Insights are not strategy.

Consumer insights are not a marketing strategy, in Nigeria or anywhere else. An insight is a true thing about the market. A strategy is a decision about what to do with it — one target, one behaviour change, one proposition, chosen at the expense of everything else. This essay explains why so many agencies blur the two, and gives you a five-minute test to run on any strategy page before money moves.

An insight is a true thing about the world. A strategy is a useful thing to do about it. Our industry confuses the two constantly, and bills for the confusion. I have spent twenty years in West African brand and market development, and the most expensive documents I have seen were not bad strategies. They were research summaries wearing a strategy title page.

A deck full of true things is not a plan. The discipline is the leap from observation to decision — from “people feel X” to “therefore we will do Y, and not Z.” That leap is where the value sits — and the part most decks skip.

Here is a blunt check I run in strategy reviews. Delete the insight slides and read the strategy again. If it still stands, it was never built on those insights. If it collapses into nothing, it was never a strategy — just a well-evidenced feeling. Either way, fix it before the media budget moves — a strategy page is the instruction sheet for hundreds of millions of naira.

A working consumer insight lives in the gap between what people say and what they do. Shoppers in an open market will swear that price decides everything — then pay a premium for the seasoning cube their mother used, because dinner is not the place to experiment. A young Lagosian will describe herself as loyal to her network, then port the day a rival’s data bundle stretches further. An insight names that contradiction and explains why it exists. Once you can name it, you can act on it.

Most slides labelled “insight” do nothing of the sort. “Nigerians love value.” “Consumers are price-sensitive but aspirational.” “Gen Z wants authenticity.” These are category descriptions — true of every shopper, in every market, for every brand on the shelf. Nothing follows from them. You cannot build a choice on a sentence your fiercest competitor would happily paste into their own deck.

The say–do gap is not a research failure. It is the raw material of brand strategy. People answer surveys as the person they would like to be. They spend as the person they are. The distance between those two people is where propositions are won.

A strategy is a choice that forecloses other choices. If nothing has been given up, nothing has been chosen. A real strategy page can be read in a minute, and it commits the brand to three things:

• One target — the specific buyer whose behaviour you intend to change, described sharply enough that you also know who you are not chasing this year.
• One behaviour change — the single act you want more of: first trial, a second pack in the basket, switching from a rival, moving from sachet to mid-size.
• One proposition — the one claim, rooted in the contradiction you named, that makes the behaviour change feel like the obvious thing to do.

Foreclosure is the test. Choosing open-market mothers means the mall shopper waits until next year. Choosing penetration means you stop defending a premium price this quarter. Choosing one proposition means three good lines die so one great one can carry every naira of media behind it. If your strategy page reads like it keeps every option open, it is not a strategy. It is a wish list with a logo.

I have sat through debriefs of 140 slides that ended with “rich learnings to take forward” and not one decision. The pattern is common enough to deserve an honest explanation: incentives. Volume looks like rigour, and rigour justifies fees. A description cannot be wrong, but a choice can — and an agency that never chooses can never be blamed when the quarter disappoints. Nobody gets fired for presenting more data.

Clients keep the machine running too. A thick deck feels safer to forward to a CEO than a single page that says “we will do this, and we will not do that.” The thick deck spreads accountability thin. The single page concentrates it. Concentration is uncomfortable. That is why it works.

You do not need a strategy degree to catch a weak strategy page. You need five questions and the nerve to ask them in the room. If you are new in the seat, fold this into your first quarter — it pairs well with our 90-day plan for new brand managers in Nigeria.

1. What did we choose not to do? Ask for the foreclosed options by name — the audience parked, the channel dropped, the proposition killed. If the answer is “nothing”, no choice was made.
2. What number does this move? Penetration, rate of sale, repeat purchase, share in a named region. If the strategy cannot point at one commercial number, it cannot be judged.
3. Could a competitor claim the same slide? Cover the logo and read the proposition aloud. If your nearest rival could present it without edits, you have a category description, not a position.
4. Can each team act on it by Monday? The distributor argument, the media plan and the creative brief should all change in a way each team can state in one sentence.
5. Where is the contradiction? Trace the proposition back to a named say–do gap. No contradiction underneath means the strategy is standing on air.

Score it honestly. A page that fails two or more of these questions goes back — before production is booked, before media is committed, before the launch date makes weak thinking permanent.

This is the problem our operating system was built to solve. One of the five principles on our philosophy page is Shinjitsu — truth: market, human and cultural understanding must come before strategy, but it is never allowed to substitute for one. Research at Aikido Agency has one job, and that job is to force a decision.

The Katana System makes the leap from true to useful a mechanical step rather than a hopeful one. The first three stages each produce a named truth: a Market Truth Map, a Human Insight Statement, a Cultural Opportunity Board. Stage four — Strategic Clarity — collides those three truths until they surface a strategic tension, and resolves that tension into a Strategy Crystal: the tension, our point of view on it, and a single-minded proposition. One page. One target, one behaviour, one claim. Everything creative that follows must trace back to it, and anything that cannot is cut.

Two house rules keep the crystal honest. No creative work begins until one commercial objective is agreed in writing, and the KPIs behind that objective are reviewed weekly — with authority to kill what is not working. Both founders sit on every brief, so the person who made the choice is in the room when the numbers report on it. That is what our brand strategy practice sells: not a bigger deck, a sharper decision.

We work with marketing leaders across FMCG, telecoms, financial services, food and beverage, fintech, beauty, health and technology. Brands usually arrive with a familiar file: two years of research, three strategy decks, and no agreement on what the brand should actually do next. We take a deliberately small number of engagements so the founders can sit on every one.

The way in is simple. Tell us the business challenge, the target and the timeline, and we come back within 48 hours with a point of view and next steps — not a credentials deck. Write to hello@aikido.ng, call +234 810 960 5970, or visit us at 3b Felicia Koleosho Street, Opebi, Lagos. Or start the conversation here.

— Dolapo Ogunbambo, Co-Founder & Managing Director, Aikido Agency.