The balance of art and science necessary to be a successful market researcher depends a great deal on your creativity.  It’s what turns interesting information into a strategy-changing insight, but sometimes we can lose sight of the importance of fostering an open and creative environment.  I was reminded of the importance of this issue as I read a psychology blog that outlined 6 practices sure to squelch creativity in your organization.  I was struck by how many of the general issues mentioned in the blog (listed below) can rear their ugly heads in researcher’s day-to-day work:

6 Ways to Kill Creativity:

1. Mismatch roles
2. Ration resources
3. Restrict freedom
4. Reduce group diversity
5. Provide no encouragement
6. Provide no support

This list doesn’t have too much to disagree with, and some of these issues can seem pretty daunting.  But luckily there are a number of Research-specific solutions you can put into play:

Encourage Calculated Risks-it seems to me that the last 4 creativity killers have all to do with the environment that your team creates and fosters, and we have the data to show that departments that foster open, creative cultures have more impactful insights.  You need to create an environment where researchers take risks, push for creativity, and encourage peers to do the same.  Companies like Diageo do this by changing their teams’ focus from risk-aversion to judgment-based (asserting judgments backed by information and experience rather than just sharing what the data proves).

Specialize Roles-we all know that different people are good at different things, so why don’t we focus on these specialties more?  I’ve said it before: Research teams provide more compelling guidance when team members play to their strengths.   We’ve seen BT carve out specialized roles for those interested in client consultation and Motorola create a dedicated synthesis role.  The point is, don’t try to be a team of bionic researchers.  Focus on the areas that you are best at and are most interested in.

Provide Resources and Time-and, as usual, resourcing comes into play.  But for creativity we aren’t simply talking about budget.  Sometimes it seems that the scarcest resource is time.  But time is a key ingredient to creative insights, and to make this time you need to build it into your research process.  Unilever does this by breaking its insight generation into two separate days: forcing a separation between observation and conclusions allows the team to break through its own conventional wisdom and assumptions.

What have I missed?  How do manage creativity in your day-to-day jobs?  Tell us about it in the comments section below!

Related resources:

• Diageo’s Judgment-Focused Research Guidelines
• Researchers: Play to Your Strengths
• Avoiding the Bionic Researcher Trap
• Research Role Specialization Resources
• Unilever’s Customer-Insight Laboratory

By Kate Camp

In the 2009 film The Invention of Lying characters live in a world of absolute truthfulness. This type of a culture is every market researcher’s fantasy. Imagine simply being able to ask consumers what it is they want and what factors are most likely to drive them to make a purchase.

The problem we face isn’t so much that consumers actively lie about what they want or what drove them to make a purchase, it’s that they often aren’t consciously aware of the answers to these questions (or can’t verbalize them.) In order to get to the truth behind consumer decision-making, many market research functions are turning to neuroscience.

Check out the MREB’s research brief on Revealing Hidden Purchase Drivers to see how organizations are using neuroscience techniques for market research. Our members are finding success using three different measures of neurological effectiveness:

1. Attention
2. Emotional Engagement
3. Memory (both encoding and recall)

As neuroscientists collaborate with market researchers to tap into consumers’ unconscious processes, they’re using a variety of technologies including: the electroencephalograph (which measures electrical activity by brain region), eye tracking, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and measuring galvanic skin response.

Have you used any of the above methods? Are there any that you’re experimenting with that you don’t see on the list? A quick poll of our members found that while the majority of respondents have not used neuroscience techniques, 12% said that the use of these methods is growing, and a few even say that they often use these techniques.  We would love to hear from you as we continue to explore progress in this new domain; please leave your thoughts in the comments section below.

How many managers are you working for right now?  With the variety of business partners researchers serve and the number of organizational structures available, chances are good that you have a number of folks to report to, update, and address issues for at any given moment. 

A recent HBR blog talks about tactics for avoiding the main challenges of managing multiple bosses, including assignment overload and balancing loyalties.  The author’s recommendations include:

• Identify your ultimate boss (the one responsible for your performance review and career development) and prioritize activities accordingly
• Be proactive in communicating what you have on your plate, and get your bosses to talk to each other to prioritize work

As researchers, we have to navigate the world of multiple bosses while also striving to have our recommendations heard and acted upon, which adds a whole new dimension to the balancing act.

