In this series of feature articles we have been looking inside the “black box” of market research analysis. We have been looking at what analysis really means and trying to provide some direction in making analysis more effective. In this final feature we will look at the final layer of analysis: the generation of ‘insight’.
Jon Chandler 
20 Oct, 2009
The Keys to Analysis: Insight
Three Layers of Analysis
In the first feature in this series we took an overview of the vital ‘must haves’ that any market research analysis should deliver against. Here we identified three key needs critical to any analysis:
- Narrative: what is the most useful account of the research data that we can achieve.
- Understanding: how can we move from the portrayal of data and the description of the world to a point where we understand how and why things happen?
- Insight: How can we take that final step to the point where we have identified some key that allows us to bring about some kind of change?
In the second
feature in this series we looked specifically at Narrative: reviewing
and sifting raw qualitative data to create an intelligible and accessible
account of what a market research project has thrown up. This can mean narrative
accounts of all types and varieties; what Doctors think and feel about a
particular brand, how they approach different patient types, what their goals
are in using particular therapies and so on. This narrative will reflect
the subject and focus of the research itself, whether this is amongst Doctors,
Nurses, Patients, Payors or others. This narrative forms a primary layer,
the backbone of the whole analysis process, but this narrative does not tell
us why things happen or why they are as they are... and it does not tell
us about how different outcomes can be engineered.
In the third feature in this series we looked at analysis for understanding: how can we move from the pure description of the world to a point where we understand how and why things happen? ‘Understanding’ is the output from secondary layers of analysis that happen partly in parallel to our development of a narrative and partly in consequence of it. Providing understanding is about explaining the relationships between things, it is about establishing what the driving influences and causes are, sequences of events and so on. This crucial next step in moving beyond the purely descriptive involves the application of different analytic models. Here analytic models help to build ‘shape’ into data and can give important clues as to the relationship between different items within the data. A range of such analytic models are available; Binary Analysis, Two Dimensional Analysis, Significance Analysis, Constellation analysis, Sequence analysis and Linkage/Causal analysis.
In this final feature we will look at the third of the three keys to analysis established at the outset of this series ….. analysis for insight; how can we take that final step to the point where we know how to bring about some kind of change?
The Challenge of Insight
If achieving understanding is about knowing how and why things happen and hence where to apply pressure in a particular market, insight is the underpinning for more profound change. Insight has been bandied around as a ‘hot’ label in market research for a few decades. Like the ‘analysis’ label it can mean different things to different people. To some “insight” can simply mean an effective Narrative portrayal of data, to others it means more... an account of why things happen. Here we want to talk about insight as something even more than this.
Insight has been described elsewhere as ‘seeing what everyone else sees and
seeing something different’. Viewed in this light we can see insight as a kind
of revelation that allows us to move forward. Insight is what allows us to
go somewhere new, to effect some kind of change. Insight is the act of envisioning
new possibilities and the mechanisms through which these can come about.
Analysis that leads to insight represents the greatest challenge we face. The primary analytic requisite for effective narrative portrayal is a thorough and tenacious review of data. The primary analytic requisite for effective ‘understanding’ is the identification of relationships, causes and sequences. The primary analytic requisite for insight is imagination and inspiration. This is not something that can be designed in to an analytic process. However, what analysis can do is adopt stances, pose questions and interrogate data in ways that are more likely to generate insight. In this fourth and final feature in this series we will look at these practices.
Insight Through Challenging the Narrative
The philosophical start point in searching for insight is that we are looking for what others do not see or have not seen. Thus, it is often not helpful to take everything we have heard at face value, the majority opinion will tend to reflect whatever consensus there is around the status quo. Delivering insight is about going beyond reportage, accepting narrative accounts and explanations at face value will not deliver insight and will not provide the impetus or leverage points for change. Accepting narrative accounts and explanations at face value will merely reinforce the status quo and reinvent the world in its current form.
