How to Change What Your Customers Think and Feel About Your Product

In the 18th century, Antoine-Augustin Parmentier proposed the potato as a suitable addition to France’s diet. Despite widespread starvation, French peasants resisted growing it, declaring them to be dirty and without taste. Parmentier was not deterred - after all, he was the Steve Jobs of potatoes. 

King Louis XVI granted him large plots of land which he turned into potato patches. He surrounded them with armed guards during the day to suggest they were valuable goods. He’d then instruct the guards to accept bribes and withdrew them at night.

Not before long, peasants began stealing these “royal crops” to grow themselves. Suddenly everyone in France was eating la pommes de terre (apples of the earth).

Now, I don’t suggest you hire a group of mediaeval guards to premiumize your SaaS offering - but the story shows how Parmentier understood a fundamental truth about the people he wanted to influence. An insight that let him change their behaviour.

What is a consumer insight?

When it comes to marketing, consumer insights are a bit different from what your product manager is working with. Their insights usually revolve around product market fit, solving customer problems and building features your audience want.

In contrast, consumer insights for marketing are about human behaviour and emotion, sometimes on a subconscious level. There is definitely overlap between the two, but keep this in mind as we continue.

There are approximately a billion definitions of what constitutes a consumer insight - this is marketing 101 stuff, yet most strategists struggle to articulate how to define one. Here are some terrible explanations I’ve come across:

• “An insight is a disturbance in discourse”
• “An insight is like a refrigerator. When you open the door, a light comes on”
• “An insight is something that is 'weird-normal' - it's an invitation to interpret. We know it's familiar in a way, but it's also unfamiliar”

I gag when I read these. They might be commonplace in the agency world, but I’ve always despised their pretentiousness and how they often muddle a quite simple concept:

A consumer insight is a fact used by businesses to gain a deeper understanding of how their audience thinks and feels. Analysing human behaviours allows companies to understand what their consumers want and need, but most importantly why they feel this way. These can be used in many ways, e.g. connecting with a consumer, driving behaviour change or positioning messaging to align with a new segment.

It’s hard to explain what “deeper” means in this context - but a good way of getting to a deep insight is to begin with an observation, then keep asking “why” until you hit the root of the insight. This is best explained with examples:

Observation: The French population won’t eat potatoes. Why?
They say potatoes look and taste unappealing. Why?

Insight: Peasants at the time grew potatoes merely as hog feed and therefore associated the crop with rotten leftovers and food waste.
Idea: Premiumize the crop by associating it with nobility.

Observation: A large portion of customers drop off at product sign-up. Why?
21% of customers were unwilling to provide their address at sign-up. Why?

Insight: The most common reason is because they couldn't understand why it's required.
Idea: Add an explainer paragraph why this information is required. 

Observation: Many CEOs of Small & Medium Sized Businesses (SMBs) are reluctant to expand to a global market. Why?
SMB’s operate with tight margins - one delayed container of inventory might make or break their bank. They won’t take the chance to ship it abroad. Why?

Insight: SMB’s who try are unfairly treated by large shipping companies - their cargo regularly get pushed back in queue in favour of enterprise businesses without any delivery guarantees.
Idea for a shipping company: Create a positioning territory around backing the underdog.

Observation: UK drivers are more interested in horsepower, top speed and interior design than car safety features. Why?
They don't think they need as many safety features as other drivers. Why?

Insight: 80% of drivers think that they drive better than the average - and wish other drivers would just learn how to drive instead.
Idea for a car brand: Create an ad not showing how the car protects you from your own lack of ability, but the ineptness of others:

The “deeper” the insight the more interesting work usually comes out of it - but it does not have to be deep. I’ve seen a lot of obvious insights inspire great positioning.

Do I really need to use consumer insights for my startup positioning or ad campaign?

Yes and no - most advertising strategists swear by them (to an almost fetishised level) but I’ve seen many great creative ideas killed because they didn’t align with a forced insight. Try to mine as many as possible but use them as a tool - if they don’t give you anything interesting to work off, then don’t use them.

However, the benefit of using an insight is to elevate your marketing from spraying-and-praying your feature list (like all startups seem to do) to really connecting with your prospect. This is usually the biggest and most effective difference between advertising work from an enterprise market leader vs. your run-of-the-mill startup competitors.

