For many years I ran insights teams, which mostly meant I was the person other people came to when they needed to know something about their category and needed it yesterday. I was the human search engine sitting on top of a very expensive document. It worked, sort of.
Running insights for Asahi across ANZ, the monthly Portfolio Management Review sat inside the integrated business planning process.
Underneath all of it was one question for the exec team: how do we grow with the brands we have, and what else do we need through innovation or acquisition? You can’t answer that without knowing your consumers. How they tick, where the incremental opportunity spaces are, and how to mobilise a business against them.
The prize was a map of your world. Deep enough to be trusted, simple enough to be shared. A common language the whole business rallies around, so everyone from the exec team to the brand manager is pointing at the same growth opportunity.
I got that map once. It took a great agency, months, senior bandwidth, and hundreds of thousands of dollars. You get a lot for that, maybe more than you need. A 144-page PDF where some is must-have and most is nice-to-have.
And because it’s so hard and expensive, you can only do it every few years. The data dates. It lives in a document that the insights team has to manually farm for every tactical need, and it never connects to what the business is actually building: the NPD chasing a new occasion, the repositioning aimed at a demand zone. You end up sticky-taping numbers together across docs and systems. This kind of power has only ever belonged to the big players, and even they could rarely afford to keep it up to date.
Here’s what I actually believe after years of running insights teams: insight without influence is worthless. You can hand someone the smartest, truest finding in the world, and if it doesn’t move them to act, you’ve solved nothing. Influence is the whole point of insight. It comes from a shared language everyone understands, a framework that makes complexity feel simple, and design that makes people want to lean in rather than switch off. A 144-page PDF almost never gives you that.
The industry has treated this as the cost of doing business for decades. It shouldn’t anymore, because the constraints that created it are dissolving.
Category understanding no longer has to arrive as a monolith. Brands can buy the segmentation and core usage-and-attitudes work they’ll actually open, and skip the chapters that gather dust. The map no longer has to sit frozen between refresh cycles; when research is fast and affordable enough to rerun, it can move at the pace of the category. And with AI in the stack, the map no longer has to be interpreted by a specialist. It can answer a plain-language question from anyone in the business, the moment they ask it.
That last shift matters most, and it worries insights professionals for the wrong reason. Making category knowledge self-serve doesn’t make the insights function redundant. It removes the part of the job that was never the job: the fishing, the farming of decks, the human-search-engine work I spent years doing. What’s left is the work only insights people can do.
The strategic thinking, the framing, the influence.
For years, deep category understanding belonged to a handful of companies with the budgets to buy it, and even they struggled to make it stick. The tools now exist to give every brand a living map of its consumers, built so it actually gets used.
The businesses that win the next decade won’t be the ones with the biggest research budgets. They’ll be the ones where insight travels furthest.
Kurt Hately is the head of product science at Ideally.
