Blog Post 2

What do you think the difference is between a fact and an insight? Provide examples that support your point-of-view.

 

From my perspective facts and insights have many similarities. First, the objective of each is to help understand or explain a truth.

 

This truth can be a scientific truth, such as a math equation. Or it could be a product truth, such as the claim a product makes around it’s percentage of calcium it provides.

 

One key difference between a fact and an insight, is that facts provide a rigid indisputable answer while an insight can provide a broad understanding of an answer. One example of a fact is that two plus two = 4. One example of an insight is understanding how first graders feel about the two plus two equation.

 

If we broadened this into an Account Planner role, we can look into some additional examples. If you are an Account Planner tasked with creating a campaign around a new nutrition bar called “Moneybar”, you may need to research facts and insights to support your campaign.

 

In order to get insights, you could deploy a variety of tactics with an audience. A few examples of tactics you could deploy include focus groups, interviews, social media analysis and surveys and questionnaires.

 

For this example let’s say that we chose to gain insights from an audience by performing a focus group tactic. Once we decide if we want a small group or large group, we would have a moderator ask questions, going from warm-up questions, detailed storytelling, second story, and finally third story. If we find that there is overwhelming sentiment that we should not name our nutrition bar “Moneybar” than we can provide this feedback to the product marketing teams to quickly pivot to better branding for our campaign.

 

It's important to understand that the difference here is the answers that are provided to use from the audience are not facts. They are typically the opinions of the group, while they may be stated as facts that is not how they should be taken. One way to still gain facts from this process, is by understanding the percentage of audience that share a sentiment. For example, we could find out that 90% of the audience liked the taste of the nutrition bar, this would be a fact.

 

In conclusion, the answers that are gained from an tactic such as a focus group would be able to provide fantastic insights from the audience. As discussed, it’s important to know the difference between insights and facts.