Do I really need consumer insights if I’m B2B?

In modern marketing, agencies don’t really distinguish between B2B and B2C insights anymore. There are of course insights more connected to businesses as a whole (see previous examples) but you’re still selling to a human who has needs and aspirations. A B2B consumer persona might look different to a B2C persona, but you’re still trying to get to the bottom of what the person on the other side of the Zoom call wants to achieve for their business as well as their own career.

How to find consumer insights

Let’s get into the fun part. Start by using your previous research - we talked at length in a previous article about creating a target audience segment. Use these interviews and break down what you learned into insights. Remember to also talk with customer facing stakeholders - a call with your CEO about your core customer usually provides an excellent starting point.

Write down as many insights you can find in a long list - all of them might not be relevant but filtering can be done later. Look for interesting facts and observations from your interviews and ask “why” until you get to an insight you like.

You can then flesh these out with desk research:

Social listening: Monitor social media platforms for mentions of the problem you're solving, your company or competitors. You can use social listening tools (use up all their free trial periods, then switch to another one) such as:

• Answerthepublic (3 free searches)
• Google Alerts (Free)
• Twitter Advanced Search (Free)
• Buzzsumo (30 day free trial)
• Brand24 (14 day free trial)

Forums: Lurk the comments of forums where your customers hang around to pick up their wants and interests. Try to find specific and intimate groups - a big subreddit might be too general.

• Boardreader - Find obscure forums related to your problem or customer base
• Disboard - Discover Discord servers
• LinkedIn Groups
• Reddit

Statistics & trends: We'll explore these more in the following "Culture" module, but you can also use trends and statistics tools to discover insights.

• Statista (some free, some paid statistics)
• Google Trends
• GWI (Has a free plan)

Lastly, I thought I'd mention a more expensive option ($25K-$50K/year): The biggest marketing agencies, Fortune 500 companies and consulting firms like McKinsey and Bain use a software called MRI-Simmons MEMRI. It is basically the Bloomberg terminal / holy grail of US customer insights and a bit of a well kept secret.

Its crosstab search enables you to find insights and correlations between anything, like how a US male over 30 eating more than 3 breakfast bars per week is twice as likely to enjoy gambling at a casino than the ones only eating 1. Simmons has statistically significant data about almost anything you can imagine - and is really fun to play around with if you get the opportunity.

Now, how do we compile all of this research? 

What is a customer persona?

The most useful way to use consumer insights is collecting them into an audience persona - a persona is a written down profile of a made up “ideal target consumer”, including a made up name and profile picture. It helps every stakeholder in the business visualise who you’re selling to and might be the most valuable strategic marketing asset a business can create. It can be your guide (and leverage) to almost every future marketing and product development decision.

If you’re selling to other businesses, your sales process is sometimes a bit more complicated. You usually have a “buying committee” of stakeholders who need to be marketed and sold to for you to seal the deal - e.g. a CEO, an IT Director and a VP of Marketing. Creating a persona document encompassing these profiles, their wants, needs and relationship to each other will be the cornerstone of your marketing, product and sales strategies. I can’t stress enough how useful this document is.

How to create customer personas 

To create it, use the insights gathered and add demographic information about the persona. If you’re a B2C brand, maybe income, location and age might be more relevant. If B2B, job title, job description and who they report to might suit your business case better - but it is up to you.

Here is an example of an IT Director persona document (with a buying committee) for our made up startup "ApiHub": Google Slides Link

Another way to present insights for positioning work is to just tie them together as a narrative (but I strongly recommend developing a persona document later on if so):

Consumer insights for the logistics industry: Google Slides Link

There are no rules in strategy so create a document that works for your company.

When you have enough consumer insights you can move on to your next positioning research area (the second C of marketing) - and maybe one of the most underestimated ones: Competitors. This module will teach you the most common frameworks of competitor research, why it is so important yet often overlooked and where the whitespace in your market lies.

Next module: How to Beat Your Competition With Positioning -> // Coming soon //

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Related Module: How to Develop a $300,000 Target Audience Segmentation Like McKinsey ->

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