Pocketbooks across the country are feeling a bit squeezed. Personal financial counselors tout the importance of “spending wisely” – thinking about what you really must spend on and cutting out unnecessary extras. This advice applies equally to personal finances and research function budgeting. By figuring out what research projects are strategically important, shopper insights can stretch a small budget to have big impact.

ConAgra Foods’ shopper insights department approached the research agenda setting process by implementing a retailer-manufacturer Co-Business Planning process which delivers specific actionable research findings to a wide variety of retailer partners.

Here are the steps they take:

1. Figure out what they want: Through a series of meetings, ConAgra Foods develops an understanding of the strategic priorities of its key retail partners, and associated research needs.
2. Look for overlaps with what you want: Research interests are then tested against internal capacity, and projects are selected based on areas where retailer interests overlap with ConAgra’s strategic priorities.
3. Look for overlaps in what they want: When the planning process shows that multiple retailers are looking for similar information, work is conducted as foundational research than can be repackaged for multiple retailers.

By developing customer learning plans in conjunction with retailers and internal business partners, shopper insights at ConAgra Foods is able to determine and produce insights and actionable recommendations that retail partners will be interested and engaged in.   

Additional information about ConAgra’s Co-Business Planning process is available in our new whitepaper, Boosting the Impact of Shopper Insights.

The same agenda setting principles can be applied by consumer insights teams – ConAgra’s Customer Learning Plan process is a shopper insights-specific example of a tested consumer insights learning process. Johnson and Johnson’s Strategy-Driven learning agenda process to identify company-level known’s and unknowns is similar in its structure and approach.

Related blogs:

• Setting Up a Shopper Insights Shop
• Santa Won’t Do Your Insight-Shopping for You

Shopping is something we all do every day. Be it picking up a newspaper on the way to work, buying groceries for the week, or investing in a new computer, regular purchases are so integral to everyday living that we may often forget just how important and frequent shopping is. But, shopper insights functions haven’t forgotten! These functions serve as the research function within a consumer goods company that seeks to better understand shopping behavior and work with retailers to develop and implement ideas to improve sales. And with all the shopping we are doing, they are very busy!

Shopper Insights functions have responsibilities that are different from consumer/brand insights teams:

1. Figure out what the shoppers are doing and thinking!

• Shopper insights teams seek to understand the shopping behavior of a retail partner’s consumers at the shelf, store, and sometimes category levels. 

2. Deliver insights to retailer

• Shopper insights teams work closely with Category Management, Sales, and sometimes Shopper Marketing to produce insights designed to attract the interest of retail partners.

3. Work to share knowledge and findings with the brand/consumer insights function and the broader business

• Insights about how consumers act in a store setting can impact the internal business partners traditionally served by consumer insights functions.

Leading shopper insights departments are developing new organizational structures and processes to help them achieve all of these goals. A recent Market Research Executive Board paper describes two different ways companies organized to achieve these same goals:

• ConAgra Foods developed an organizational structure to facilitate for cross-functional collaboration and developed processes for research sharing
• Hershey’ s developed an organizational structure to facilitate knowledge sharing and developed processes for cross-functional collaboration

Details about how these companies set up their Shopper Insights functions are available in our new whitepaper, Boosting the Impact of Shopper Insights.

Have you ever looked at yourself in a funhouse mirror – the type with curves in the glass that found at a carnival or fair – you can recognize the general outline of yourself, but it doesn’t really look like you. For market researchers working in new overseas markets, the experience can be similar. Although the basics of the market research discipline and general habits of customers and consumers may be recognizable, the details are vastly different.

The Market Research Executive Board recently conducted research on Russia’s markets and strategies for conducting a successful Market Research study in the region. Many things that a market researcher may think he knows look very different when viewed through the international looking glass in Russia.

Market Differences: Russian markets vs. western developed markets:

1. Big vs. Bigger

• The United States and Europe are big markets that cover a lot of geographic area, but Russia is a huge country, with a land mass 1.8 times larger than the United States. Market researchers in Russia should focus on Moscow and other large cities which house most of the population and have the necessary infrastructure to support research and product launches.

