This week I present the last of a series of posts sharing results from surveys on our Primary Research Forum.  (check out past posts on communication trends, data collection trends, and scattered research teams)

Our members weighed in on their biggest priorities as they work to become more of a strategic partner in their organization, and the response rate shows that this goal resonates well with researchers, but the action plan for how to get there isn’t as consistent:

Taking a look at the three most popular priorities:

1. Getting business partners more engaged in the insight generation process—as with most business initiatives, getting stakeholders involved early does improve the uptake of results, and we’ve seen some research departments gain a lot from looping their partners involved in the process.  In one example, Eli Lilly trains its line partners on insight generation to help them create, understand, and apply insights to achieve growth.
2. Ensuring that research is focused on projects that matter—the ever-popular Issue Sensing and Agenda Planning: we have an entire topic center on our Web site devoted to it!  And the key here is to not only diagnose their issues properly, but to also have some proactive issue sensing in place to make sure you’re addressing the needs that business partners don’t even know that they have.
3. Understanding the drivers of business impact—knowing what your partners are looking for to create impact means that you yourself will create impact.  We’ve worked with line partners to understand, in general, Research’s highest value activities, but you also have to examine your individual organization to identify specific business drivers.  We’ve seen this work at Amway, which identified core business drivers and now transforms product-specific research into compelling answers for strategic concerns.

So, what do you think?  Did we miss any priorities that will help Research functions become more strategic?  Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Around this time of the year, you see a proliferation of two types of articles: “Best of [this year]” and “Predictions for [next year].” I thought, why not jump on this bandwagon? So here, based on industry news, recent research, and conversations with members, are MREB’s Top 5 Trends to Watch Out For in 2012.

1. From Insight Consultant to Knowledge Inculcator: In a recent quant study, we surveyed decision-makers to uncover the characteristics of the information that they find valuable when making customer-facing decisions. What we found was pretty sobering – the decisions best informed by a consultative research process account for only 10% of the value of all decisions made at your company. The characteristics of valuable information, and experiences of leading Market Research functions, suggests a new impactful role for Research: increasing the customer acumen of the business. The “knowledge inculcator” engages organization-wide decision-makers with novel and contrarian knowledge to help them internalize the most essential information.
2. Synthesis improves corporate agility and knowledge: Support urgent decisions by creating new insights without spending time collecting data. Rather than launch new projects to address business needs, many functions devote formal time to synthesizing and updating existing information to create holistic, easily accessible knowledge for organizational use. This trend has been gaining steam for some years, and will only increase in the next – as business change speeds up and Research moves towards a currency of knowledge over data.
3. Broadening data inputs: We predict that traditional methodologies like focus groups and surveys will continue to decline as a percentage of your total data inputs. It’s not that they’ll be replaced by new methodologies – no matter what suppliers claim – but that more time will be spent integrating methodologies to get to deeper insight.
4. Big Data ≠ Big Action: Technological enhancements have made it easier than ever to collect data and the press has been (mostly) trumpeting the benefits that solid data will have for decisions. Unfortunately, access to ever-increasing quantities of data does not automatically equate to better decisions. The need for incorporating data analytics into traditional research, as well as smart analysis and business translation, will be more necessary than ever to turn information into actionable insights.
5. Emerging markets are for understanding, not offshoring: A continued focus on globalization will lead to more research on the consumers in emerging markets, but less staffing in them.  The gains from offshoring market research activities to countries like India have plateaued, with the challenges of managing an offshore team often stymieing the benefits.

What do you think? Leave a comment if you have a 6th trend – or a bone to pick with one of the above!

“Open bar!” “Attendees will be automatically entered in a raffle to win an iPod.” “Lunch will be provided.” “Open this e-mail to claim your cash prize!”

We’ve all seen these tactics used to try to get people to show up somewhere or read something – I’m sure you can think of even more! Vague promises of value aimed at people’s stomach, wallet, or techie desires seem to be very popular in getting people’s attention.

Market Research often faces the challenge of getting people to pay attention to research – especially when working with people who have strong confidence in their already-existing view of customers. Why should they be interested in learning when they know everything they need to know already?

How to get around this challenge? Show people that they actually don’t know everything already – and even that what they “know” is wrong. A new niggling feeling of doubt, or outright shock, goes a long way in provoking interest in learning. Pull those emotional levers – surprise, doubt, wonder, intrigue – and grab their attention.

