People are the lifeblood of your insight community. While community members need continual nurturing to stay engaged and collaborate, this is also true for internal stakeholders. From aligning your community DNA with your business goals to regular reviews and pivoting the community along with your business’ needs – internal stakeholders need to be front and centre throughout the entire community lifecycle to drive impact. 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 to understand people. Our ultimate goal is to fuel human intuition throughout your organisation – helping internal stakeholders think, feel and make decisions with the consumer at heart. It’s about touching their hearts, changing their minds and sparking actions to drive positive change.

Hearts: close 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 might lead to an empathy gap, as people struggle to understand the perspective of someone with a different opinion and/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, through videos that bring consumers to live, immersive activities such as consumer safaris, but also via Consumer Connect programs where stakeholders can engage directly and frequently with their target audience – like we did for Haleon. The brand’s Oral Health R&D scientists/innovation teams wanted to get closer to consumers to build a strong human understanding and fuel consumer-centric innovation. We organised connects with 61 consumers from two markets (the UK & the US) over the course of 15 weeks. This allowed for teams to build empathy, capture consumer stories, and provide insight springboards for future ideations.

Minds: boost insight stickiness

But touching the hearts is not enough to fuel human intuition. We need to make sure stakeholders not only empathise and ‘feel’ the key insights, but also remember them. Impacting the minds is all about increasing insight stickiness.

Through creative deliverables – such as playbooks, infographics, postcards, flyers or movies – we make insights memorable. But we also go beyond one-off deliverables, using the power of AI to turn your ongoing community into a knowledge repository. This helps to set up for success as you can easily spot what is already known about a topic, category, or target group and detect knowledge gaps. It also facilitates the extraction of meta-learnings. For Heineken, we summarised community insights across topics and brands in a magazine to fuel category learnings.

Actions: drive internal change

After impacting their hearts and minds, it’s vital to activate stakeholders on the insights to drive internal change. We make insights actionable via a variety of (digital) workshop formats and creative techniques. For Mars Wrigley, we set up an online 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 the innovation platforms through strategic workshopping. These sessions were about immersing in the worlds of healthy minded people – but also about filtering these 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, but the workshops also sparked energy and left the stakeholders with an eagerness to start acting. To increase the longevity of such energy peaks beyond these sessions, Mars Wrigley organised an internal roadshow to activate the results in a fun way. For example by using a visual summary that brings to life how people seek balance and the strategies they are putting in place to live a healthier life.

Getting to (great) insights is not the end goal of your online insight community. There is no value in them if you don’t take them forward. To fuel human intuition throughout your organisation, you need to nurture your stakeholders. It’s about touching their hearts, changing their minds and sparking actions to drive positive change.