blog04 | 08 | 2025

Insight curator: not all insights are worth the same

Author

Federico Kalos

Index

In marketing, we work with two types of insights: incremental and transformational. However, the pressure for immediate results from performance marketing, the culture of always-on optimization, and operational KPIs like CAC, ROAS, and CLV push teams toward the safe bet: continuous micro-improvements. In this article, we help you detect if your team has a bias toward incremental improvements and how the role of the insight curator is enabling more businesses to discover transformational insights.

IN THIS ARTICLE

1. Excess of insights and the continuous improvement trap

We've never had so much data. We've never generated so many reports. And yet, many organizations continue to make decisions that don't move the needle. Why? Because not every insight generates impact. Some insights help us adjust what we already do. Others can redefine what we should be doing.

The trap of continuous improvement is thinking that optimizing is always enough.

In an environment where change is accelerated and disruption is the norm, focusing only on incremental things can be a subtle way to stay still.

2. What is an incremental insight and what is a transformational insight?

The difference between an incremental insight and a transformational insight lies in the level of impact on the strategy and the nature of the proposed change.

Incremental insight

An incremental insight is framed within the existing mental, operational, and strategic model. Its main function is to optimize what is already working, fine-tuning tactical decisions to continuously improve results. In organizational change theory and innovation management, these are considered part of continuous improvement (Kaizen, in Japanese terminology). They do not alter the underlying logic or structure of the system, but allow for sustainable progress, small victories, and improvements in efficiency or effectiveness. Typical examples:

Changing advertising schedules
Adjusting budgets by channel
Refining retargeting audiences

Transformational insight

A transformational insight disrupts the way we understand a problem, a market, or consumer behavior. It involves a reconfiguration of the mental model used to analyze a situation. In marketing and strategy, these insights often lead to pivots, new lines of business, or profound rethinking of the value proposition. They don't answer a pre-established question: on the contrary, they often reveal that we were asking the wrong question. This insight challenges assumptions, proposes a new hypothesis, or opens up an unexpected strategic path. Typical examples:

Detecting a systematic decline in a valuable segment
Discovering a new, unforeseen conversion driver
Quantifying the impact of external variables such as the weather or the political context

3. The risk of settling for incremental insights

While incremental insights improve what we already know, transformational insights change what we think we know. Both are valuable, but they play different roles in the evolution of a strategy: some refine, others reinvent.

However, the pressure for immediate results from performance marketing, the culture of "always-on" optimization, and operational KPIs like CAC, ROAS, and CLV push teams toward the safe bet: continuous micro-improvements. In other words, there is a bias toward the pursuit of incremental insights. This creates three risks:

Analytic fatigue: insights that repeat themselves and cease to surprise
Superficial alignment: decisions that respond to metrics, not real problems
Strategic myopia: not seeing disruptions until it's too late

As Harvard Business Review points out: "Organizations that focus solely on efficiency miss opportunities for transformation. Efficiency without direction can be a trap." (HBR, "Don't Let Metrics Undermine Your Business", 2022)

4. Who's in charge of transformational issues?

In many teams, no one is explicitly tasked with seeking out the non-obvious. This is where an emerging role emerges: the insight curator. This isn't necessarily an analyst. Nor is it a BI executive. This is someone who:

Observes patterns that others ignore
Formulates uncomfortable hypotheses
Integrates data with business context

Connects weak signals that can be transformed into competitive advantages

As McKinsey defines it: “The ability to translate data into strategic decisions is the most differentiating factor in competitive advantage in the coming years.” (McKinsey, "Analytics Comes of Age," 2021)

5. How to develop a dual culture: efficiency + transformation

The solution isn't to stop optimizing. It's to create a dual agenda:

The key is to ensure this duality is distributed:

That the entire team isn't "putting out fires"
That there is space and budget to think long-term
That the tools don't dictate the strategy, but rather enable it

6. Self-assess your insights portfolio

Bunker DB offers a simple self-assessment of short questions that will allow you to determine if your marketing team combines incremental and transformational insights. For example:

How many insights from the last quarter were truly new?
Of these, how many were descriptive, how many predictive, and how many prescriptive?
What transformative decisions are we making based on data?
Are we repeating the same analyses as always?
Who on the team is thinking outside the box?
What part of our stack allows us to see the non-obvious?

Below, we provide an Insights Portfolio Score so that you, together with your internal team, can determine the quality of your insights portfolio.

7. Even if it's measured, it may not be transformative

If everything we measure is aligned with what we already do, we are probably losing sight of what we could be doing differently.

The value of an analytics strategy is not measured only by how detailed our dashboards are, but by the quality of the questions that data allows us to ask. And for that, we need less complacency and more creative discomfort.

We need to curate insights, not just generate them. Because in a world that will change without asking our permission, only those businesses that dare to interpret beyond the data will transform.