I spend a great deal of my time wrestling with MREB’s newsletter and Web site, trying to figure out the best ways to communicate our research findings to thousands of market researchers across the globe.  And MREB’s annual research initiative on Embedding Customer Knowledge into the Business contains best practices that any researcher hoping to improve action taken on insight should apply.

I know that many researchers face the same challenges I feel, as across 2011 we fielded many tactical questions related to communication on our Primary Research Forum.  Perhaps I should have seeded a question on the best way to communicate interesting results from one-off survey questions…but for now I’ll go with a blog post to share interesting results from a variety of communications-related questions.

Newsletters: What Have you Done for Communication Lately?

Asked if their research department uses newsletters to deliver knowledge to the broader organization, 61% of respondents said no:

And for those who DO use newsletters, it’s pretty clear that corporate research departments typically use the channel for basic, untargeted information sharing.  Among the most popular goals for newsletters: communicating new project results and sharing synthesized insights:

One thing newsletters definitely AREN’T used for: communicating with senior executives.  According to our respondents, face-to-face presentations are the main channel used for driving senior execution action based on customer insight.  Folks also mentioned immersion events as an effective communication channel, and MREB members can see how Pollstar, P&G, and Alticor create interactive experiences to re-build business partners’ understanding of customers.

For those looking to communicate with senior executives with a written product, we uncovered a concise and powerful written format used at Alticor.  Researchers there aggregate and synthesize information around pre-identified core business drivers, creating a report that addresses the company’s most important strategic issues.

Partnering for Better Communication

As my colleague Liz Barrett blogged about a few weeks ago, going to the pros for communication help can help disseminate insight-based messaging to internal audiences.  And about half of respondents to a related question on the forum say that they’ve worked with the Communications department to distribute insights:

One member on the forum said: “We work closely with the corp communications team.  They cull our newsletter for information that they can readily share with the entire corp.  Their newsletter has more clout than ours.”

So, what do you think are the best communications strategies for getting customer knowledge into the brains of decision makers?  I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below.

The idea of involving lead users in innovation is not a new one – it’s been gaining traction over the last few years, with suppliers popping up to help companies harness the ideas of experts and key customers when designing new products or service offerings. (And it’s been a popular subject of MREB research.)What if we adopted the principle behind that idea – that something created in collaboration with your target audience is more likely to be attractive to that audience – and applied it to communication?

We recently profiled a company who adopted a similar approach to designing insight communications.  Their research team works with key business partners to co-create stories about the customer, based on insights and experience. This builds resonance into the story, and makes it that much more appealing to other business partners.

A couple of nice bonuses? Stories are more easily remembered, and collaborators are eager to share stories that they feel a sense of ownership for – turning collaborators into “evangelists” for Research.

The company also takes advantage of collateral that is created during the process – the storyboards they create remain intact for people to be walked through, and a video of the final story is used as a storytelling aid. These media make it practically easier for people to share stories, and their interactivity only increases the “stickiness” of the story.

MREB members, read the details of this story co-creation process.

This week, our colleague Patrick Spenner of the Marketing Leadership Council shares his perspective on B2B marketing issues for 2012.

Each year, MLC surveys our members about their top challenges looking ahead.  As we read the tea leaves in the survey results, here are our thoughts on what’s creeping into (or storming) the B2B marketing consciousness for 2012.

1. Voice-of-Customer 2.0. Marketers are grappling with what kinds of customer data are most important to collect and how to make hay out of the data.  This topic received the most “top priority” votes by a big margin, so we’re making it the subject of MLC’s primary research initiative in 2012.Early hypothesis from the MLC study team: marketers are over-investing in collecting and analyzing data about the customer, and not enough in gathering information and insight about customer context, which is critical for generating commercial insight (see #5 below)
2. Skillset Reset. There’s a creeping sense among B2B CMO’s that their marketing teams are in need of a capability overhaul.  With the rise of “no man’s land” in the mid-funnel (you can read more about it in MLC’s 2011 research) and rapid changes how buying centers are making purchase decisions, out-of-date marketing skillsets are being laid bare.As one example of B2B marketing teams aggressively managing the skillset transition, consider the example of Cisco starting to “badge” and reward its marketers on their social media impact.   I wrote about this in a blog post on the Present and Future of B2B Social Media.

