As we have already written, a correctly expressed consumer insight has several elements: a desire, a motivation and an element of tension. In current practice, the motivational element is often omitted. However, it is central because it is he who will be the center of gravity of the offer that we will propose in response to the insight.
If insight ("I would like (...) because (...) but (...)") constitutes a form of addressing a tension written in consumer language, the marketing offer constitutes the response. Of the three elements that make up insight, motivation (the second term of insight) expresses the “why” of the insight.
Even if marketing teams devote sustained energy to understanding the motivations of their customers and consumers, it is often surprising not to find any motivational element in the insights written, which are then often expressed in the form: wish/tension, that is to say “I would like that () but”.
I often take this example in my training on writing insights and concepts, let's take an insight that does not include this motivational part: “I would like to eat organic fruits and vegetables, but I find that it is quite expensive”. There are many possible responses to such an insight because there are actually several possible motivations behind such a sentence (for illustration purposes, let's just take two):
These variations express motivations of a quite different order, with for the first example a fairly functional degree (health) and a more aspirational degree (societal consciousness). The use in terms of communication elements must take into account that one or the other of these motivations is potentially the majority in the expectations of targeted consumers (or even the two dimensions are tied, the studies are there to arbitrate on this point).
The construction of the value proposition must take into account this or these “why”, the motivational element constituting the in-depth element of consumer expectations.
If, for example, a hard discount organic section can satisfy a purely health positioning (which would be indifferent to the working conditions of farmers), an Amap could better adapt to the second (societal awareness). In both cases, the solution (hard discount, amap) can resolve the tension on prices (economic model of hard discounters on the one hand, elimination of intermediaries for amaps), but by dealing with quite different motivations.
This example is deliberately caricatured because certain consumers may of course be motivated as much by the health aspect as the environmental aspect.
We therefore see that taking motivation into account leads to a finer insight, which potentially further segments the target targeted by the value proposition. This value proposition can therefore, depending on the motivation, be quite different (see our article on broad or targeted positioning).