My five tips…
The market research industry has been consistently criticised by research users, including clients, for producing no insights. I have tried to get to the root of the problems here, here, here, here and here. In short, the gist of the problem is the lack of experience in insights application and the failure to see the need for gaining such experience.
I have talked about how I could not use a market research report when I was developing the brand strategy for an FMCG client (here), despite knowing why the agency did things the way they did. I have also talked about why I gave up reading a 100+ pages report at page 16 because it was just pages of charts with descriptions of the charts. At the end of the report was the recommendation section in which its “recommendations” were either a rephrase of the positive results or the opposite of the negative ones!
Understandably, research users, whether clients (brand owners) or agency professionals who need to use research, have come up with their own solutions, but with mixed results. Some have already made up their mind about what insights they want before research and analysis, then look for data to support themselves. Others have a genuine desire to “find the truth” but may not know how to do it properly. This has led to unfortunate results such as asking leading questions, which is no different from looking for data to support your pre-defined insights. Another example is asking questions that, while they may not be leading, will give us superficial results:
There is another more worrying trend of beliefs that you only need to do one thing — usually analytics (data science) — because it has replaced everything that has gone before, especially traditional market research (here, here). The very act of pitting analytics against market research — specifically focus groups and surveys — shows a lack of knowledge of analytics itself and how insights are uncovered.
We need a holistic approach, not a focus on any one thing.
The road to true insights
Having helped clients custom-build insights systems, I will sum up my experience with these tips:
Tip 1: Good-bye to traditional market research?
As I have said many times, traditional research methodologies are means to an end. People are responsible for making them useful.
We can still use focus groups and surveys, but not in the same way. Ad hoc research is seldom effective in uncovering true insights if it relies on asking people to self-report their thoughts and behaviours. However, such research can be useful when we have specific questions (e.g., preliminary assessment to help us decide on our next steps) or when we want to do disaster checks (e.g., whether a localised brand name would sound right in different dialects or certain messaging would be offensive to local consumers).
The key is not to rely on traditional market research methodologies only.
Tip 2: Big data and analytics are part of the insights system, not the whole
Technology companies like Intel have long acknowledged the importance of “soft data” by hiring anthropologists to add meaning to numbers. Walt Disney uses futuring to get inspirations for informing their theme park experience innovation. In a machine learning course, Professor Cynthia Rudin reminised about her conversation with the winners at a Netflix competition. The winning recommender algorithm is still in use today.
“These guys knew how people behave when they rate movies and they realise all sorts of interesting stuff like when people rate multiple movies at the same time, their ratings change from when they are rating one movie at a time. So their model was absolutely laid in with gems of (the) behavioral psychology of movie raters…” (emphasis added)
If data are your ingredients and data science is the chef, then the “soft fuzziness” of social sciences, humanities, design and arts is the vision and creativity that will elevate your restaurant to Michelin stars’ level.
Tip 3: Uncovering insights is a long-term process
“We realise that it is essential for not only marketing but also engineers to see the issues first-hand. Only if you are present do you really understand the issues.”
— Olaf Dietrich, director of project management at Miele
There have been efforts to get to true insights, all with good intention. An example is using ethnography which involves researchers observing and interviewing consumers in real-life settings. This approach has its root in anthropology whereby anthropologists spend time with the people and culture they want to study by observing, living, feeling and learning the life of their informants (in anthropology term) as it unfolds.
However, most ethnographic research done by market research companies have been twisted to a form that has lost many of the benefits that ethnography is supposed to offer — insights uncovered from data gathered as they naturally occurr, rather than reported by respondents. Market research ethnography is conducted in a man-made setting in which respondents are recruited knowing why they will be observed and what they will be required to do (e.g., shopping or cooking as they normally will with researchers and clients following them).
A typical ethnographic fieldwork in anthropology lasts for at least a year. For example, Bronislaw Malinoski, the father of social anthropology, spent two years in the Trobriand Islands. On the other hand, a typical ethnographic session in market research is 1 to 1.5 hours. Even though brand owners have found inspirations through market research ethnography, we can do better.
Ethnography, and any data collection and insights-uncovering methodologies, should be a long-term process, instead of a one-off, ad hoc project.
Tip 4: Everyone can uncover insights
The long-term insights uncovering process should also be embedded in the organisation. My experience, and the main reason why I have left the market research industry, is that researchers tend to treat each project separately. While the business problem for which a research project is commissioned is just one of our clients’ problems, researchers seldom try to understand the larger problem faced by our clients, where our role is and how our ad-hoc project can help them achieve results in the context of the overall business. Even if external research vendors are willing to spend more time to understand clients, our knowledge of clients’ organisation will always be limited to what we are allowed to know.
We cannot rely on external research vendors only, not even the in-house insights department. Everyone from CEO to front-line staff is responsible.
Part of my job is to train my clients’ staff to collect data (we will uncover the insights based on the data collected later). At the data collection stage, data is to be gathered at their purest state, untainted by factors like what types of insights clients want or whether the insights can be feasibly activated upon. The objective is to gather as much data as we can in as many natural forms as they appear.
To support this effort, we will need both hardware and software. The hardware is the infrastructure for storing and integrating the data and the tools to help us gather and upload them (e.g., mobile app, online forms). The software is the trickest part as it involves training people who may not know what research, data or insights is.
Typically, training is conducted with HR and relevant departments. It involves:
- Interviewing customers at the right moment across touchpoints so that feedbacks that are truest-to-the-reality can be obtained at the moment when customers are feeling/experiencing it while not disrupting their experience of the brand. I will also teach interviewing techniques— e.g., avoid leading questions, start from open-ended questions and the general then drill down to the specifics, etc.
- Building empathy in our customers by immersing in their experience. I will train everyone from CEO to front-line staff to be ethnographer. An important concept of ethnography in anthropology is “etic and emic”. When immersing in our customers’ experience, I will train the up-and-coming ethnographers to collect data both from a first-person, subjective view of their customers by putting themselves in their customers’ shoes and a third-person, objective view of what is happening with, to and around their customers. This is not easy and will require lots of practices to master. An exercise I often use is role-playing where my clients will take turns to play the role of themselves (service provider) and their customers.
- Be curious. When you are at a restaurant, be curious about the ways your dishes are cooked coupled with the ambience and service. When you are shopping for a pair of sneakers, be curious about how you experience the store environment. When you want to buy a bottle of soy sauce while cooking dinner, be curious about whether a store provides support for such “emergency situations”. Everyone from CEO to front-line staff should be encouraged to “nose around” even when they are off-work. But such nosing around should be done with the least inconvenience, not only to ensure people will keep being nosy, but also to make sure they are gathering data in their most natural state without bias.
- Knowing when to engage external vendors and how to coordinate and integrate them with our internal insights system.
Tip 5: Crowdsourcing
An insights system will not be complete without continuous inputs from customers. A long-term crowdsourcing system should be in place to facilitate customers to share their opinions and experiences. The system will gather “natural-state” data (e.g., a forum where customers can have discussions in their own time) and can be mobilised for specific purposes — e.g., a quick assessment of new ideas with A/B testing or disaster checks. Each organisation is different so the crowdsourcing system will be designed to meet their unique needs.
An insights system is just a start…
As important as insights system is a change of attitude towards insights. Customers or consumers are humans who live in a socioeconomic and geopolitical environment as much as they do in the market. They do not compartmentalise their world into buying world, social world, economic world, etc.
We need to break out of our silo, marketing or whichever field we are working in, and view our customers and consumers in totality.