   Ask yourself: how sweet/spooky would it be for 20% of your pay to rest on your social graph?

3. Disruption. Uncertainty is the lurking leviathan swimming beneath the surface of commerce these days (cheery, no?)  This came through in our survey loud and clear, as the third most popular topic was how to manage risk in changing customer buying behavior, emerging markets, technology and the like.  All we can suggest here is to build your house out of bricks, not sticks.  In commercial terms, that means delivering insight to customers (see #1 and #5).  Read more about how Research helps identify the right insights to teach in Supporting Sales: Embedding Insight into the Sales Process.
4. Going Global. I wouldn’t call it new, but the Global Marketing topic continues to be a top priority for the half of the MLC membership that doesn’t see a continued growth run in Western economies.  See MLC’s resources on global marketing organization structure, and then get ready for new best practice case studies, showcase profiles and tools to help marketing leaders manage the global transition, due in Q1 2012.  And check out MREB’s new resource center for specifics on Research Supporting Global Business Needs.
5. Content Marketing Hits the Breaking Point. As marketing automation, segmentation and targeting continue to evolve and penetrate marketing activities, there comes a tipping point at which creating version X+5 of an email for sub-segment Y  to be delivered at trigger Z in the lead nurture program simply becomes unsustainable.  We believe many marketers on the content marketing train will hit this point, to be followed by a period of navel gazing, to be followed by a period of content rationalization, to be followed (depressingly) by content proliferation again.Smarter angle: the answer isn’t more content, it’s commercial insight.  Cut off the long tail of content creation (those white papers are languishing out there, anyway) and re-invest the time and energy into insights that can fuel “commercial teaching”.  MLC and its sister program, the Sales Executive Council, have written extensively on this go-to-market approach.  Commercial insights trump relevant messaging all day long as drivers of loyalty and purchase in the B2B space.  This is the rocket fuel of successful go-to-market strategies these days, and it’s the heart of what makes the Challenger Sale work.

Mobile! Just kidding.  Not ready for primetime for most B2Bs…yet.  We’re seeing more near-term value creation from mobile as a sales tool than for marketing purposes.  Maybe 2013…

MLC will be doing research in most all of these areas in 2012.  If you’ve got expertise in any of these areas, we’d love to chat.  Please email me: pspenner@executiveboard.com.  Or, if you want to share your point-of-view on 2012, drop in a comment below.

Guest blogger Christopher Frank is the co-author of Drinking from the Fire Hose: Making Smarter Decisions Without Drowning in Information (Portfolio/Penguin, September 2011). He previously spent 10 years at Microsoft as senior director of corporate research, worked at Accenture as a consultant in the consumer and technology practices, and founded an online start-up called Drei Tauben Ltd.  @chris_j_frank  

Imagine yourself in a conference room, 20 minutes into a meeting when the presenter finally makes it to slide four of a 42-slide deck. At least you can read this one, unlike the others, which were crammed with numbers and charts. You look around wondering if anyone else is following the presentation. Rather than searching hopelessly for one relevant piece of information, what you really desire are insights to see clearly into complex situations. 

Regardless of your industry, job or target customer, we have become data hounds. The business climate worships numbers – and rightly so since figures hold weight. Facts are supposed to make you more confident in your decision and certain of your direction. However, in our information economy, the challenge lies in keeping your head above the flood of data, learning how to separate real information from disparate facts and applying the judgment to inspire others to act.

The goal seems easy: identify the data you need, use the information to yield fresh insights and then deliver the new learning to fuel growth. Then why is it so hard? It seems like every meeting and conference call becomes a futile effort to survive the data deluge. In essence, data is unfortunately the main character and any meaningful dialogue is a supporting cast member. Given the increasing pace of data flowing at decision makers and the business survival challenges facing companies, this needs to change and change quickly.

