HOW INTEGRATED INSIGHTS WAS BORN

Helping companies sell their story to grow sales

Think about the last project you worked on that failed.  I'm sorry, I mean the last project that fell short of expectations.  The educational moments.  The times when you felt surrounded by people that love to celebrate mediocrity.

I've had dozens of failures...both personally and professionally.  I've always seemed to have ambition that was greater than reality, leading to a life that felt rather unremarkable.  My personal modification of the contemporary saying is:

My failures have come from how I define success.  I see the miles left to run, not those that are already behind me.  I don't celebrate getting something 95% right.  I fixate on the 5% that was wrong.  I've always focused on what wasn't accomplished versus what was.  And that has actually served me well.

But I also love to learn.  And it turns out I'm pretty good at learning how NOT TO DO THINGS RIGHT.  Fortunate for me, there appears to be a point when one can exhaust most of the ways to do things wrong and start figuring out how to do them right.  

And I love to improve.  I look at work that took 10 hours and ask "how can this be done in 1 hour?"  I look at repetitive tasks and try to find ways to automate the process, which should also reduce variation and the risk of introducing error.

In my experience, it is through understanding all the possible points of failure that one learns how to succeed.  It has been setting a high bar for what is considered success that has gotten me where I am today.

INTEGRATION, NOT ISOLATION

This is the value I seek to deliver clients through Integrated Insights.

Companies make a crazy number of decisions...some seemingly small and others really big...that sum up to their ultimate success.   Make a big mistake and failure is inevitable, but make too many little mistakes and that failure can become just as likely.

Each of those decisions is based on some set of underlying 'data points'.  Maybe those 'data points' exist in spreadsheets, syndicated reports or historic POS sales.  Maybe they are based more on experience or intuition.  Maybe it is watching trends and doing a little extrapolation or convergent validity to predict a future opportunity.  Or maybe they are built on outdated assumptions, untested hypotheses or incomplete perspective.  Could personal bias or emotional investment be a big influencer?

My goal is to help companies do better data-based decision-making.  It is to help them collect the dots in order to connect the dots.  And it involves three fairly simple components:

We rarely find answers to questions that aren't being asked.  We help clients understand what they really need to learn.  If the objective relates to pricing strategy, what questions really need to be asked:

• What should my retail price be?

• What does a price elasticity curve look like?

• What factors motivate people to pay a premium price in my category?

• What products are shoppers most likely to substitute with my product?

• How does the shopper profile change at different price points?

• How does claimed repeat or loyalty change with price?

• What are competitive products doing to command a higher price?

By answer, I also mean understand.  How vendors utilize POS datasets like Walmart's Retail Link demonstrate how different approaches analysis, interpretation and presentation of the same data can result in completely different conclusions.  It is amazing how the worst performing product on a modular will still find some way to paint a pretty picture.  And how great products fail due to poor planning.

In the primary research we do (like internet surveys or ethnographic in-person interviews), we seek to find truth through a careful combination of how a question is asked, who answers it and how we listen to and analyze the results.  

Our solutions are built on years of learning to identify valuable answers.  

While any analyst can compile data and create reports, it takes experience and perspective to uncover and recognize useful insight.  It takes talent to translate data into a compelling story  

Better answers help identify better actions that lead to better results.

Results are all that ultimately matter.  Thought and theory and strategy are worthless without execution.  All this work is just another expense, not an investment with ROI.  Data needs to translate into information which needs to translate into insight which needs to translate into action plans.

This is where we shine.  Where most firms deliver a report and leave it up to the client to make sense of the results, we're able to help begin the application.  We'll help write the omni-channel or content marketing strategy, the creative brief or the package design principles.  We'll make specific recommendations based on the broader perspective we've got.  

We want all our clients to benefit from the many mistakes we've observed or made ourselves.

Sound appealing?  Are you ready to see better decisions lead to better results?  Contact us to begin the conversation.  We'd love to hear more about your situation and what you're trying to accomplish.

Not convinced yet?  Take a look at our menu of services, read a little more of my backstory or dive into the almost 200 short articles I've posted to give you a glimpse into my mind palace.