So, it isn’t enough to just understand the informal power relationships amongst our business partners, we also need to consider who has the power to most inflect company strategy.

The good news is that we can wield a bit more control over what we are working on than most: part of our job is to make sure that the business is asking the right questions, so it really is your responsibility to be proactive in pushing back if your assignment isn’t going to impact company strategy.  In fact, my colleague Kirsten Robinson just blogged about how to reframe partners’ requests on what they really need to know.  And it even includes a formalized process for having business partners compete with each other for discretionary project funding…talk about getting your bosses to talk to each other about prioritization!

And speaking of inflecting business partner decisions, MREB members can join us for a teleconference on August 30^th to hear tactics for embedding insight into the business using natural learning channels and breaking through strongly help customer misconceptions. 

And as the HBR article points out, at the end of the day it is important not to take things personally—these competing priorities aren’t usually an indication of horrible bosses out to get you, it’s usually just a case of getting caught in the middle of competing agendas. 

Related Resources:

• Nokia’s Research Stakeholder Analysis
• WaMu’s Stakeholders Relationship Grid
• J&J Breaks the Myopic Focus of Research Requests
• Teleconference: Embedding Customer Insight into the Business

I was hit by a sad truth last night as, of all things, I looked for a Netflix movie. Content, no matter how good, does not sell itself!

It happened like this. Netflix suggested Rob Reiner’s Flipped to me. Did you see it last year? Neither did I (or apparently anybody else)—it’s one of the ten best movies that nobody watched in 2010.

Sadly important insights can get lost like Reiner’s movie if we fail to put together a good marketing and communications plan.

Any good marketing plan starts with a great product. So start with a compelling topic and a  readable narrative. After that – as the big guys in Hollywood would say – the show really begins.

1. Identify key business partners:

• Synthesis products are different from traditional research findings in that they are designed to target a broad business audience. The synthesis team should start by thinking broadly – identifying all business functions that make customer facing decisions and deciding if and how they would benefit from information.
• Tools like Nokia’s Informal Stakeholder Power map can be used to develop an understanding of business partner’s informal relationship power structures and determine key partners to engage.

2. Tailor the message: 

• General Motors creates a list of stakeholders who will receive information rather than spamming all employees on a general listserv, and then generates specifically tailored emails based on the stakeholder’s relationship with the information. 

3. Be brief:

• Most synthesis is written in long word documents. Although these contain a lot of important information, they are probably best included as companion pieces to shorter, catchier communications vehicles.
• Researchers should create short, tailored summaries of the synthesis piece to communicate to a broad audience.  For example, Kappa Food retailer created Quick Five-Minute Reels—companion decks that took business partners through the main points of the synthesis findings. This solution managed to appeal to audio-visual learners while keeping the reality of business partner time constraints in mind.

4. Think outside the traditional communications toolbox:

• Business partners learn and engage in different ways, and good communications efforts understand and harnesses this by communicating through traditional written reports, presentations, and other
• Kappa Food Retailer realized the difficulty of conveying emotion via a deck alone and sought to match data with emotions via video interviews. Videos would typically be taken of a consumer in their own home or in store to personalize the material.

by Anthony Bell

I’ve been talking to members lately, and the same questions keep coming up; I guess it’s that time of the year again, good ol’ budget proposal season!  It’s instinctive to want to peek over the fence into competitors’ lawns. We want to know our budget and staffing sizes match up. We want to know if we are aligned to serve the most impactful parts of the business.

Luckily, MREB members have the chance to compare your budget and resource allocation against peers and understand emerging trends in the Market Research Function.  The custom report is just in time of the 2011 budget planning cycle and it’s a valuable tool when explaining budget or staffing proposals to senior executives.

I know by now you’re thinking, “Anthony, I’ve got a small research function, how customized will my report really be?” Depending on the sample size of the specific data set, we can cut the data for company size, geography, budget, industry, function, or business unit.

Here are some of the trends we’ve tracked over the years:

• Flat was the New Up. Research budgets declined from 2008-2010 at rates of a little of 4% each year. As we spoke to members, many have reported their budgets will rebound in 2011, but did they?
• Not just Marketing’s Support Service.  While 98% of us support Marketing (not surprisingly), 80% of Research functions support Strategy and Planning, 80% support R&D or Innovation, 76% support Sales, and more than half of us support Corporate Communications!  And we expect this cross-functional expansion to continue–this is what we’ve focused this year’s Executive Retreat Series on!
• The Heat Is On. The ratio of how many budget dollars each researcher represents is a pretty good proxy for how much work they are doing.  In 2009 and 2010, that number has been higher than what we’ve seen historically ($868,500 and $778,800, respectively). As those numbers continue to rise, the pressure grows for Research to continue to the “more with less” expectation.

