There are strategic brand or comms projects where you’re given weeks and a generous budget to find the insight you need, but let’s be honest, for many strategists they can be few and far between. Whether it’s a pitch with tight timings, a low-budget bodge, or a time-sensitive response to something affecting the brand, an eight-week full quant survey and ethnographic study are simply not going to cut it.
And AI is a decent servant, but a poor master. It isn’t going to present you with that vital nugget of strategic gold that leads to an ownable, distinctive positioning, proposition or problem solved. While a decent AI prompt might give you ideas of where to look, start a train of thought, wade through a report or even test a hypothesis, you’re still going to have to do some fast, low-cost legwork yourself.
That’s where Thinking Scrappy comes in. If you start by accepting that you have neither time nor money, you’re forced to think more creatively about where you might find something interesting. To be more curious, faster on your feet and even a bit cheeky. And if you do it right, it can unlock insights that bigger, slower projects might miss.
We’re after Golden Nuggets that lead to Insights, not just Facts (but that’s a whole other post). Here’s how to dig for golden nuggets when time and budget are tight:
- Start with What You’ve Got
Re-read every piece of research, report, stakeholder interview, brand book etc. from the last couple of years that’s sitting in the client’s folder on the agency system. Then ask the client for what they’ve got in a similar vein, including anything like sales decks or conference speeches that relate to the project.
- Speak to the people that speak to your target audience all the time
If you can’t speak to the customers, speak to the people who sell to them or service them. It might mean zooms with customer service agents, trade counter managers or the sales teams, I even got great insight from the quality assurance team in a past project.
Or you might have family or friends, even friends of friends, who work in the industry, or buy the thing, who’d be willing to have a quick chat or whatsapp with you. People like hairdressers and taxi drivers, who chat to lots of people every day, can also be great at giving you a feeling of where the land lies on a hot topic.
- Keep your eyes open
Can you go on a factory tour? Is there an event coming up you can go to? Should you be loitering in the supermarket freezer aisle to watch how people choose oven chips? You’ll be amazed what jumps out at you, like people’s weird workarounds or realising no-one looked at the PoS. Being physically present helps uncover stuff no focus group will tell you.
- Be nice to the digital and data teams
Whether that’s the client’s or the agency’s experts, if you ask nicely they’ll usually be happy to help out with your wishlist of known unknowns that you’re hoping their data might throw some light on. Just keep the wishlist tight and try to give them as much time as possible.
- You’re still going to have to do some desk research
There are SO many free, good quality, robust data and insight sources out there, from broader ones like the UK Household Longitudinal Study and the Office for National Statistics to niche trade press reports and obscure academic papers on Google Scholar. You can even access free Mintel reports in-person from any library big enough to have a Business & IP Centre.
But if you dig deeper, there are usually breadcrumbs all over the internet, be it LinkedIn posts from people working in the sector, Reddit or Mumsnet threads or review sites. The nuggets might be more individual-focused and thus less robust, but dig deep enough and a picture will start to emerge.
- Be your own Sherlock and Watson
As you go, don’t forget to write up your notes – exactly where you found anything interesting, who you spoke to and what you learned. No client, or creative, will want to base everything on your gut feel, so you should be upfront about where your insights came from, however unconventional the source. It shows that you did your homework and put the effort in, despite restrictions on time and budget. Then gather those clues, spot the pattern, Sherlock the heck out of it and make the deduction. Be able to briefly tell the story and make every decision maker feel like they went hunting for golden nuggets with you.
(photo by Suradeach Saetang on Unsplash)