One way in which we may start to generate or identify real insight is by challenging
the narrative account of the world we have been presented with. There are a
number of levels at which this can be done:
- Analyse truth, ideology and falsehood: most Market Research narrative is a mixture of truth, ideology and falsehood, it is a mixture of accurate accounting of what people do and think and feel, this is often interlaced with self justifying beliefs and myths, in turn this is intertwined with some conscious or unconscious misperceptions and untruths. A vital first step on the road to insight is to analyse what people have said in research for those things that are obviously true, versus those that are simply convenient beliefs versus those things that do not stand up to scrutiny. Identifying this kind of ‘false consciousness’ and recognising why it is present can often be extremely valuable as a source of insight.
- Challenge Consensus: human beings often have strong impulses towards consensus, towards agreeing a common world view. These impulses are often at work in group discussions where respondents often coalesce around common views or themes. Similar impulses are often at work when researchers create narrative accounts of what they have seen and heard in research, they cluster behaviours and responses, they create ‘types’ who share behaviours, beliefs or attitudes. This consensus may be real or illusory; it may be an artefact or a construct of research. Dissecting this consensus may generate new insight, identifying where there is actually difference underlying apparent uniformity and unanimity. Pushing all of this one step further we can directly challenge consensus by asking whether there are different ways of seeing the world or thinking about it that are equally viable or useful.
- Deconstruction and Reconstruction: challenging people’s narrative accounts ultimately requires a process of deconstruction and reconstruction. Deconstruction and reconstruction involves dissecting the constituent parts of people’s current behaviours, beliefs and so on, and trying to re-imagine these. Are there different ways in which we can re-imagine and re-focus people’s models of a disease process. In what ways can we re-imagine and re-focus patients’ experience of a disease and their understanding of it.
Insight through Challenging Our Understanding
In developing this account of the analytic challenge we have proposed three key analytic layers; narrative, understanding and insight. The second of these layers ‘Understanding’ arises out of analytic activity that happens partly in parallel to our development of a narrative and partly in consequence of it. Providing understanding is about developing models that explain the relationships between things, it is about establishing what the driving influences and causes are, sequences of events and so on.
Another key source of insight can be confronting or challenging this understanding.
We can gain insight from challenging understanding at 2 levels:
- Current alternatives: here we may be able to generate insight by taking our own and other explanatory models and asking whether alternative explanations are viable. Here we seek insight by questioning the received wisdom, whether this is from others or our own.
- Future alternatives: challenging current understanding can also mean asking whether the future has to be a re-working of the present. Again analysis for insight means asking whether the relationships that we have established are inevitable and where these could be turned around or changed.
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Insight through Challengers
Insight is not just the unique province of researchers and analysts thinking ‘outside the box’. Insight can also come from the mouths of respondents, but more often the unusual ones.
Researchers and ‘trend spotters’ working in areas subject to rapid change have often looked to ‘outliers’ and outlier communities to give them clues about what might be happening in the mainstream in the future. Here researchers have looked to the gay community or to street sub-cultures for future direction in fashion, or have researched ‘geeks’ to gain a vision of the future of electronics or gaming. The point is that in these cases outliers or outlier groups are valued and listened to for the very fact that they are unusual. They are not seen as aberrant from the dominant consensus, but offering a more insightful perspective on future possibilities.
The principle at work here can be applied more generally in the quest for
insight.
In every research project there are ‘outliers’; often there are outlier comments about this or that which simply do not fit with the large bulk of commentary, sometimes there are outlier respondents who simply do not fit with the mainstream. Very often the goals of research encourage researchers to ignore or dismiss outlier comments and outlier respondents … to treat them as somehow odd or ‘a bit whacky’. In the quest for insight analysis of outliers can be vitally important. These different or unusual views may point the way to a more penetrating view of what really drives particular behaviours or a different vision of how some aspect of the world could be. The quest for insight requires that we take a positive perspective on ‘outliers’.
Seeking insight from aberrant comments and outlier respondents suggests that all of our analytic procedures should simultaneously be collecting the odd and the unusual as well as seeking patterns, commonalities and routines. While the commonplace and the ordinary is telling us about the world as it is now, the odd and unusual may give us a different vision of possible futures.
This collection of the odd or the unusual and focus upon it almost brings us full circle, it says that our narrative needs to include a review of ‘outliers’ as well. This brings us back to the point where we started, our focus on three key analytic layers; narrative, understanding and insight. What we can now see is that these are not separate processes or a sequence of processes, these are three key analytic activities that must happen in parallel with one another.
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