Insight is very rarely the product of research designed to unearth it. Suffixed to ‘consumer’, it is probably the most mauled, misused and abused word in the marketing and communication lexicon today. It is used to describe everything from telling us what we know to telling us what the consumer knows, but more often than not it refuses to tell us anything original.

The human challenge that confronts any quest for insight is that what we see depends on where we stand. As human beings, we are forever seeing ourselves within everything we see,which is why we rarely see anything new.

While the market for insight has given birth to a specialized industry in its own right, it is consumers who ironically seem to bear the onus of providing all the answers. With time they have come to expect all the questions as well as the expected answers. There is clearly a need to go beyond interrogating the consumer, because human beings are never entirely conscious of why they think, feel or behave the way they do.

At its simplest, insight is the way we make sense of our world. It demands the capacity to put aside baggage, put on a curious, unbiased lens and learn things anew. Our search for it always needs to begin with a childlike, original gaze.