The Insights Advantage
Knowing How to Win
by
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Firms rely on marketing research, customer analytics, market and competitor data, and intelligence to produce actionable insights that can help their executives make better decisions. Even so, it doesn’t always seem to work as hoped. In The Insights Advantage, author Marco Vriens shows companies how to extract more and better insights, how to validate these insights, and how to turn them into action.
With a thorough business and academic background, Vriens goes beyond the how-to approach and takes a strategic perspective on insights and demonstrates, through a host of examples, how companies have leveraged several fundamentally different types of insights. Vriens shares many case studies from firms such as Microsoft, Frito-Lay, ABB Electric, UBS, IBM, U-Haul, Samsung, GE, ING, CVS, and many others. He shows how managers have generated, organized, evaluated, and managed these insights in a systematic process; made them easy to find, understand, and accept within the company; and assessed their potential marketing and financial impact.
Vriens shows how firms and organizations adopting the approach of The Insights Advantage will make more money by making fewer mistakes, identifying emerging threats sooner, becoming more efficient, growing their top and bottom lines, and staying ahead—or moving ahead—of the competition by being the first to see opportunities for growth and advantage.
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About the Book
“… this important work will provide the CEO with a blueprint on how to compete with smarter insights.”
—Thomas Harrison, chairman and CEO of Diversified Agency Services (DAS), an Omnicom Group Inc. division
“Data and analytics are great, but only insofar as they yield insights. If you’re serious about insight-driven marketing and sales, you’ll read this book and apply its lessons. It’s your first step toward decisions based on valid and unique insights about your customers.”
—Thomas H. Davenport, President’s Distinguished Professor, Babson College; coauthor of Competing on Analytics and Analytics at Work
“Marco Vriens writes with authority and personal experience on the strategic advantage of validated insights. This approach will help the bottom line for businesses and business units of all sizes.”
—Christine Betts, general manager for Microsoft
“In this period of innovation anemia and marketing data overload, Marco Vriens’ skillfully written book shows marketers the necessity and manner of organizing corporate business insights, which are currently all too often hidden in plain sight. Read the book, adopt the approach, and prosper.”
—Simon Kooyman, CEO of Knowledge Networks
“Marco Vriens lays out a blueprint for generating business-differentiating insights and how to profit from those insights. This unique book should be preferred reading for business decision-makers.”
—Sandra Miller, chief marketing officer of Health Travel Technologies
“Companies are literally swimming in data, but data without insight or action is just overhead. Marco Vriens unlocks some of the mysteries of how companies can turn raw data into insight for financial gain. The principles in this book can bring a big advantage to your company!”
—Tom Markert, senior vice president of marketing for The Home Depot
“Finally, someone who possesses deep insight on insight has created a framework to help businesses extract, capture and manage insights. The Insights Advantage is the essential primer on business insight.”
—Daryl Travis, CEO of BrandTrust
About the Author
Marco Vriens has led analytics, research, and insights teams at Microsoft, GE Healthcare, and various marketing research firms and has published articles dealing with a host of business-related topics. He is the coeditor of the Handbook of Marketing Research, jointly with Dr. Rajiv Grover, published by Sage Publishing in 2006.Visit Vriens on-line at www.strategypotential.com.