The false religion of insight

I mentioned in my previous post the problematic nature of that thing we call ‘Insight’. I called it problematic because it has been reified into a kind of sacred object in advertising and strategy, with people speaking about it as if it comes preloaded with immutable qualities or universal laws.   We’ve practically built a theology around it, complete with tests of faith and commandments:

It must be a tension.

It must be ruth about human needs and motivations that usually remains at a deeper, often unconscious level.

It must sit at the intersection of what people want and what they feel blocked from achieving that

It must be non-obvious.

It must be penetrating.

It’s not an insight if it’s an observation or fact.

It must be emotionally resonant. 

It should make your audience say “That’s so true” or “I’ve never thought of it that way, but yes”

It must be human, not data. 

It must reveal a contradiction or gap, between what people say and what they do; between how things are and how they wish they were

It must feel fresh, but timeless.

It must be audience-centric, not brand-centric. 

It must be an unrecognized fundamental human truth.

It must be a new way of viewing the world that causes us to reexamine existing  conventions and challenge the status quo.

It must be a penetrating observation about human behavior that results in seeing consumers from a fresh perspective.

It must be discovery about the underlying motivations that drive people’s actions.

It must be short, sharp, and usable.

It must create empathy.

It must evoke a visceral “aha” response.

It must feel simultaneously obvious and surprising.

It must be own-able.

You can only have one insight, never multiple ones.

Etc.

But what the disciples of ‘insight’ fail to grasp that ‘insight’ is a discursive construct, not an ontological category with intrinsic properties. As such, there are quite simply, no laws, no strictures, no commandements to enforce or demand universal adherence to. By all means develop whatever rules and protocols work for you. But there is nothing to police and demand subservience to.

Given that the average age of age of employees in the advertising industry in the UK is 34 years, it’s worth pointing out that the formalised concept of ‘insight’ has not been a permanent feature of the marketing discourse and tool box.  Yes, we all know the famous words of Bill Bernbach when he said “Nothing is so powerful as an insight into human nature; what compulsions drive a man, what instincts dominate his action. If you know these things about a man, you can touch him at the core of his being". But the fact of the matter is that it wasn’t until the 1990s that the explicit language of ‘insight’ entered the vernacular of marketing. When I started out in advertising (and for many years thereafter) we did not use the word ‘insight’ or demand that its we obey its rules and commandments. We simply talked about “useful understanding”.

Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Guinness, Kellogg’s, McDonalds, Nike, Levis, Converse, Ralph Lauren, Burberry, Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Cartier, Rolex, Tiffany, Tesco, John Lewis, Heinz, Persil, Gillette… all were brands established without the modern concept and mandated rules of ‘insight’. Something those who claim that insight and its carpetbag of formalised rules are the eternal, necessary, and single most important precondition for building brands and marketing communications conveniently overlook.

Of course great work still needs an understanding of the lived reality of its audience audience. As Bob Levenson, the legendary DDB copywriter who helped define the 1960s “creative revolution” in advertising said “Most people ignore advertising because it ignores them”. But strategy is not the same thing as insight. Strategy is directional. It’s about judgment, not mere discovery. You don’t need a revelatory truth to say: “We’ll go against the category,” or “We’ll claim the unclaimed category high ground,” or “We’ll use humour where others use fear.” These are strategic moves, not psychological epiphanies. They emerge from choice, not from consumer insight. And that’s okay.

The recurring insistence on psychological depth and epiphanies leads to the quest for depth over usefulness. It also happens to be a very effective rule for writing utter bullshit like “They’re determined individualists and identity shapers. They the things they create and experience every day alters who they are and what they can become. Their lives are self-constructed mosaics”.