Putting Yourself Through Data Rehab
How do you find the truly essential nuggets of information and use them with confidence to make decisions and effectively lead your teams? The answer, ironically enough, is found in asking questions. The right questions help leaders zero in on the most important information to keep strategic initiatives on track and drive team progress and innovation.

We identified seven core questions – not complex analytical questions learned in business school, but a product of business experience. Read More »

We hear from a great many of our member companies that in this slow-growth economic environment, they are looking to new markets for growth, which often means an increased international focus.  Global success, however, doesn’t come easy.  McKinsey & Company recently published an article entitled, “Understanding your globalization penalty,” based on research showing that multinational companies are generally less healthy (e.g., innovative, aligned around common goals) than their less global counterparts. 

The latest cross-functional research effort here at the Corporate Executive Board provides additional insight into the source of the difficulty – and potential solutions.  Too many international growth efforts focus only on market-level investments, failing to address how corporate center functions need to adapt.  Members can download this study and review support resources here.

So, is your company – and is your team – ready to capture global opportunities?  I can recommend four ways to address this question:

1)      Take CEB’s Assessing Global Readiness Diagnostic.  Learn what attributes characterize a globally ready corporate center, and assess how your organization stacks up.  Participants get a custom analysis of their responses and suggested resources for further learning and developing an improvement strategy. 

2)      Compare your team’s current organization and processes to MREB best practices for supporting global business needs.  Learn from global leaders such as Reckitt Benckiser, Nestlé, and DuPont. 

3)      Explore and manage opportunities for offshoring market research.  While many business processes are routinely sent to staff in low-wage countries, client-side market research staff are more frequently been located in the markets where the company sells its products and services.  But offshoring can be an opportunity.  MREB members click here to use the Board’s Sourcing Decision Tool and obtain practical advice for managing an offshore team. 

4)      See whether you follow the three imperatives for successfully managing dispersed teams: engage remote staff, personalize career support, and foster knowledge sharing.  Learn from leaders such as Wells Fargo and Kellogg’s. 

Any global challenges you face not addressed here?  Please let me know.  Also, I’d be interested in your own success stories in navigating the challenges of providing market research to a global business.

“Our messages just aren’t getting through the clutter.” “It’s really hard to get people’s attention with insight.” “There’s no way my team can reach everyone with the targeted approach that really works for getting people to understand insights.”

Sound familiar? Communicating insight is one of the biggest challenges for many Research teams, and one of the most important to tackle – even the smartest, most innovative insights have no value if they aren’t understood by the company.

We recently profiled one company’s Research and Communications partnership. The Research team there works with the Communications team to disseminate insight-based messaging to internal audiences.

The key to making this work? Researchers take a crucial, easily-missed step when they filter the information passed to Communications – ensuring that the essential pieces are included, but that there isn’t so much information that the key points are lost or muddled.

MREB Members, learn more about the template Research uses to pass the right information to Communications.

Globalization is not a new phenomenon but its dramatic acceleration is. In fact, during the downturn, many companies have turned to international markets as a feasible approach to expand, increase profits and divide risks. However, at times instead of profits many companies face deep losses, cultural disconnect and even consumer hostility. So, why is it that successful large multi-national companies seem to get their global strategy wrong?

It seems the question most companies forget to ask themselves is — are we suitably equipped to meet the needs of the global consumer? Today, companies are challenged by consumers at their own game. As consumers are exposed to global trends and advances in technology, their demands and expectations from companies (local and international) are increasing — they want companies to do away with the “one size fits all” approach and build products that serve their needs.

While companies must be responsive to local needs, for successful global expansion and local penetration establishing a dedicated research team at every point of presence is not a viable option for companies.

MREB’s research shows that leading companies are establishing processes to leverage learnings and resources to benefit from research units spread across countries. In fact, by collaborating efforts, global research teams provide unparalleled research support and boost company competitiveness through cost management and knowledge sharing.

