Insight activation turns research and community insights into action by helping internal stakeholders understand, remember and apply what they learn.

People are the lifeblood of your insight community. While nurturing community members is essential to keeping them engaged and collaborative, the same holds true for your internal stakeholders.

From aligning your community DNA with your business goals to regularly reviewing and adapting the insight community to your business needs, internal stakeholders need to be front and centre throughout the community lifecycle.

To take great insights forward, it’s vital to impact the hearts, minds and actions of your stakeholders.

Impacting hearts, minds and actions

We go beyond helping brands understand people. Our ultimate goal is to fuel human intuition throughout your organisation, ensuring internal stakeholders think, feel and make decisions with the consumer at the core.

It’s about touching their hearts, changing their minds and sparking action to drive positive change.

Hearts: closing the empathy gap

You are not your consumer. Research shows that many business stakeholders are (sometimes unknowingly) out of touch with their audience’s daily reality and context. They tend to rely too heavily on their own perception rather than reality.

This can create an empathy gap, as people struggle to understand the perspective of someone with a different opinion or lifestyle. To touch the hearts of internal stakeholders and bridge this gap, we bring them closer to the people that matter to their brand. For example, we use videos that bring consumers to life, AI-powered consumer personas and immersive activities such as consumer safaris. We also run Consumer Connect programmes where stakeholders can engage directly and frequently with their target audience.

For Haleon, the Oral Health R&D scientists and innovation teams wanted to get closer to consumers to build a stronger human understanding and fuel consumer-centric innovation. We organised connects with 61 consumers from two markets, the UK and the US, over 15 weeks. This allowed the teams to build empathy, capture consumer stories and provide insight springboards for future ideation.

‘Working with Human8 for the Consumer Connects program has been a great experience – our team felt supported throughout the program. It gave them greater consumer understanding and empathy and provided inspiration for our future innovation pipeline.’ Adiba, Consumer Scientist, Global Oral Health at Haleon

Minds: boosting insight stickiness

Touching hearts isn’t enough to fuel human intuition. Stakeholders also need to remember and use the key insights. Impacting the minds is all about increasing insight stickiness.

Through creative deliverables such as playbooks, infographics, postcards, flyers and films, we make insights memorable. But we also go beyond one-off deliverables. AI can turn an ongoing insight community into a knowledge repository, allowing teams to explore historical data and insights. This makes it easier to see what is already known about a topic, category or target group, identify knowledge gaps and extract broader learnings.

For Heineken, we summarised community insights across topics and brands in a magazine to fuel category learnings.

Actions: driving internal change

After impacting hearts and minds, it’s vital to activate stakeholders on the insights to drive internal change. We make insights actionable through a variety of digital workshop formats and creative techniques.

For Mars Wrigley, we set up an online insight community to uncover micro-moments in the space of ‘health and wellness’, which led to eight innovation platforms. We onboarded the team and leadership to these platforms through strategic workshops. The sessions immersed stakeholders in the worlds of health-conscious people while also helping them filter opportunities through key value indicators:

• What is our right to play here?
• What can we bring that no one else can?
• Is this incremental to the rest of the portfolio?

This resulted in the team prioritising three innovation platforms for further exploration. The workshops also sparked energy and left stakeholders eager to start acting. To extend that energy beyond the sessions, Mars Wrigley organised an internal roadshow to activate the results in a fun way. For example, a visual summary brought to life how people seek balance and the strategies they use to live a healthier life.