I remember when I first started working as a strategist, whenever responding to a brief I had the tendency to just go straight to the idea and skip the insight, or come up with the idea first and retroactively fit the insight later. I somehow justified it by blaming tight turnaround times, or creativity, or process, or whatever, but the truth is, insights can just be really intimidating to write.

This infuriated my boss to no end, but I was all like "we don’t have time for this, just let me work how I work, my idea is brilliant!" Or worse, I'd write what I thought was the greatest insight in the world and take it in to get checked, and Maree Hall would just read what really was an observation, and say "but why?" Because even if the idea was brilliant, it still needed an insight, because an insight is the most important thing you can have in a proposal or a response to a client.

Why? Because an insight does three things:

It puts you in the shoes of your target audience and provides a lens for you and the business to work through. If your insight is strong, your team shouldn’t need to read the brief, they should be able to independently work off of that insight and arrive at the same conclusion. It identifies a problem or need, and leads to multiple solutions that work together, allowing you to scale and change the ideas without needing to redo the whole project. It shows the client the angle you’re tackling their problem from, and that you’ve given it thought.

Now that my career has progressed, my biggest pet peeve is when someone brings me a response with a statistic or observation being passed off as an insight, or worse, no insight (and thus no strategic thought) whatsoever.

So what is an insight? It’s easier to answer what an insight isn’t.

An insight is not a statistic or a piece of research, if it was, we wouldn’t need strategists and the sales team would be pulling together responses based on pure data. Data and research are great, but they're information that not everyone may understand or be able to relate to, it is vital to an insight, but the purpose of an insight is to turn that information into intelligence.

An insight is also not an observation, an observation is obvious, an insight needs to apply the available information and intelligence to an observation and explain why.

"67% of people enjoy chocolate" or "78% of people feel guilty for eating junk food" are statistics. "People eat chocolate in the evening" is an observation. Neither are an insight.

"After a long day at work, I like to do something for me and enjoy some chocolate, but I feel guilty if I eat too much" is (albeit a loose one, for sake of easy example) a workable insight. If this was a real brief I'd use more of the data available to keep asking "why?" (damn it, thanks Maree!) until I drilled down to the root insight, but for the sake of this example it works.

It clearly identifies the audience and positions the rest of the response and idea through their lens, and it helps whomever you are responding to to put themselves in those shoes too. It also provides tension and a problem for us to respond to, a clear direction. With this example we automatically know 3 things; 1. Our audience is busy. 2. They love chocolate. 3. They feel guilty for eating it.

If our objective is to sell them more chocolate, then we know that guilt is a problem we need to somehow alleviate in order for them to eat and thus buy more. Internally we can then go off and come up with ideas in line with that insight that will all fit together. Perhaps we create a lower calorie chocolate. Or we create some content that shows them how to easily exercise at their desk so that they can then feel less guilty eating it later. Or we can challenge their work to provide the staff with some sort of weekly exercise and organize a charity marathon for them to run. Maybe we change their perception of chocolate being bad by discussing the benefits of cocoa and take away their guilt that way. All vastly different ideas, but all of which would easily work in line with the same insight and thus same response.

So that's why you need to develop an insight. It'll help everyone; your team, and whoever you're responding to, to all be on the same page, and at the end of the day, it'll make your response stronger, scalable, easier to understand, and help you win the business. And all it takes is a little extra effort and time at the very start of the workflow, but makes a world of difference throughout the whole process.