Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Getting to Aha!: Why Today’s Insights Are Tomorrow’s Facts
    Getting to Aha!: Why Today’s Insights Are Tomorrow’s Facts
    Getting to Aha!: Why Today’s Insights Are Tomorrow’s Facts
    Ebook162 pages2 hours

    Getting to Aha!: Why Today’s Insights Are Tomorrow’s Facts

    By Darshan Mehta

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    The amount of information and analytics provided by today's digital and social media is overwhelming. To make sense of it all, companies must gain insights: knowledge of what consumers think and feel and what motivates them.

    In Getting to Aha!, Darshan Mehta explores the nature of insights: what they are, how to uncover them, and how to use them to drive innovation and audience engagement. He surveys the trends driving modern consumers' behaviors and discusses how technology is shaping the way buyers interact with brands and directly impact their performance. He also shares the steps brands can take to access and leverage the knowledge gained from external and internal audiences alike.

    Whether you're a CMO, a brand manager, or an entrepreneur, this book contains theoretical wisdom and practical tips that are ready to be put to use today in order to give your business the competitive edge it needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateNov 2, 2021
    ISBN9781619617735
    Getting to Aha!: Why Today’s Insights Are Tomorrow’s Facts

    Related to Getting to Aha!

    Related ebooks

    Business For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      Flipping the Value Creation Model

      May 1, 2018

      HISTORICALLY, MARKETING has been based on an ‘Industrial Age’ approach. Marketers saw what they believed to be a customer need, developed a product bearing what they considered to be ‘value’, and then tried to find buyers seeking that value. This ‘su

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Cast Iron Life

      Sep 19, 2021

      A Cast Iron Life
      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Selling Ain’t Telling

      May 5, 2020

      A former editor and founding CEO of the ad agency Droga5, Andrew Essex is currently the CEO of Plan A, a marketing services holding company, the author of The End of Advertising, and a recognized authority on branding and brand storytelling. In this

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Start Up Ecosystem

      Jun 24, 2019

      The Start Up Ecosystem
      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Your Structured Approach To Brand Management Is Killing You

      Feb 11, 2018

      For many years now, academics and agencies have been developing scientific models to measure the strength of the brands we build. This is based on the prevailing wisdom that a good brand is one that grows in equity over time. The result is a (very re

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      6 branding

      May 2, 2023

      6 branding
      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Say My Name

      May 16, 2019

      Say My Name
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Disarming Retail

      Nov 30, 2021

      The retailer’s then CEO, Tommy Millner (who previously spent 15 years leading gunmaker Remington), reportedly said his company enjoyed such a rush of gun buyers after the Sandy Hook massacre that it “didn’t blink” about continuing to sell them. Cabel

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Getting It Done

      Sep 1, 2020

      You developed the GettingItDone® management system and have been teaching it to Rotman MBA students for 19 years. What are its key principles? The system applies the thinking of three well known management gurus. The first is the late-great Peter F.

      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Getting to Aha!

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Getting to Aha! - Darshan Mehta

      ]>

      cover.jpg

      ]>

      Copyright © 2021 Darshan Mehta

      All rights reserved.

      ISBN: 978-1-61961-773-5

      ]>

      To the renegades, pioneers, and rebels who strive to make a difference.

      ]>

      Contents

      Introduction

      1. Branding and Human Nature

      2. Insights

      3. Digital vs. Biz

      4. The Era of Experiences

      5. The Era of Blending

      6. The Era of (Not) Thinking

      7. Aha! Moments

      8. The Digital Promise

      Conclusion

      Acknowledgments

      About the Author

      ]>

      Introduction

      The best vision is insight.

      Malcolm Forbes

      In today’s world, whether you’re a fledgling startup or an established brand, you’re operating in a world of hypercompetition. Whatever products or services you sell, you’re up against not only the company down the street but also the one across the state, the one across the country, and the one halfway around the world. Technology gives you new opportunities to deliver products and services at scale, globalizing customer access and minimizing barriers to entry for passionate, disruptive entrepreneurs. Today, brands must carve out positions they can own and defend. They must differentiate themselves from their peers to establish strong emotional connections with their customer base. This is a daunting proposition for young startups. But successful brands know and speak to their audiences. Companies that understand their customers’ needs, fears, desires, and problems—and what they are willing to pay to fix them—will survive. But those that chase insights—and put them to use—will thrive.

      This book is about acquiring these insights. It’s a guide to the tools entrepreneurs, marketers, and everyday individuals can use to uncover them. But more importantly, it’s about uncovering and interpreting the cultural trends that make these insights all the more powerful.

      Arriving at insights is both a science and an art. And ultimately, it relies on the one elusive constant technology that remains hard-pressed to replicate or replace: humanity.

      Chasing Insights: The Tools at Your Disposal

      I’ve been working as a brand strategist and marketing researcher for more than 15 years. I help clients figure out what ultimately drives consumers to buy their product or service—the why behind customers’ decision-making processes.

      As we’ll discuss in detail in chapter two, I’ve come to realize that insights are multidimensional. They incorporate not only quantitative data but also a deep understanding of consumers’ needs and desires. They speak to the societal trends influencing consumers’ purchasing habits and brand sentiments.