MREB Members, learn more in our budget and resourcing topic center or launch your survey today.

How much of your staff is a flight risk? Recent research reveals that 57% of new graduates are planning to leave their jobs within two years, and another 40% plan to leave within 12 months. Granted, the recent economic disruptions may stay these plans – but the dissatisfaction that these employees exhibit (mostly around opportunities for career advancement and compensation) will remain.

There’s often little you can do to increase satisfaction with compensation, other than making sure salary offerings are competitive. However, the challenge of creating more career advancement is a meaty one, and one that is especially important for Research, which has typically limited career paths.  In fact, MREB research has revealed that for researchers, the main source of job dissatisfaction is the lack of advancement opportunities; even when researchers are appropriately compensated, they feel that the job is relatively unattractive and underpaid because they are ready for greater roles long before opportunities arise.

Kelloggs, recognizing that company-wide retention is more important than Research retention, has solved this problem by expanding the scope of career opportunities to include roles outside of Research. Supporting rotations or permanent moves into other functions is a powerful signal of career support to current researchers, and also builds a broad alumnae network of former researchers across the company.

MREB members, learn more about the key elements to facilitating external-to-Research career advancement.  And check out additional tactics for expanding career opportunities at our Career Planning Resource Center.

Summer, for most of us, is a time to recharge our batteries, to relax, to enjoy some calm before the demands of life pick up again.  Unfortunately, investors have made that a good deal harder recently as they collectively removed over a trillion dollars in value from financial markets over the course of a few days.

Why the sudden volatility?  Consumers haven’t suddenly changed spending behaviors, nor have business customers. And suppliers look healthier than in some time, beating earnings estimates and sitting on plenty of cash. Credit availability has drastically improved. Inflation is hardly threatening.

The answer seems to lie in the health of developed economies. While many appeared to be on the mend for the past year (albeit slowly), it’s become clear the recovery is far more fragile than was thought, especially in the US.  We’re not in a recession, but we’re also not in a recovery that is self-sustaining.

In such an unstable place, most signals (economic data) are too weak or confusing for investors to proceed with confidence.  Even small pieces of information have outsized impact and prices gyrate.  Markets, after all, are just groups of people trying to discern future value and in this case they are struggling.

So, what are executives doing in the face of this volatility?  Some are being tougher on discretionary spending.  Many are revisiting assumptions for 2012 planning.  But the executives we’ve spoken with are not deviating from the strategies and tactics they put in place following the recession.

There is one thing all executives should be doing right now – getting used to operating in an uncertain environment.  Fortunately, that doesn’t require telling the future.  It does require, however, a structured exploration of what could be, and flexibility to respond regardless what becomes.

Most companies can stand to improve in this area.  Want to learn more?  Join your peers in our upcoming webinar, Taming Uncertainty, on 25 August at 11:00 am EDT.  We’ll clarify why volatility has become “normal” and how the best companies are working around it.

This post was written by guest blogger Hans Eisenbeis, Iconoculture’s senior Financial Services editor

For a decade now — since the rise of the global economy — political pundits from Mumbai to Madrid, Hamburg to Honolulu have argued about “American exceptionalism”: the idea that the US is unique and can hold itself to different standards than all other nations. When it comes to love and war, you can argue both sides. But when it comes to the hard facts of economics, not so much. Last week Standard & Poor’s downgraded US creditworthiness from a top rating of AAA to a less-than-top AA+. That’s the first downgrade in America’s credit rating since credit rating began, early in the last century (WashingtonPost.com, 8 August 2011). It also puts the US behind many of its European allies, not to mention Canada. (Canada!)

