We recently conducted our first UK Insight Managers Survey to find out more about Insight Managers, how they relate to their colleagues in other departments, which challenges they face and what up and coming trends they have started to notice.
We posted a summary of the results to our blog not long ago: Results of the UK Insight Managers Survey 2011.
Now, the full report is available to download in the Resources area of our website.
If you have any problems downloading the survey please email me (sophie.hill@onalytica.com) and I will be happy to help.
Are You an Insight Manager?
Do you want to become part of this growing networking group? - Join the Onalytica Insight Manager Forum by sending us an email at: insight@onalytica.com.
We have been really interested in insight managers for a while now, but after encountering insight managers positioned in different areas within the business and with different uses and means of gathering insight, we set ourselves a mission to find out a bit more about these increasingly important and influential people.
We found ourselves a great team of insight managers and our research began!
We started off asking the question: Who are insight managers? And this was what we found:
Definition – of insight varies hugely and so does the job title. Many insight managers are from research backgrounds, but not exclusively so.
Growth - hiring of insight managers has continued to grow – despite economic stagnation.
Seniority - insight managers typically are senior, especially if from a research background, and are either line managers or departmental heads.
More likely to be found in large organisations - 85% are employed in organisations with 200 or more employees.
Skills required to be a good insight manager – the need for strong analytical skills was ranked highest priority, but more surprisingly perhaps was that the second most important attribute is considered to be communication skills, followed by the ability to influence senior management.
Once we had a better understanding of an insight manager’s general background, we wanted to find out how insight managers relate to the rest of the business.
Our questions spanned a number of areas and the responses showed:
Where they sit in the organisation - approximately two-thirds of respondents sit within the marketing department or a related function (sales & marketing).
Increasingly provide insight to the rest of the business – more than 50% of the insight is for outside their department, and more than 50 % of respondents are supplying insight to four or more departments (e.g. sales, customer management, product development, HR, IT, finance, operations).
Biggest users of insight - public relations are the biggest users of insight, followed by advertising. Consumer behaviour is the highest application for insight (compared to, for instance, insight into market competition).
In order to put ourselves in a good position to help insight managers in their day-to-day activities, we needed to understand some of the key challenges they face:
Demand on time - most survey respondents spend more time reporting writing and disseminating information than any other task (as much as 75%). This underlines the need to use tools that provide automatically analysed insight that can be presented in an accessible format to colleagues, other departments and senior management.
The management buy-in challenge - 65% said that getting management ‘buy in’ and subsequently ensuring action is taken is a challenge.
Other challenges include - limited resources and an inability to easily access forward-looking insight.
Once we knew about the current situation we wanted to start building some predictions for the future. We asked our team of insight managers about the trends they felt were starting to build in the area of insight management and how they felt these would develop in the near future:
Increasing demand – almost 80% of respondents expect that increasing demand for the insight they can provide to their organisations in the next year.
New tools and technology - and growth in online networks were the most positive, though not to all, some respondents indicated that the new tools were increasing the challenge of their job.
Social media - use of social media to monitor user complaints and learn about customer satisfaction was high, with the majority agreeing that use of social media in their organisations will grow significantly in the next few years. 81% also agree that their organisations have a significant learning curve to overcome before they can utilise social media, with over half saying that until social media’s impact can be measured, it will not be taken seriously internally.
Providing the most benefit – customer feedback was ranked the highest in terms of providing the most beneficial insight when compared with general research, industry reports and expert advice.
Want to Know More?
If you are interested in finding out more and would like to read the full report, please email me (sophie.hill@onalytica.com).
Are You an Insight Manager?
Do you want to become part of this growing networking group? - Join the Onalytica Insight Manager Forum by sending us an email at: insight@onalytica.com.