What Is An Insight?
(And How Do You Know When You’ve Got One?)
The word “insight” is ubiquitous in the innovation business these days, but the meaning of the word has become vague. Time was when an insight was any deep, intuitive, accurate understanding. As I watched my kids mature I occasionally had insights about their behavior that led me to be a better parent (I hope). Reading a few novels by the same author reveals insight into the author’s personal values. And surely the earliest humans gained all sorts of insights that enabled their survival and still shape our DNA today. Insights like these are helpful, but they have little to do with innovation and “unmet consumer needs” … or do they?
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Ok, yes, even I piled on. It was simply too easy. It set me up. And I fell for it, hook, line, and sinker. So what’s the big flap over the Gap’s new logo? Consumers don’t care about logos, anyway, do they? They don’t really mean anything, after all. Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, Gotham. Doesn’t matter. You get what I’m saying. All they wanted was a little press. And boy, did they get it.

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On Friday morning, July 10th, at The Common Market (thanks Chuck!) on S. Tryon St., some of us from BOLTgroup hosted the first ever Brand 3.0 | Coffee 234 in Charlotte. It was a beautiful morning on the patio, with wonderful tasting free trade coffee.

Brand 3.0 is an online community with a group in LinkedIn. The owner is Cristian Saracco in Madrid, Spain. Earlier this year, Cristian decided to try taking the online community offline, to network face-to-face and discuss the same topic in multiple cities across the globe—at the same time. We missed the first one in April, but jumped on board for this, the second meeting. There will be 8-10 cities worldwide participating.

The topic was “After the recession, branding and marketing will change forever.”

Here are the results of our discussion:

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