      Fortunately, technology has made it easier than ever to square insights’ quantitative and qualitative components. With just a few clicks, these new tools can track responses to advertising, map website behavior, conduct digital surveys, compile audience trends, and much more.

      But while quantitative data is inarguably useful in business, it can’t offer a true picture of consumer behavior. It delivers the what but rarely the why.

      To get a firm grip on your customers’ purchase decision-making behavior, you must pair quantitative data with its qualitative counterpart. These non-numerical assessments can take you to the emotional heart of consumers’ decision making—to the why. And the ideal vehicle of qualitative data? Genuine, human-to-human conversation.

      The Lost Art of Conversation

      Mastering the art of customer conversation begins with this realization: you’re going to hear from your patrons whether you want to or not. If you’re a bar, restaurant, or café, they’ll review you on Yelp. If you’re a hotel or resort, they’ll talk about you on TripAdvisor. Whether you’re a clothing retailer, a consumer products manufacturer, a technology platform, or even a health-care facility, your fans and detractors will plaster their thoughts about you across any number of channels, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and an ever-growing number of specialized sites and blogs.

      Your customers will do all of this without warning and without your permission. Whether you invite it or not, you are going to hear from your customers.

      The only way to deal with this is head-on. Engage your customers where they are. Understand their grievances so that you may limit future ones. Ask what drives them nuts about your product and brand. Listen when they tell you, I really hate it when X breaks down, and I have to keep fixing it, or I can’t believe I have to hold this button down with my right hand in order to turn on this machine with my left. Your customers may not know how you can solve their problems, but they’ll happily tell you what those problems are.

      Engaging with negative feedback can be easier said than done. But there are two rules to remember. The first is that negativity happens. Not everyone is going to love your product or service; no matter what you do, you won’t make everyone happy. The second is that negativity itself matters less than your response to it—and you must respond to it. Leaving unfavorable comments unaddressed allows them to become facts, while sharing thoughtful, genuine responses can mitigate the impact of negative ones. Your customers understand that s*@! happens, and they’ll appreciate your responsiveness and willingness to own up to a mistake.

      Positive or negative, addressed or not, customer feedback is out there. Businesses that enter into exchanges with their fans and detractors alike are those that pull critical insights into reach. They are the companies that constantly challenge themselves to deliver the experience their customers want, refining their products and services and differentiating themselves from their competitors.

      At the end of the day, your brand can only be validated by its customers—not by you. You control the product or service you offer, your mission and values, and your customer communications. But only your customers can appreciate your product, mission, values, and communication. It’s a synergistic relationship. And the way to build a maximally productive one is to get to know your audience through conversations.

      What Are Insights Anyway?

      When I talk to people about insights, I often realize that they don’t truly understand what insights are. Many understand insights as simple observations or facts. But insights are multidimensional. They’re combinations of observations and facts, influenced by overarching sociocultural and technological trends that make us say aha! Recognizing insights requires us to venture beyond our comfort zones—to consider ideas and situations from fresh perspectives, believe insights are out there waiting to be uncovered, and trust that today’s insights are tomorrow’s facts.

      Consider the example of fonts. We exercise our creativity in the fonts we use to write everything from essays to blog posts to marketing copy to books like this one. We take these choices for granted. But when the first generation of personal computers came to market, IBM and leading software developers used only a handful of fonts. Developers and marketers paid scant attention to the fact that consumers may want something more stylized. Around this time, Steve Jobs was taking calligraphy classes at Reed College. Jobs saw the functionality of personal computers (a fact) and our impending dependency on them (a trend), and he combined these with his observations about humans’ emotional attachment to art and design.

      Once upon a time, the idea that our experiences and product choice could be influenced by font design was an insight. Now, it’s a fact, and it’s driving innovation at tech companies ranging in size from startups to Apple.

      Exercising Empathy

      When you’re chasing insights, it’s important to remember that arriving at them requires a deep understanding of human behavior. You need to be curious and inquisitive. You need to ask questions and listen carefully to answers. And you need to have empathy. How do those qualities lead to insights? Here’s an example. I’ve been teaching executives how to deliver business presentations for many years. I’ve done this in North America, Europe, and Asia. In one popular exercise, I ask participants to persuade a group of Midwestern Americans who have never traveled outside the United States to visit a non-English-speaking country for their next vacation. Whether they are American or not, participants often start by making assumptions about the fictitious Midwesterners. Well, we’ve got to sell Billy Bob on Thai food, they say, or What’s the closest thing to a dude ranch in Paris? Participants start with what they assume they know about their audience members rather than what they know about themselves. But the dynamics of the exercise change when I ask participants to shift their emphasis from the fact that their audience is composed of people from the Midwest to the fact that those people have never traveled outside of the United States. I ask the participants to think about their own first trip to a foreign country. What concerns or questions would you have going to a foreign country for the first time? I ask, and the participants start to think more empathetically: How long is the flight? What currency do they use? What language is spoken? What type of food can I expect to eat? Then I ask the participants to rethink their presentation strategy.

      What I’m asking the participants to do is

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1