2. Rich adults vs. rich kids

• In western countries, market researchers find that wealth and spending increases with age. Because the market economy is so new in Russia, younger customers have grown up in the market economy, while older generations lived under the Soviet Union, leaving older generations not on the top of the consumer spending/market curve in Russia. 

Differences in research practices: Market Research in Russia vs. western developed markets: Read 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”

In Moneyball Brad Pitt turns a tiny little team into a huge success. How so? The power of analysis! Too good to be true? We think not.

We know that companies that understand their market will outperform competitors, and for our companies we are the voice of superior customer understanding.

A recent Market Research Executive Board survey asked 291 senior and junior level business line partners whether they believe that “Customer Focus is Critical to My Company’s success”. The answer was overwhelmingly yes, with 95% of both Senior- and Junior-level decision makers strongly agreeing or agreeing with the statement. 

So we are all on the same page in thinking that customer focus is important. But is it empirically?

A stream of research on Market Orientation has sought to examine a linkage between a focus on markets and customers and company performance (See The Capabilities of Market-Driven Organizations, George Day, The Journal of Marketing, October 1994; The Effect of a Market Orientation on Business Profitability, Naver and Slater, 1990). General consensus amongst these academic articles is yes, “Market orientation positively affects various measures of performance, such as overall business performance, profits, sales, and market share” (Market Orientation: A Meta-Analytic Review and Assessment of Its Antecedents and Impact on Performance, Kirca, Jayachandran, & Bearden, Journal of Marketing, April 2005).

Great. So it does matter, but can we show that the Market Research Department is pivotal in this relationship?

In the same survey of business decision makers, we asked whether they believed that their “MR Department Is a Thought Partner”. Answers were fairly dispersed:

Market Research is a Thought Partner

We took this information from survey contributors, and matched it against data showing the performance of their companies relative to other companies in their industries (S&P 1500 Industry Indexes, ratio of 5 year total shareholder return for company to industry average, n=85 companies), and the results were in the best possible way unsurprising:

Ratio of company to industry performance, separated by “Market Research is a Thought Partner” responses:

Those companies where company decision makers believe that market research is a thought partner have been performing better relative to others in their industries. Everyone can quibble with the data but the point is – lots of different studies agree. Customer focus drives business success.

So how can Market Research achieve valuable thought partner status, and achieve shareholder returns for their company?

In the Analysis and Insight topic center on the Market Research Executive Board website, we lay out several ways to create an environment conducive to insight generation, get beyond conventional wisdom, and Increase researchers’ ability to convert insights into compelling recommendations for business partners.

My office building is pretty big. We had a recent earthquake here on the east coast, and while evacuating down 20 packed flights of stairs, I saw a lot of new faces.

Unfortunately, it’s pretty easy to feel lost in a big office. Multiple offices, each with their own management, can often seem to be populated with employees from a completely different planet, and communication and cooperation can be difficult.

A recent Forbes piece “Are CIOs From Mars? If So, It’s Time for CMOs to Visit”, talked about the importance and difficulty in coordinating strategy between marketing and IT

In today’s environment, with digital marketing and internet data collection central to company strategy, these two departments should be working extra hard to ensure they’re on common ground.

Unfortunately, as the article points out, this is often easier described in theory than in practice. CIO’s and CMO’s often think differently about problems, and have their own distinct goals. So, if “CIO’s are from Mars,” as the author suggests, then market research should be working to translate Martian tongue into something useful for the company:

1. Organize information in a way that’s clear and easy for both IT and Business Partners

FedEx’s research team, when trying to think about how best to gather and use information for the company, came up with a means for organizing and gathering information around a customer pathway—looking at what operation metrics influence customer metrics, and what customer metrics influence financial metrics. Research was able to help organize information and recommendations around operational metrics that the business already understands and trusts, and spur action with demonstratable financial outcomes.

2. Delegate responsibilities amongst departments correctly

Lincoln Financial’s IT team struggled to understand data requirements of the company, and business partners struggled to get relevant and important information from the IT team. The Market Research department was able to step in and lighten the IT load—allowing it to focus only on technical issues, while the Researchers were able to apply their business acumen to analyzing data and its implications for 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.