What does it mean? First, we should recognize that credit-rating agencies themselves have been in hot water. There’s evidence that folks like Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s and other credit raters contributed to the Great Recession (and the Not-So-Great Recovery) by rubber-stamping financial instruments and portraying risky investments (mortgage-backed securities, credit default swaps) as safe, easy money. The raters are in a fight for their lives, a fight that depends on reestablishing their credibility as objective, neutral evaluators of creditworthiness. And, as uncomfortable as it may be to admit, signs point to the fact that the US simply is not what it used to be in terms of macroeconomics. We’re $14 trillion in debt, and the people in charge of the federal checkbook can only agree on making a $2 trillion minimum payment. As NPR financial correspondent Heidi Moore succinctly commented, “The US government is like a kid who turns in his homework late and incomplete” (Minnesota Public Radio, 8 August 2011). Lucky the teacher didn’t flunk us.

It’s true that carrying the level of debt that we’ve been carrying is a financial disaster waiting to happen, but we’ve actually carried debt for 60 of the past 71 years. One might easily agree with vice president Dick Cheney, who, seven years ago, famously said, “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter.” And one might ask: Well, do they matter or not? If they do, then why has the US credit rating never before been downgraded? The answer, at least if you listen to S&P, is straightforward enough. The US government is not acting in a unified, responsible way. Simply put, it’s not acting like a triple-A credit risk, so it doesn’t deserve that rating. Time to play catch-up to the rest of the class: Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom all still enjoy AAA ratings. So much for American exceptionalism.

A double-dip recession is bound to have political repercussions stateside in the next 18 months. But for consumers in affected markets across the globe, rating-agency jockeying and stock market woes mostly translate to more of what they’ve already been living through for the past few years. While the Great Recession that started in 2007 forced a seismic shift in consumer attitudes — from a world of ample credit to one of credit scarcity, this economic news won’t immediately make consumers change their minds any more than they already have. Because while nations in North America and Europe are now coming to terms with getting their economic houses in order, regular consumers in homes across the globe have been doing that for some time.

By Kirsten Robinson

Sure, there’s an abundance of projects that marketers want Research to focus on—but, are these projects truly in line with your company’s big-picture objectives?

Many marketers focus primarily on subjects that are within their span of control—such as features, package, and price. As a result, they miss out on scoping the bigger issues affecting the company.

The good news is Research can help reframe marketers’ expectations on the level and scope of projects that the business should undertake. At Johnson & Johnson, Research helped broaden their marketing function’s narrow perspective.

In order to resolve the disconnect between ideal and actual research focus, Johnson & Johnson developed a process that forces marketers to focus on what they actually need to know. The company’s research planning process maps out what the business knows and doesn’t know about customers and the market, elevating the discussion beyond prioritizing individual projects to prioritizing how to fill business’s knowledge gaps. The steps to Johnson & Johnson’s mapping strategy include:

1. Capturing what is known today
2. Prioritizing brand-level unknowns
3. Reconciling cross-silo unknowns
4. Competing for additional funding
5. Communicating cross-silo prioritization decisions

MREB members, learn more about how Johnson & Johnson’s strategy-driven learning agenda works.

Did your company plan for this week’s trip to the World Markets’ Amusement Park?  With the environment more volatile than the craziest new roller coasters, Research needs to stay ahead of business needs and make sure that the decisions being made are based on sound knowledge. 

To help you help them, I have compiled the best tools and tactics we have found—processes and techniques that some of the best Research teams in the world use to drive quick action in their own organizations.  How do they allocate their resources to ensure the greatest impact?  It’s all about harnessing existing knowledge and communicating it in a way that makes it easy for business partners to use in their decision-making process.

With no time to initiate new projects, companies like FedEx, Sabre Holdings, Motorola, and Nokia rely on their wealth of existing knowledge to create relevant new insights:

• To make sure Research has the full information context, FedEx combines disparate data assets based on customer touchpoints, while Sabre and Texas Instruments use social media technologies to identify and collect tacit corporate knowledge.  
• To create high-quality synthesis of existing information, Motorola staffs its team with folks responsible for synthesis activities, and Nokia runs time-efficient synthesis workshops to get a cross-functional view.

But we all know that even the best knowledge foundation means nothing if business partners don’t use it. 

• A pharmaceutical company uses wiki-style sites to turn its collected wisdom into an interactive foundational knowledge platform.
• Alticor transforms product-specific research into compelling answers for broad, strategic concerns by focusing communications on pre-identified core business drivers.

In addition to these resources, we will be sharing our new work on injecting insight into your partners’ natural learning patterns over the next quarter—so stay tuned!