Moreover, suggesting that we must embark on deep sea fishing expeditions in the sub-conscious mind of the consumer is to appeal to a notion of the human mind that has long since been superseded. For more than a century, the notion of a “subconscious mind” has haunted psychology, advertising, and popular culture, conjuring the idea of a shadowy mind beneath awareness that steers our choices and betrays our rational self. Yet there is no neat anatomical basement to discover. Brain scans reveal no hidden “place” where a subconscious lurks; instead, there is distributed activity across networks, modulated by attention and context. Cognitive scientists today prefer to talk about unconscious processes, which are simply the brain’s routine, automatic computations: breathing, procedural memory, perceptual shortcuts, pattern recognition. The distinction matters. The popular idea of a subconscious suggests a hidden self that knows better than we do, an oracle of buried truth, when in reality there is implicit learning or attentional filtering. We notice patterns, absorb habits, and form intuitions without being aware of each step, but that does not mean there is a hidden theatre of the mind where another “you” resides. This does not mean our behaviour is fully transparent to us - far from it - but it does mean that invoking the subconscious as an explanatory engine is a category mistake.

In any case, just how penetrating and deep do our insights actually need to be? It’s not like our task is to understand the very essence of what it is to be alive, or what it means to be, or the nature and cause of suffering, or what is the good life, or why is there something rather than nothing.  You know, the stuff of philosophy, religion, and spiritualism.

“Business travellers and leisure travellers, long stay travellers and short-stay travellers, budget conscious travellers and luxury-seeking travellers… at the end of the day they don’t want vast inventory - what they really want and value above all else is nailing the perfect accommodation for their needs”. This is as psychologically deep as an episode of Emily in Paris. Yet it led to a client dramatically reducing their reliance on paid search.

“Young men want to look like they know their way around”. As a psychological revelation this is thinner than a cigarette paper. And it did not evoke any kind of “ah-ha!” response. Yet it led to a fractured global brand and marketing organisation become cohesive and enabled a client to expand their global distribution whilst maintaining their price premium.

It might be heresy for some, but I’d argue that the more profound the understanding is, the less utility is has for the machinery of capitalism and its enablers.

(As a side note, we should beware ‘learning’ from the for-profit insight reverse-engineers, who extrapolate purported foundational insights from work they had no hand in).

All this has a warping and distorting effect on expectations. Elevating the centrality of insight as the key that unlocks effective creativity warps and misrepresents the role of the strategist. It positions the strategist’s role as that of a researcher - digging for a golden nugget in the minds of consumers. It’s a deeply damaging myth. I recently read a recruiter on LinkedIn looking to hire strategists declaring that the key question they will be asking candidates is “What’s the most interesting insight you’ve uncovered?”, It’s clear they don’t grasp the difference between inputs and outcomes, or between working with research and working in research. Or indeed the nature of strategy.

The theology of insight doesn’t just warp and devalue the strategist’s work - it warps the process. Insight becomes a hurdle - a box to tick before creative thinking is even allowed to begin. Strategy is reduced to a treasure hunt, with teams stuck in research loops, convinced the work is not allowed to progress until the “perfect” human truth is unearthed. This delay isn’t productive. It’s cowardice in disguise: a way of deferring creative involvement and responsibility under the guise of rigour.

Moreover it promotes a dangerously linear and naive view of how work gets made: discover the truth → write the brief → unlock the idea. But this is not how creative brilliance actually emerges. It comes out of a process in which as Stephen King put it in his JWT Planning Guide “a series of ideas emerges, very often as a result of an apparently random stimulus, some external collision of minds or some unexpected interaction of thoughts.” The best strategies and ideas emerge from conversation. From hypotheses and hunches. From flights of fancy, from the interplay of strategic and executional thinking. From collaboration. At its best, the process is exploratory, nonlinear, and irrational. To quote King again, “the whole process of advertising is not a safe, cautious, step-by-step build-up, because that would inevitably lead to me-too advertising for me-too brands…” It’s world away from from the false sense of order that the narrow, constricting theology of ‘insight’ and its salespeople would have us believe is the One True Way. 

To be clear, none of this is an attack on the value of understanding people. Observation, curiosity, empathy - these are vital. Dieter Rams said "Indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin in design”. His words apply to the development of brands and advertising too. But the idea that ‘insight’ is and must always be the starting point and first hurdle to overcome is deeply flawed. The strategist’s real job isn’t to find truth - it’s to create traction, and create change. Insight may be helpful in that endeavour. But it is not holy.