Once an insight is validated in its capacity to deliver a part of reality, it remains to evaluate the dimensioning of the territory of opportunity that it designates. The sizing of this territory is fundamental in order to guide various company decisions. This sizing involves quantification, and therefore presentation to a significant volume of customers and consumers so that they can position themselves. In this case, it is a question of evaluating the insight (and not the response that we will provide – i.e. the concept). Quantifying insights can be useful to clarify decisions very early in the innovation process or even better guide the downstream targeting of certain communication operations. Particularly when the planned launches are particularly strategic, quantifying insight constitutes one of the project management tools.
After having validated (for example during qualitative interviews) that these insights are clear, the quantitative evaluation will make it possible to prioritize these insights and profile their core target. We carry out this evaluation online, on a sample that we recommend as “open” as possible, without too preconceived an idea of the core target. Our recommendation is therefore only to avoid interviewing audiences for whom we are certain in advance that the insight would not concern them. This openness therefore makes it possible to reveal the real core target of the insight, a posteriori, from the results, therefore avoiding diagnostic errors which would result from bad hypotheses or upstream prejudices.
The KPIs used to evaluate an insight may depend on the strategy of the brand or company, based on its own criteria. A first obvious metric concerns the volume of consumers recognizing themselves in the insight submitted to them. This first KPI establishes the extent of the territory but also makes it possible to segment and type the population most concerned. It is already, in itself, carrying a huge amount of knowledge, sometimes validating certain hypotheses, or even disconfirming them – when the insight corresponds to a target other than that initially anticipated.
A second useful metric concerns the level of effort that the consumer could make to obtain a response to their insight. In other words, what is he prepared to do to satisfy his expectations? The level of effort can be measured in different ways, and depends largely on the subject in question: it can be the amount of additional money one is willing to spend or one's ability to change one's consumption habits to favor a product that would respond to the insight (but, again, we are not testing the product here yet). At this stage, we can verify that for certain insights, consumers recognize themselves in this expectation but are not ready to make a significant effort to obtain an answer. In other cases, on the contrary, consumers are ready to make a significant effort to obtain satisfaction. This second “effort made” metric therefore makes it possible to offer a fairly operational map of the territory of opportunity.
Particularly in very early phases of innovation, such mapping makes it possible to better define priorities among different candidate insights and to anticipate the nature of the opportunities that can be expected. Such an interpretation key can be useful for sizing the industrial project (and providing useful insights for the business plan).
In the very downstream phase, with a view to communication, quantifying an insight makes it possible to better understand the audience to whom it “speaks” best or, in another logic, for a given target, to “angle” the speech as best as possible.
Other possible metrics
We can of course integrate other metrics to refine the diagnosis: the frequency of occurrence of the insight, the innovation effect that a solution would have that would resolve the insight, etc. The complementary metrics are, once again, directly linked to the company's strategy and the categories in which it operates.