Your favorite book, the magazine sitting by your briefcase, and the blog you read each morning each have something in common – they’re interesting, they tell a story, and they’re read. Unfortunately, as researchers, we sometimes get lost in numbers and information, and forget that resonance and impact depends on readability and interest.

So how can we take the mass of information successfully collected on a topic and turn it into a coherent story? By thinking openly, and letting creative juices flow:

In a recent Southern Business Journal article, Visualize your Business, the author lays out a strategy for infusing creativity into the business by “going back to kindergarten” – using crayons, markers, and big sheets of paper to visualize ideas. Grey suggests a quick easy process for making connections:

1. Identify the topic or issue
2. Draw a picture that represents that topic on the center of a page
3. Draw any images related to the topic around the image
4. Highlight keywords
5. Illustrate connections

There are other ways age-appropriate ways to find and see connections and develop story flow in a pile of information. In Increasing the Effectiveness of Synthesis Efforts, the Market Research Executive Board describes how some researchers are aided by:

• Online brainstorming programs
• Mind Mapping
• Movable sticky notes

Once ideas are on paper, it’s fairly easy to draft narrative and end up with a product that will make it to the top of the company reading list.

How big is your research department?

A logical response to this question would be to tally up the number of staff, or describe how large your budget is. But the heart and soul of a research department is its insights and information. And research departments have A LOT of information!

The best research departments regularly package and repackage their information into synthesis products, bringing together information from a variety of sources to create a cohesive story.

But the wealth of information is also a challenge. How do we know what we know?

4 steps at the beginning of a synthesis project:

1. Start Broad: Research has a lot of information available, and though there may be a temptation to limit ourselves to “popular” findings, or the newest projects, the initial stages of an information pull should center around going as broad as possible – it would not be unusual to pull an average of 40 sources and a researcher may pull as many as 80–100 sources in a synthesis sweep. Not to kill ourselves! A practical tip is only reading the project summary.
2. Skim and squint: A good synthesis reads paints the forest more than the trees. The “skim and squint” approach notices the details but focuses us on the broad understanding. It’s never too early for the big picture.
3. Ask Around: Looking to subject matter experts outside of the research department allows for diversity of opinion and information.  GM developed an informal network of experts, identified by auditing existing relevant reports and seeking candidates in relevant functions.
4. Prepare ahead of time:  Research departments that have already organized their information for publication to the business in a research portal will have an easier time finding information for their own purposes. Adobe Systems Inc. organize their Goldmine research portal into 13 supertopics and the relevant subtopics and tagged projects by more than 1,000 topic areas.

Related Resources:

• Increasing the Effectiveness of Synthesis Efforts
• GM’s Informal Intelligence Network
• Adobe’s Goldmine Research Portal

Related Blogs:

• Don’t Be Right – Be Interesting

There’s no greater feeling than seeing your work eagerly consumed.

And there’s no worse pit in your stomach when good work goes nowhere. I’ve had a few of these and, happily, a few more of the first ones.

With proactive synthesis the problem is really tough because we need to guess the right topic – a report they didn’t ask for but deeply want. No problem – I have my Ouija board here somewhere (did you know it is a registered trademark of Hasbro Inc.?)

I’ve been talking with people who’ve hit the nail on the head in selecting synthesis topics (and a few who’ve learned from near misses). And I couldn’t agree more with this:

“I am increasingly of the view that very few people read anything… [therefore] you need to start off with a message that helps them do their job.”

-          Research Director, Johnson & Johnson

The complete answer is in Increasing the Effectiveness of Synthesis Efforts. Here’s a few highlights:

1. Be Strategically Tactical:

Synthesizers like Alticor find topics that are important to the company but immediately applicable to mid-level people. Often it is C-suite strategy making its way down to various parts of the business.

2. Don’t Be Obvious:

The best research refutes common misconceptions, resolve debates, or explains the inexplicable. So companies like Johnson and Johnson use an information inventory template to determine company-level known’s and unknowns and developed a work agenda around unknown topics.

3. When in Doubt – Ask:

Friendly business partners are a great source for feedback on proposed synthesis topics. Levi Strauss used a structured interview process to monitor stakeholder beliefs from a major segmentation project.

Additional information can be found in Increasing the Effectiveness of Synthesis Efforts and Internal Issue Partner Diagnosis