Insights are gems
“Insight” is one of those overhyped marketing words that have almost lost their meaning. But in reality, insights are gems: crystallized, precious bits of knowledge that are delightful to dig out and, with the right polishing, bring immense value.
A true insight can become the kernel of your next creative campaign or open your eyes to a new business opportunity. The catch? To find one, you have to shovel a lot of dross first.
Mining the insights: Where to look
Here is a non-exhaustive list of where to look for signals:
- Industry research,
- Your own market research,
- App store reviews,
- Transcripts of sales calls,
- Comments on social media,
- Customer support tickets,
- Reddit,
- Internal email and chat threads,
- Your colleagues’ brains,
- Your competitors’ marketing materials,
- People watching,
- Striking a conversation with a client at an event,
- Talking to your mum,
- Talking to your friends,
- Knowing your product very, very well,
- Knowing your competitors’ products very well,
- News,
- Culture,
- Trends,
- Influencers,
- Books,
- Podcasts.
As a PMM for Search Ads, I have trained my LinkedIn feed to show me relevant posts: I follow Google Ads experts, like case studies and tips, and investigate complaints. I also lurk on PPC chats.
Internally, I have collated all the product comms docs, subscribed to sales troubleshoot email chains, and regularly attend product and trading meetings. I also use Google and competitor products to advertise side projects to get that hands-on experience.
It’s a lot of ground to cover, but luckily, AI is helping modern marketing detectorists.
AI as an aide
Modern LLMs can process massive amounts of data. For example, Gemini 3.1 features a 1-million-token context window, allowing it to process 1,500 pages of text or over 8 hours of audio in a single prompt. Desk research that once took a week can now be completed in 20 minutes in a parallel tab.
Almost all AI chatbots nowadays have a “deep research” function. Notebook LM is great for storing reports to query them later. Search engine alerts, newsletters, and AI agents can notify you when new information appears.
Use AI to identify and summarize external knowledge, but remember that your competitors have access to the same tools.
In an existing organization, your edge is the unique, proprietary knowledge already living within your walls. Aspire to create a company-wide knowledge management system that can be queried and used to supercharge LLMs through RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation).
Watch out: While LLMs are incredible at summarizing texts, I encourage you to read as many verbatim first-hand accounts as possible. They carry raw emotion and the specific language you should reuse. For example, the Wix team embraced haters’ comments under their YouTube ads to create an iconic campaign.
If you outsource the reading, you often skim over the nuance.
Avoiding false signals
Not everything that glimmers is gold. Use this checklist to distinguish a true signal from noise:
- A banality is not an insight. If it’s common knowledge, your competition is already all over it. “Apple is perceived as a high-value brand”. OK, duh.
- A stat is not an insight. If a data point doesn’t trigger a “hmm, interesting” reaction, keep digging with your “why?” shovel. “12% of iPhone users switch to Android but return to Apple”. But why? “They are hooked by social apps like iMessage”. Hmm, interesting. Why? “There is a green bubble stigma”. Hmmm… Now you’re getting closer to a human truth.
- An anecdote is not an insight. Isolated feedback is worth exploring, but beware of “vocal minorities” who aren’t your target audience. Some users move to Android to use a specific app or customise their widgets/launchers. Interesting, but it won’t carry a mass campaign.
Red team approach: Assign a colleague (or an LLM) to critique your insight. If you find a signal in one source, triangulate it against internal data and qualitative interviews before committing.
At the core of an insight should be tension. The consumer wants to do X but is doing Y. The competitor is saying A but actually is B. Your brand is perceived that way, but is actually this.
From insight to strategy
The annual planning season. Most organizations do annual strategy reviews. Keep an eye out for year-end reports from industry titans like Mary Meeker, Ben Evans, and Scott Galloway to spot the macro trends. Repeated in-house studies, such as Brand Health Trackers, allow you to find competitive angles and observe year-on-year trends specific to your industry.
Hot take: You don’t need Insights with a capital “I” to create your marketing strategy. Insights are a product of deep knowledge of your customer, industry, and product, not a substitute for it.
When writing a strategy, an “insights pack” is a distilled version of that knowledge. Pick what actually matters for your team in the upcoming year: what audience segment is ripe, low-hanging fruit? What leverage do you have vs. your competition? How are you going to position your product? This is strategy.
New marketing campaigns: Every brief should start with clear objectives and a good insight. Arguably, clear objectives are even more important. Great product plus deep, provoking insight plus clear goal equals great marketing campaigns in the hands of a savvy marketer and a talented creative agency.
Let’s continue with the Android vs. iPhone example. [Disclaimer: I have never worked on Android or Pixel teams at Google; this is my personal interpretation as a somewhat partial observer and admirer of their work]. You can realize that the stigma around green bubbles is a moat.
Product understanding reveals an interoperability issue: Apple relies on outdated SMS/MMS for Android-to-iOS communication, which causes low-quality media and lacks encryption.
That conflicts with their high-value brand image. You found tension. “Create a public pressure campaign for Apple to adopt Rich Communication Services (RCS)” could be your campaign goal.
You can now see how product and competitor insights allowed the Android team and their creative agency to create the #getthemessage campaign.
Daily observations: Keeping your ears open to the zeitgeist is the job. When Drake released “Texts Go Green” while the Android campaign was active, the social team responded instantly.
10% Insights, 90% Follow-through
Even the most precious gem won’t matter if you can’t follow through. The #getthemessage campaign has been running for four years with Apple gradually adopting RCS.
The Pixel team has made gains in the US and around the world by consistently making good-humored fun at iPhone’s expense and appealing to those ready to make the switch, but most also invested in retail, launch moments, awareness building, pricing strategy, and so on.
Focus and ability to stay the course are what turn insights into strategy and strategy into business success.