Learn more in MREB’s study Supporting Global Business Needs on how leading global companies optimize their Research teams globally to support their growing business needs by:

1. Proactively share research insights and best practices to avoid research duplication.
2. Strategically align researchers to geographic markets based on business need—not researcher location.
3. Equipping regional business units to handle certain aspects of research independently.

My colleague at the Marketing Leadership Council Patrick Spenner recently wrote on Forbes.com warning CMOs about the big data hype: In MLC’s recent survey of CMOs across the globe, Big Data ranked as one of the top 3 issues on their minds. 

And our own study revealed that 60% of business partners feel that they do NOT have the support and tools needed to be customer focused.  And yet this is just the support decision makers need more than ever as they wrestle with the prospect of Big Data.  Indeed, the MLC work found that close to two-thirds of the marketing team is likely to experience “analysis-paralysis” in the face of the data deluge.

We found that research’s role is changing as information proliferates, and that functions are now evolving from insight consultants to knowledge inculcators.  This means that researchers must work harder than ever to ensure business partners are using insights to inform their decisions.

We recently asked leading organizations how to drive business partner engagement with knowledge, and they tackle the problem with two strategies:

1. Use existing information flows-partner with the Communications team and business partners themselves to make sure that your insights will resonate throughout the organization
2. Correct overconfidence and misperceptions-tap business partners’ emotions to create internal dissonance that demonstrates the value of new information

These two strategies will make information more memorable, ensuring that your insights (from Big Data or not) will truly become Big Insights that impact your company’s actions. 

MREB members, log on to see how companies like GM, Intuit, Heinz, and Telecom NZ drive engagement with knowledge.

Sales expert Tom Searcy recently outlined four tips to ensure recipients read and act upon your email on cbsnews.com:

1. Declare action requests up front
2. Use email for transactions: if you need to write out context and details draft a letter and attach it to the email
3. Write the email assuming your mom will read it at a press conference
4. Read every email twice before you hit send

I definitely follow the press conference test and the re-read imperative, but those of you who have received emails from me know that his steps 1 and 2 are not necessarily a strong-suit for me.  I just cannot imagine typing “Action Requests” after my salutation and listing to-do’s like Tom advises. 

Should I (and others) be treating emails as transactional correspondence, with an ultimate goal of getting the entire message into the subject line, as Tom recommends?  It seems so curt to me…but perhaps it helps folks see what needs to be seen, learn what needs to be learned, and take action in the right direction?

I’d love to hear what you think…should we be striving for such directness in our daily emails?  Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

MREB members, for perspective on effective communication, not limited to email guidelines, check out our Communication and Consultation resources and our brand new center on Driving Engagement with Knowledge.

 By Aaron Field

Saturday Night Live really gets market research. Why else would they invent Einstein Express? “When it absolutely, positively, has to be there the day before yesterday.”

It is absolutely true that executives should think ahead of time so we can do quality research. It is also absolutely true that they do not. In fact the problem is even worse. Strategic decisions are much more likely to be urgent.

Worrying stat of the day: Important = Urgent

17% of relatively unimportant decisions are considered highly urgent. But a whopping 55% of important decisions are highly urgent in the eyes of executives.

So we need to be fast or strategic decisions will slip past. Two ways Research is beginning to cope:

Use existing information to quickly answer urgent requests. Motorola Mobility uses quick-fire teams to draw together existing information. How fast is it? They deliver fact-based information in as little as 24 – 48 hours.  Here is a really telling result. They’ve seen a dramatic increase in the number of strategic requests. Because executives have the new confidence that Research runs at the pace of business.

Doing fast research: In the ideal world I would have a well-balanced, representative sample for all research. But pulse surveys, expert networks, and MROC’s are custom-made for directional information without the wait. And it’s not like executives aren’t doing it already. DIY research (aptly named SurveyMonkey) or even worse – chatting with random customers.

The classic research project is both more precise and reliable – in short more right. But today the absent of right isn’t wrong – it is irrelevance. It makes me very uncomfortable as a researcher but fast is as important as right. The most impactful research departments are learning to be a little bit of both.

MREB members, learn more about Motorola Mobility’s Quick-Fire teams here.