MREB members, read more about how Heinz and Iconoculture use emotions to create interest in learning opportunities.

Researcher Spotlight: Joel Ombry

Recently Joel Ombry at Amway shared his insights on two passions with us—triathlons and synthesis. Joel has served 20 years in research roles in both the public and private sector. He currently is the Manager of Segment Strategy and Planning in the Global Sales Division at Amway Corp. The views in this piece are solely his own and do not reflect those of Amway Corp.

One of the hot topics in marketing research today is the notion of “synthesis.” I put synthesis in quotes because it’s not well defined and can mean different things to different people. For our purposes here, I define it as “the combination of data collected through different methodologies into an integrated story around a research question.” Similarly, a triathlon is a single event combining multiple sports into an integrated effort.

In triathlon, you must have basic competence in each event or you may not successfully complete the race. In synthesis, you need a basic competence in multiple methodologies or you may not produce useful insight.

But how does one approach this? What are some ways in which researchers can start down this path? Triathlon offers several lessons for research analysts and managers in dealing with the “multisport” research challenge.

The first thing to understand is to know that there will be pain but also know that it will pass.  And you should always use training partners.  Click here for the full text to learn more.

I’m a bit behind on my holiday shopping (And apparently I’m not the only one – more than 40 percent of consumers plan to shop between Dec. 21 and Dec. 24 for holiday gifts). It’s not that I can’t find anything for the people on my list—rather, there’s too much of everything, everywhere. Brands, retailers, and it seems like all of the internet are trying to catch my attention with brightly decorated storefronts, carol singing banner ads, and email offers.

As difficult as I sometimes find this wealth of choice, I know that this market fragmentation is even more difficult for the retailers and brands seeking my attention and business amongst the flashing lights and glittering coupons being offered by competitors. In this environment:  

• Retailers have to work harder to maintain customer share in the face of new specialty shops and the internet shopping boom. (Internet shopping really is booming this season – U.S. buyers spent $733 million bargain-hunting on “Cyber Monday,” up 21 percent from a year earlier)
• Brands must work harder to get their messages to potential customers. Traditional advertizing and outreach tools such as television are losing potency, and figuring out where and when your customers will be is tricky.

Manufacturers and retailers, looking to navigate the increasingly complicated marketplace, have sought opportunities for collaboration through shopper insights functions—the research function within a company that seek to better understand customer shopping behavior, and work with retailers to implement ideas to improve sales.

This is a win-win opportunity for both manufacturers and retailers:

• Retailers, who have too many categories and customers to do custom research on all, get help learning about shopping behavior and opportunities in specific categories.
• Manufacturers are able to advance their brand in store settings, which is becoming one of the few places where they know customers will be interacting with their brands.

We at the Market Research Executive Board are working on a forthcoming paper on shopper insights that will explore how to make manufacturer-retailer collaboration mutually beneficial.  More information available here.

So stay tuned! And in the interim, “Merry Christmas to All and to All a Good Insight”

For the past few weeks I’ve been looking back at topics addressed on our Primary Research Forum, and have already shared some interesting trends in communication and data collection.  Today, let’s take a look at just how scattered your research team is (literally, as in where you guys are located).

We asked forum members how dispersed their teams were, and only 29% of respondents said that their entire team was located in the same office.  It seems that most teams report into the same person, but not all under the same roof:

For those of you on a (geographically) scattered team, we have identified three imperatives for successful team management:

1. Improve Employee Engagement
2. Provide Career Support
3. Foster Knowledge Sharing

At a more tactical level, we’ve found that many teams with dispersed researchers rely on some form of research standards and guidelines to create more consistency in output:

MREB members, check out how Unilever improved resource flexibility by enforcing research standards and how Capital One better supports decision making with a defined research product suite.

A recent article asserts that analytics is the only sustainable source of competitive advantage in today’s markets. The author argues that Michael Porter’s Five Sources of Competitive Advantage are more vulnerable today due to the competitions’ heightened ability to imitate companies, invade market niches, and quickly cut costs. Analytics, he argues, is the foundation for quicker (and more accurate) decision-making, which is the ultimate defense against competitors – so companies need to get over their hesitancy in leveraging business analytics.

Market Research has both an interest in better and faster decision-making and analytics. Company data is indeed a rich source of information on companies, and we do have more technological tools that allow us to build models and extract valuable information from what can otherwise be an overwhelming data dump.

