The most successful brands don’t shoot strategy ‘straight from the hip’ – they build their customer focus on strong insight. 

By understanding the role their brand plays in their customers’ lives, and why it’s important to them in the first place, they develop a strategy that can thrive in an ever-evolving marketplace. 

Here’s our top three reasons why insight is invaluable for creating a robust brand strategy. 

Don’t create a brand in a vacuum

It’s vital to understand the context in which the brand operates. Competitor benchmarking is a crucial first step to understanding this, but can you really create an exciting new brand from your desk, just looking at competitor website alone? Context matters – you need to get out of the office. 

Richer inspiration comes from getting out into the real world, experiencing the products and customer service of your competitors; both through your own eyes and those of your intended audience. Be open, be honest and be humble. 

There are plenty of great (and not so great) examples to be inspired by and that also means looking out-of-category. Just because you’re creating a hospitality brand doesn’t mean you can’t take key learnings from a retail store, a bank or an airline. 

People build the worlds they live in by moving from sector to sector on a daily basis, interacting with a multitude of brands simultaneously. If you understand why they’ve chosen that world then you can shape yours more effectively.

Know the target audience

More often than not, those designing a brand strategy are not the target audience. Despite having a wealth of sector experience built up over the years, customers’ wants and needs are not standing still. 

Relying on industry knowledge and what customers have been happy with until now won’t cut it. You may develop something that might be okay but it won’t engage them enough to make your brand a part of their lives. Taking this approach also means getting locked into past models of thinking that leave no scope to evolve the ways that you serve your customers. 

A strong insight base means we can understand what’s going on in our target audience’s lives, what matters to them and how this is changing, which brand speaks to them and, crucially, why – what’s more, mixing insight methodologies, such as qualitative, quantitative and social intelligence, will get always get you further. 

This gives us the key to unlocking an emotional connection with our audience and creating a brand that will fit into their lives in a meaningful way. The role that insight plays is absolutely critical to understanding what levers are needed to create those necessary connections.

Plan for the future

It goes without saying that a great strategy will help the brand stand the test of time. There is only so much that people can tell us directly. Insight tools such as semiotics allow us to analyse trends and deeper cultural shifts. This means we can understand what’s in decline, what’s ubiquitous in culture and, most importantly, what is emerging that we need to tap into in order to future-proof our strategy. 

Take the world of luxury where the codes of excess and display oriented wealth have been dominant for years, whereas a forward-facing brand would want to leverage newer luxury codes of muted extravagance and hyper bespoke experiences. 

Insight gets you there faster (not horses) 

When you invest in insight, stakeholders are aligned, what you create connects with your audience, and your brand can grow more organically. Insight doesn’t limit imagination – when you really know the drivers and behaviours of your audience, you have permission to innovate. 

Henry Ford may have warned against using insight when he said, “if I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”, but this somewhat misses the point. You don’t simply ask people what they want and need; you understand and interpret what they tell you in order to build a foundation for the creation of both exciting and meaningful products and brands.