Insight Foraging

What most people mean

“Customer research.” Send a survey. Build personas in a boardroom. Read a trend report. Run a focus group. Check your web analytics.

Most of this produces what looks like insight but is actually poison. Trend reports are prepackaged. Personas are fiction. Surveys to the wrong people produce answers that sound plausible but lead to terrible decisions.

Where the definition breaks

The more you rely on prepackaged, generic insights all your competitors have in their possession (trend reports, web analytics overviews, the 12 fictional personas created in a boardroom yesterday), the more likely you are to blend the f*ck in.

A poisonous insight is a piece of customer information that appears insightful on the surface but leads to harmful consequences. Send a survey to the wrong people, ask them the wrong questions (anything about future behaviour, for instance), and you’ll end up with insights that are just as good as Nostradamus’s. Those poisonous insights lead to terrible decisions: spending months building solutions people don’t want to buy, investing money in campaigns that don’t move the needle, burning out running your business like swimming against the current.

Two specific groups produce the most poison:

People who appear interested but haven’t committed any resources. They’re well-intentioned, but since they didn’t travel down that road, they will have to make shit up.

People who purchased in the distant past. They’ll rely on decaying, altered memories. So yeah, they will also make shit up.

How we define it at STFO

Insight foraging is hunting for the raw, unfiltered truths about your customers. It’s Stage 1 of the STFO methodology, and the foundation everything else is built on.

The one rule: exclusively learn from people who have recently invested resources (time, money, effort) to address the problem you’re interested in solving. Why? Because those individuals are much more likely to share information that is usable. You have proof they’ve done something you can learn from. Their recent behaviour means it’s easier for them to recall what happened.

The metaphor comes from mushroom hunting in rural France. You never know where the juicy insights are hiding. You can’t rush to collect any type of insight, just like you wouldn’t eat any mushroom you find in the forest. Don’t mindlessly follow your competitors hoping they’ll lead you to new insights. And the journey is as valuable as the insights themselves.

Three methods to forage:

• Looking at existing data. Reviews, testimonials, internal customer inputs, customer-facing staff knowledge. Your “free interns.”
• Gathering new data. Interviews, surveys to the right people, online communities, observation. The most impactful method, but slow.
• Relying on knowledge and intuition. Brainstorming with your team, industry experience, first principles. Fast but limited. Best combined with the other two.

Never ask people what they want. They can’t predict the future. Only gather information from folks who have invested a significant amount of time, money, or reputation into solving a problem. Always dive deeper. 95% of our brain activity is unconscious and automatic. You have to do the emotional labour on behalf of your customers to fill the gaps.

What it is NOT

• Not “customer research” in the traditional sense (surveys to random people, focus groups, persona workshops)
• Not reading trend reports (prepackaged = your competitors have the same insights)
• Not asking people what they’d do in the future (they’ll make shit up)
• Not a one-time exercise (you forage continuously as your understanding deepens)
• Not optional (skip this stage and every stage after it is built on sand)