Insight isn’t static, your Discovery shouldn’t be either…

Don’t get me wrong, it's a huge part of what we do - and forms the basis for all our thinking. Without insight around audience, market, behaviour, brand and product how could we possibly hope to deliver ideas that bring about real change? Spoiler alert, you can’t...

But the notion of Discovery is being misused… We see it time and time again where new relationships have this huge importance around Discovery - lots of energy thrown in early-doors on workshops, questionnaires, interviews, away days. Building some great picture of the brand's world that defines the client/agency relationship and all the great work that follows.

I know this because we do it too. Nzime have (and I’ll quite rightly brag here…) a fantastic suite of modular workshops and activities that allow us to explore various themes - from brand, to behaviour, to perception, to market trends and everything in between. It allows us to build a bespoke Discovery process around a clients needs.

And all that’s great. We’ve never walked away from these sessions without digging a little deeper, challenging convention or overturning complacent strategies. It’s a fantastic tool for capturing a moment in time for a brand's journey through the world. But that’s all it is… A snapshot.

The fact of the matter is that insight isn’t static. It moves, it evolves, it changes its mind, it grows - and it shits on your old ideas that used to work...

Agencies wonder why their relationships become stale over time. It’s because they have become less relevant in the relationship - the client outgrows that fixed point in time when they completed their snapshot.

Discovery isn’t tickboxing - something done at the start of a project and then put to bed. Discovery is about a commitment to ongoing insight, and as such it doesn’t have an end.

It’s about a process of challenging complacency - and it’s about hard work, not agency magic…

Yes, extensive onboarding and Discovery is essential at the start of any new relationship or project. But from then on it's about a little and often approach to gathering insight. Evolving, honing and sometimes challenging your own strategy - not being precious about your previous thinking if the world around it has shifted.

And that’s why, if you want to add long term value to a client, it’s important to build these reality checks into your process. And this doesn’t mean constant day long workshops - keep your ear to the ground, be sceptical of convention, speak to the audiences, pour over heatmaps, understand your analytics and use this to hone strategy before the need to tear up and start again. But don’t be afraid to do so if that’s what’s needed.

Spend time setting objectives and give yourself KPI’s - create focused dashboards that allow you to see when things aren’t working - Data Studio is fantastic for consolidating data from several sources. Because looking for insight isn’t like searching for your car keys - it’s not simply a case of looking for it. It needs to be done with purpose - ask questions, identify specifics to unpick.

Successful agencies never sit still. It’s a commitment. And it’s hard work. But it does work. It's what drives us at Nzime - energy beats everything...