No one thinks about milk until they don’t have any.
When you’re hungry, you can’t be yourself and you risk not fitting in.
Other people can smell foul odors in your home that you can’t distinguish anymore, and they’ll judge you.
Very few women think of themselves as beautiful, and many say advertising makes them feel worse.
These are some of my favorite, non-famous insights. Ah-has that have powered years of sloganing, marketing, and effective differentiation for The California Milk Board (Got Milk); Snickers (You’re not you when you’re hungry); Febreze (Noseblind); and Dove (Real Beauty).
Getting to insights costs what most marketers refer to as non-working dollars, yet they’re some of the hardest working assets a brand will ever invest in.
Insights emerge from focus groups, surveys, observational data, quant and qual research… and culminate in the concise articulation of an undeniable truth — an idea that when played back makes people think, “I recognize that. I’ve seen that in myself. I know exactly what you’re talking about.”
Insights are the bedrock of brands. They help companies differentiate and are often the reason why consumers will pay more for one product over a generic that performs just as well — hence, driving up the brand value. Insights are sometimes so well-said, they don’t need any copywriting, craft, or clever conceit to imprint them on audiences through marketing and advertising at all. But insights generally languish in creative briefs that are used to inform those ads and campaigns, and often live somewhere between slides 4 and 64 of a Powerpoint deck that will never see the light of day, save for someone’s portfolio, case study, or an agency capabilities meeting. See, the people talking about insights are usually the agency planners, the brand managers, and occasionally the CMOs.
The best insights feel irrefutable. They’re often invisible. And I believe are intangible.
If you haven’t been on the business end of a business conversation lately, very briefly, intangible assets are a category of things a company lists as critical to its operation — things that have no physical substance. That can mean brands, patents, IP, copyrights, processes and human capital. These intangible assets exist in contrast to the tangible ones, like property and land, vehicles, inventory, or equipment. When a company’s value is calculated (monitored, adjusted, defended and protected), few intangible assets ever show up on the balance sheet but instead get lumped into a sort of magical thinking part of the bar chart.
For S&P 500 companies in 2018, tangibles comprised just 16% of company value, while intangibles were 84%. I defer to Reuters to illuminate this, “take Facebook as an example, while the company only has US$109 billion of assets on its balance sheet, the company’s market capitalization is roughly five times that.”
Increasingly, companies are spending an equitable amount of money protecting these assets like the mark, logo, jingle, and IP, because they understand or have experienced how much damage a threat to those things can do.
You can start to assign cost to things like logos. I’m not sure how much of this is folklore but I remember reading that the person who designed Nike’s swoosh was paid $25 back in the day. It’s estimated that emblem is now worth upwards of 26 billion dollars. So even if we adjust that 25 bucks for inflation, that’s still one heck of an ROI. So while brand equity itself is a knotty challenge to quantify, Nike has a very clear understanding of how much they spend batting down threats to their intangible assets. (Worth noting that for most companies these days much of the threat comes in the form of digital — cyber and IP liability.)
Now, I know this can get fluffy real fast, when things like goodwill and trustworthiness get bundled into the mix. I’d welcome a discussion about the merits of those things because plenty of data support the notion that doing good is good for the bottom line, as is trust. But my case today is for insights.
Market research is thought of as an intangible asset and given the fact that most brilliant insights are the culmination of market research — dare I say, research applied — I posit that insights should be talked about, understood, sought, and protected by brand managers, VPs of Marketing, CFOs and CEOs alike.
If intangible value represents 80% of the value of the S&P 500, how much then do insights contribute to that? Well, I did not go to business school so I’m going to albeit frustratingly leave that as an open end. But in an increasingly complex business environment, where a company’s value correlates to what it invests in and talks about, I think it’s time to take insights seriously — as a business cost vs. purely a creative pursuit.
