Why Your Insight Is Not Landing, and What to Do about It

Five years ago, I was directing a cross-market insight project for a global retail client. The research was unequivocal: pricing information on their product pages was structured in a way that made users feel lied to. It was an issue of trust, which we could prove with behavioral data. We reported the result out to three different regional teams.

The UK insight was politely noted and parked the findings. The India insight was reframed as a design problem. The Australia insight led to a meeting-wide debate, and ultimately a different page prototype.

Same insight. Three completely different reactions.

If you work in research or strategy, chances are you have a story like this too. You have run rigorous qualitative work, surfaced authentic behavioral tensions, and underpinned it with behavioural data. But what happens next? Your time, effort, and craft aren’t rewarded with consistency at best, and are entirely at the mercy of personality and politics at worst.

It’s not that your findings aren’t valid. It’s that they are not validated. And that is not a knowledge problem, it is a delivery problem. More specifically, it is a cultural fit problem. And until we talk about it, the future of insight work will be increasingly performative and decreasingly useful.

The insight myth is that telling the truth will lead to action.

We imagine that insight is objective truth. But in reality, insight, like feedback, is only as good as the receiver’s ability to hear it.

McKinsey reports that 70% of change programs fail to reach their potential, largely due to lack of employee support and resistance to change.¹ Consider the parallel when we deliver qualitative insight in organizations; namely, when a piece of research reveals something that is inconvenient, politically awkward, or simply humanizing. Meaning anything less-than-perfect.

In behavioral science, we call this ‘reactance’. A human’s automatic defense response when their sense of freedom or identity is under attack. It is common in organizational cultures from senior leaders who ignore or downplay research that points to internal delay or blame, to middle management who actively resist change or scapegoat the research function for bad news.

Insight, it turns out, is a special case of feedback. And as with any feedback, its usefulness and uptake is entirely dependent on how well it is tuned to the culture of the receiver.

Insight is feedback, and feedback is cultural.

To understand how culture shapes feedback, you need to understand what feedback actually is. Feedback is not a passive exchange. It is a complicated social and emotional transaction. The same is true of insight, particularly when it is critical or challenges the status quo.

Erin Meyer’s Culture Map⁴ (a must-read for any cross-cultural researcher) has a chapter on how countries differ on their communication, confrontation, and decision-making profiles. But similar dimensions map onto intra-company cultures, too. A hyper-data-driven product team in Berlin won’t take insight the same way as a risk-averse compliance team in Kuala Lumpur. Across an organization, teams’ microcultures shift how they hear what you have to say.

If your insight is not culturally aligned, it will not resonate. At best, it will be acknowledged. At best, it will be lauded. But it will not act as a catalyst for change.

Translation Not Transmission 

Let’s return to the pricing page example from earlier. In each team, the raw insight was the same: “Users feel confused at the point of decision, and this breaks trust.” But the framing was altered slightly for each team to get it landed:

Executives: “We’re losing trust at the moment of conversion. That’s a direct revenue leak.”

Design: “There’s no default option, and the mental load is high. We’re triggering choice paralysis.”

Marketing: “There’s a mismatch between our campaign promise and the actual experience.”

Same truth, but calibrated for each team’s context, goals, and incentives. This is not manipulation; it is smart communication. This is what researchers need to do if we want our research to move from commentary to action.

Filter the Insight 

Before you send your next research presentation or debrief, run it through these three filters:

1. Language Fit: Does the language match the team’s common vocabulary and way of talking about problems?
2. Status Fit: Is the insight shared by someone whose status the team respects? 
3. Timing Fit: Is this a good moment in their political or workflow cycle to receive it? 

Fail on any one of these three, and your insight will quickly be watered down or deprioritized. This is especially true when working in a multi-regional or cross-functional context where internal hierarchy, decision velocity, and psychological safety can vary significantly from team to team.

When You Get It Right

In another case, I was working with a large retail organization that had historically struggled to communicate the value of its loyalty program. Previous insight reports had failed to shift messaging on the front end, and ROI was unclear. By re-framing the user tension (“I feel like I always miss the good deals”) as a brand risk, loyalty fallout, and hard revenue opportunity, and more importantly, aligning with a review point at the end of Q3 he insight report lead to a re-segmentation of email communications that drove an uplift in re-engagement rates.³

The research was the same. But the delivery was different.

From Insight to Impact 

Budgets are shrinking and internal stake-holders are expecting ever-quicker returns on research investments. Our job, it is time to accept, is no longer just to seek truth. It is to translate truth into the language and logic that leads to action.

Which means adjusting our language. It means knowing internal cultures intimately. And it means building loops that keep insight loops live and fresh, long after the debrief.

Because if your insight did not land, it did not live. 

Sources:

• McKinsey & Company, “ The Inconvenient Truth About Change Management.” 
• Meyer, E. (2014). The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business. 
• Internal data, anonymised client case study (retail, APAC, 2020).