It used to be that brands only had to think about the consumer. With the continued evolution of shopper marketing and the need to more closely link marketing outreach to purchase behavior, marketers now want to know all about the shopper.

As a result, the newest bright-and-shiny object has become insights. Everyone wants them — consumer insights, shopper insights, retailer insights. However, considerable misunderstanding lingers in marketer circles about what constitutes an insight and, equally important, how to apply them to ensure some sort of business solution: fending off a competitive challenge, meeting changing shopper tastes or some other need.

Don’t worry, this is not some sort of exercise in semantics, but it’s important to clarify what insights are and what they are not. Among the many manufacturers and retailers with whom we meet, we see a common fixation on data points and percentages masquerading as what many label as insights. Here are a couple of examples culled from recent meetings we’ve had, which were erroneously termed as insights:

• “Millennials are currently 35 percent of the work force and are expected to grow to just under half (47 percent) by 2014.”

• “Now more than ever, consumers expect instant access to information.”

Let’s set the record straight: An insight statement does not include a percentage symbol. Period. Observations such as those above do not qualify as insights because they do not adequately capture consumer behavior, attitudes or beliefs.

To be truly useful, an insight must be addressable within the benefits of the brand or the retailer. Insights are what must be leveraged to create the right benefits and deliver the right message that will result in a change in purchase and usage behavior.

A Better Toolbox

So, why is it so hard to identify insights? Maybe our toolbox just isn’t quite up to snuff. As we all know, numerous sources for insights are available. Primary research tools encompass attitude and usage studies, brand health trackers, focus groups and ethnographies. Secondary research capabilities include such common providers as Mintel, Simmons and MVI.

All of this information is available to anyone who wants it, and it’s a great place to start. Unfortunately, for many marketers, it’s where the path for uncovering insights both begins and ends. Think about it — how interesting, unique or strategic can the insights be if everyone is tapping into the same sources?

You didn’t necessarily read it here first, and it may seem overtly intuitive, but we still believe that one of the most effective tools for uncovering insights is good, old-fashioned observation and discussion. Want to know more about how consumers are shopping the cereal category? The next time you’re in the store, hang around the aisle for a while and if you’re bold enough, ask someone why they bought the brand they did. Does it come down to loyalty? Price? Convenience? Or are there other factors at play?

What kind of inroads are Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts making on the ritual of home coffee making? Strike up a conversation with the throngs that gather at these and other retailers each morning. Actively observing consumers in action, listening to what they’re saying and noting what they’re omitting offers a lot more depth and meaning than a data point pulled from some 100-page deck.

Keep in mind that responsibility for identifying and delivering ownable and actionable insights should not reside with the strategic planner or an insights-titled professional alone. A good insight, like a good idea, can spring from anywhere. Finding the right insight should be a collaborative effort of the insights, account and creative teams.

The insights expert is the voice of the consumer and can speak at length about their behaviors and attitudes. The account person has intimate knowledge of the category and client objectives. Creative has a deep understanding of the brand’s personality and how it might manifest itself in the marketplace. Pooling that knowledge can make the difference between a compelling insight and a merely generic one.

Proprietary Panels

More manufacturers and retailers are choosing to get the insights they need through proprietary shopper panels, which allow them to probe further and dig deeper into understanding shopper behavior. The panels give them the opportunity to tap into loyal users and shoppers of their brands for quick and constant feedback on a range of topics.

Where some of these panels fall short, however, is that they skew too heavily to loyal users. So, it raises the question: when your brand is losing share or your shoppers are migrating to another class of trade, how is talking to the people who already love you going to help you solve these problems?

To help address this knowledge gap, we created an online community of 3,500 members that have been screened as shoppers across a broad array of retailers and categories. Like any other proprietary research panel, it provides a broad view of consumer behavior and attitudes. However, when we’re trying to understand why shoppers have stopped buying vitamins in Walmart, or choose to bypass the aisle entirely when shopping at Target, we also can glean insights about these developments.

Having information available at a deeper level helps lead to better solutions for clients, which helps smooth the process for selling plans in to their retail partners. Following are two examples of how we have used our shopper panel recently.

24-Carrot Insight. Over the course of a year, a vegetable manufacturer experienced business declines, most notably at Walmart and in club stores. A number of theories were floated as to possible causes — changing shopping patterns, changing cooking behaviors, the current economic climate. A week-long bulletin-board study was conducted with category buyers in the two channels to test these theories.

We learned that a challenging economic climate had a significant effect on shopping behavior for this category. Shoppers no longer thought pantry loading at a club store was a viable way to save money. In addition, there was a perception that Walmart was raising its prices, so shoppers were waiting for better deals at grocery stores (combined with coupons) to save money.

However, the unexpected learning was that the trend toward “fresh” and “local” was also taking shoppers out of the category. Offering steep price discounts would only further reinforce shoppers to only buy on deal. The key insight was that promoting taste and nutritional value, and offering recipes in addition to valuable offers, would lure shoppers back to the category.

Cellular Dissonance. We recently presented shopper marketing plans and store re-designs to a cellular provider. Current subscribers were extremely pleased and retention was strong. But the carrier wanted to convert great numbers of new subscribers and clearly understood the pain points for consumers when making a decision on their cellular provider. Using the shopper panel, we adopted a two-phased approach involving quantitative work to understand the path-to-purchase, and then asking a select group of community members to participate in a mystery shopping exercise.

This exercise revealed the differences between how they said they made their decisions and what they experienced while they were shopping. It became abundantly clear that the area of greatest opportunity for conversion was the moment-of-truth — once shoppers entered the store. These insights became the foundation of our shopper marketing and store design recommendations.

It’s the dynamic intersection between the shopper insight, the retailer insight and the brand insight that uncovers the opportunities that can be leveraged to create a planning springboard. The most strategic and effective marketing plans have at their very core a firm footing in insights, which fuel the right planning, strategies and tactics that are bound to improve any organization.