reputation as a reactive service provider?
The final option is to consider your company’s decision-making processes: what rhythms and rituals do senior leaders, management committees, and planning cycles follow that reflect how decisions are made? And is the Insight team hard-wired into these so that it is a key part of the planning process rather than an optional extra brought in at the last minute?
Insight Influence
Many of the most obvious ways to improve your team’s profile focus on its position in hearts, minds and decision-making processes, but we should also consider how our profile is affected by the way we routinely seek to influence decisions. To be clear, the main reason I’d encourage all Insight professionals to become ‘Insight influencers’ is not to improve their team’s profile; it’s to carry out a critical part of doing our job and activate insight. But inevitably senior decision-makers will take note of what we contribute on individual projects, and it will affect our teams’ profile in their eyes.
The IMA does a lot of work with Insight professionals who seek to become ‘trusted advisers’ to senior people, work that has to start by understanding decision-makers so that we can better influence them. But it’s also worth thinking about our personal brand and how we can develop it so that we are invited into key meetings – and the personal presence which we can then demonstrate if we want to be invited back.
Insight Communication
If the primary purpose of ‘Insight influence’ is to enable us to advise senior decision-makers on key decisions, the IMA uses the label ‘Insight communication’ to describe the broader goal of sharing knowledge around the whole organisation. Ultimately, we need to inform decisions that we didn’t even know were being taken, and the only way to do that is to develop an engaging and educational Insight communication programme that considers multiple audiences, channels and content.
Insight communication has always been a key competency for successful Insight teams, but it takes on even more importance if we aspire to become ‘knowledge stewards’. I believe that in the future we should not just think about what the Insight team knows and how we could share that knowledge, but what key groups within the organisation need to know and how we can address current gaps. Our Insight communication programme then becomes the bridge between what is known about markets, consumers and customers somewhere in the company already, and what needs to be known to optimise day-to-day decision-making.
As with Insight influence, the primary purpose of great Insight comms is to activate insight, not to improve the Insight team’s profile. But the two things often go hand in hand.
Taking the Next Steps
If you want some further inspiration on how to improve your Insight team’s profile, you might want to read The Insight Leader’s Playbook, complimentary copies of which are currently available to any corporate Insight leader who completes the IMA’s new 7-minute self-assessment survey, the Insight Leader’s Healthcheck. I also talk about this topic on the Transforming Insight podcast, and the IMA can arrange a masterclass for you and colleagues to explore what this could mean for you in practice.
Having defined Insight’s purpose in your organisation, and thought about how you might raise its profile, it’s then time to turn to how your team operates. All Insight teams rely heavily on their colleagues’ skills, aptitude, knowledge and habits, so that’s what I suggest you consider next. The third P in the Insight leader’s playbook is for people, and I’ll share some ideas on how we can all work on that chapter in the next article in this Corporate Insight Leader series.