But analytics can pose a huge challenge Research as well as anyone else trying to make decisions from data. Sure, data can tell you what is happening – but it can’t tell you why. Being alerted to potential issues, or potential opportunities, is certainly important. But stopping at that point of data observation and making a decision is dangerous except in the most tactical of cases – in most situations, it’s necessary to answer the question why? Why is the data showing up like this? Then you can make decisions that will address the underlying problem, or take full advantage of the underlying insight.

To answer that “why” question, you have to layer in other Market Research methodologies – those that are designed to test hypotheses – and get to the level of consumer psychology.

MREB  members: learn more about integrating analytics with other methodologies and see examples from Clorox, Tesco, Adobe, and FedEx.

MREB members: learn more about structuring analytics teams and see examples from Caterpillar and the Home Depot.

My colleagues at the Sales Executive Council recently published The Challenger Sale, a new book that confronts conventional wisdom in the sales function by showing that the best salespeople don’t just build relationships with customers, they challenge them.

In the book, Matt Dixon and Brent Adamson show that the best sales reps focus on pushing customers’ thinking, illuminating problems customers don’t even know exist and solutions to those issues.  I’ve blogged before about how Research is in a great position to identify what reps should be teaching, but I’ve also been struck by how the idea of challenging translates to the world of research communication.

A traditional consultative research department has the most impact on difficult but not urgent decisions, a group that accounts for only 10% of the value of all decisions made at the typical company.  So how do you increase your impact on the company?  You have to overcome entrenched beliefs and corporate overconfidence. 

And just like our colleagues in sales, challenging may be the posture to take—to correct misperceptions you need to create an internal dissonance that demonstrates the value of new information.

Stay tuned as we blog more about how researchers can challenge conventional wisdom and provoke interest in the coming weeks.  In the meantime, see if you have what it takes to be a challenger…put yourself in your sales reps’ shoes and play the Challenger Sale Game.

Office gossip. Hushed conversations at the water cooler, in cubicles, behind closed office doors. We’ve all seen it, heard it, and, let’s admit it, participated in it! The “grapevine” is unstoppable.

But it’s not just rumors and scandals being shared, is it? Think about the real information that you get from co-workers – it goes beyond restaurant recommendations and movie reviews (sidenote: “My Week with Marilyn” was a real treat).  Colleagues are accessible, immediate, and trusted sources for customer information, and the informal network is one of the most efficient ways that information is passed along in organizations.

That might strike terror into the Market Researcher’s heart: can you imagine how accurate that information is? While “crowd-sourcing” might be trendy, people’s experiences are liable to all sorts of biases that Research knows to avoid – exactly what is the “grapevine” saying?

While it may be tempting to shut down or limit the grapevine in response, instead, make it work for you! Small tweaks to your communication – informed by research undertaken by our sister council, the Communications Executive Council – can increase the likelihood that people will pass along YOUR information the next time they’re chatting with their co-workers.

MREB members, learn more about how to create flow-friendly communication.

PsyBlog recently posted results from two surveys that show the impressive power of a stranger’s knowledge of us.  One of the experiments recorded two estimates on how much respondents would enjoy a cookie:

1. The respondents imagined themselves eating the cookie
2. Other participants guessed based on the respondents’ facial expressions as they first see the cookie

Scarily enough, the strangers had a more accurate estimate of the respondent’s pleasure eating the cookie than the respondents themselves estimated.  This seems to underscore observations many of us have recorded in the world of market research: what (well-meaning) customers tell us and what they actually feel and end up doing don’t always match.

We first wrote on this topic more than 8 years ago with a brief on qualitative and social research techniques.   As the years have gone by, we’ve seen research seek to understand unarticulated opinions and needs with new technology.  From emotional and observational research to using social media for market research, our struggle to understand hidden behavior drivers is getting more and more technical.

It could be that the next stop on our trip toward better customer understanding will take us right to neuroscience’s door.  A recent poll question on our discussion forum found that although the majority of researchers are not yet using technology like facial coding and brain scanning, there is a growing interest in the field.

So what do you think?  Are you concerned about articulated versus un-articulated customer opinions?  If so, how do you work to dig deeper with your research?  And do you think that understanding how customers actually feel will really help you change customer behavior?  We’d love to hear about your thoughts in the comments section below.