More than a few times a month, I find myself working with members to define what the next generation of Research looks like for their organization.  These conversations take all different forms, as you can imagine.  For some, they want to look at next-generation skills.  What skillsets should they emphasize as they work to transition their teams from data providers to insights professionals?  For others, it’s often a conversation around evolving their vision or mission as a function – or even renaming or rebranding the Research department. 

Like the function itself, we’re seeing many of our members evolve the name or brand that they use to describe their functions.  In fact, while our brand, the Market Research Executive Board®, has stayed consistent during our 10+ years of existence, many of our members no longer call themselves “Market Research.”  We did an informal poll late last year and estimate that about half of our members lead functions with the name “Market Research”.  Our membership now includes Insights, Intelligence, Analytics, and Customer Knowledge functions, and I’d invite you to leave a comment below to let us know what other names exist for Research within our membership.  While the names vary, the responsibilities and areas of focus tend to remain consistent, with a majority of our members working to position themselves as strategic partners. 

So what’s in a name anyway?

Some of our members rename their functions to more accurately describe the value they provide to the business.  Market Research, for example, can imply a focus on process and data instead of insights and decision making.  With most of our members aiming to be more than “data providers,” a rebranding often makes sense.

As part of our work on Embedding Customer Knowledge into the Business, we identified three different eras or phases for Research.  Fifteen to twenty years ago was the Era of Research as Methodology Expert.  The primary value that Research provided was around research innovation and project execution – and because information was scarce and Research was still perfecting methodologies, all customer information was new information.  Since then, the function has continued to evolve.  Approximately 10 years ago, we saw the advent of the second era – the Era of the Insight Consultant.  Sometimes I describe this as the “so what” era, where Research has transitioned from providing data and information to calling out the implications of that learning – and helping business partners plug that knowledge into business decisions. 

We don’t see the Era of the Insight Consultant disappearing anytime soon.  Having said that, becoming a trusted advisor requires most researchers to spend a lot of time with a limited number of decision makers.  As functions work to increase their impact and improve the company’s overall customer acumen, we’re seeing many functions focus on capabilities that include synthesis, socialization, and storytelling.  All of this is typically in an effort to share customer knowledge with a greater number of decision makers. It’s what we call the Knowledge Era, and it’s led a few of our members to brand themselves as Customer (or Consumer) Knowledge functions.

As you consider what the next-generation of Research looks like at your own company, here’s how we can help:

• Anatomy of a Business-Impact Focused Research Organization – prioritize those opportunities most likely to create value for your business partners
• Research Skills Diagnostic – evaluate your team’s current strengths and opportunities when it comes to developing Version 2.0 Researchers
• Planning for a Next Generation Research Function
• Embedding Knowledge into the Organization

Over the past few weeks, we’ve written about how to improve business impact when it comes to Research skills.  The first that we talked about was insight.  Sure, it’s important that Research functions generate sound insights that promise business impact.  But what if no one does anything with them?

At one of last year’s in-person member meetings, several heads of Research named insight activation as one of their most significant challenges.  And as we got deeper into discussion, here’s what they wanted to know: How do you know when you’ve gone far enough?  Who’s ultimately on the hook for ensuring insights are activated?  I’m not sure anyone will ever have the answer to that question – but we certainly have some points of view on increasing the likelihood that your business partners actually do something with the recommendations that you deliver:

• Screen your insights:  It’s easy to critique others’ insights – especially if your function’s done a good job building a common understanding of what good insight looks like.  When generating insights, ensure that you’re pressure testing your own work as well.  Test your insight output against a standard set of criteria that should be present in any strong insight similar to what we’ve seen members do at Lilly or Nestlé. 
• Create clear, targeted communications that tell business partners what to do with the insight: Make sure that business partners understand what the insight means for their world by creating prescriptive, targeted communications that highlight what the insight means for their function, product, or BU.  One of our insurance members has created a set of four simple filtering questions that enable researchers to cut to the chase when sharing insights with different stakeholders.
• Equip business partners to own the insight: Get the broader organization focused on insight by giving business partners easy-to-use tools , templates, and training to use as part of their day-to-day.  Some companies even work with Marketing to build insight competencies into cross-functional performance expectations.

Interested in learning more?  Join part two in our Next Generation of Research Skills Webinar series this upcoming week (Insight Skill Development).  We’ll cover insight generation and activation – and also highlight some new work we’ll be publishing later on this month.

Can Research use social media to generate insights?  The jury’s still out.  Social media continues to be one of the hottest topics among our members—with good reason.  Here’s some food for thought:

• A recent article in Research Magazine noted that social networking accounts for one quarter of time spent online in the US.  That’s more than email, gaming, and instant messaging combined.
• In 2010, more than 330 companies rated Listening as the most important element of their social media strategy according to our sister program, the Market Leadership Council.  And more is on the way…
• The Harvard Business Review recently reported that 36% of companies plan to launch sentiment analysis of social media in the next 2 – 3 years, and 33% are planning to launch some form of social media monitoring.

But social media hasn’t unleashed a flood of new consumer insights.  In fact, no research function (based on an informal survey that we did)… can fully attribute any new insights to social media listening and monitoring.  One recent study found that only 5% of research professionals incorporate social media data into research projects.  That number sounds even lower when you realize that all of the study participants were recruited through social media platforms!

At this point you may be wondering—is it even worth putting time and resources against social media as a data source?

We think so, and others agree.  It may still be early days for most research functions (40% of researchers spend less than an hour a day using social media), but we think there are a few smart things you can do to take advantage of social media:

The MREB’s 3 social media commandments:

• Look for Short-Term Opportunity, Not Long. The best social media marketers don’t focus on high level issues like brand health or consumer psychology. Instead they focus on short-term shifts that generate positive, shorter-term opportunities. The best monitoring focuses on sudden spikes. More traditional research techniques are still the gold-standard for long-term consumer psychology.

• Fish Where The Fish Are. Measuring the broad internet suffers from all sorts of inaccuracies. But individual communities with well-known posters are reliable and useful. For instance, flyertalk.com is a great predictor of how “road warrior” business travelers talk and react.

• A Great Team Player, Not a Solo Contributor. Social media works best when triangulated with slower but more reliable research methods. By itself, social media is too unreliable.  A small change to search terms can generate entirely different “insights.”

Given that social media remains top-of-mind for our members, we recently hosted a Webinar on the topic with 3 smart panelists.  The replay and materials are available on our Web site.  Take a listen to hear perspectives from some of our members, your Marketing colleagues, and Iconoculture.

And let me ask all of you—who has seen good results from their social media efforts?

A recent post on one of HBR’s blog sites focuses on the idea of “muscle memory” in innovation.  (For anyone wondering, muscle memory, according to Wikipedia, is “a form of procedural memory that involves consolidating a specific motor task into memory through repetition.” As you may have guessed, it’s most often associated with athletics.)

The author made the point that while there is a discipline to innovation, companies often turn innovation efforts over to people with no experience.  All too often, they seek out “creative, right-brained types”… or they look for people who tend to be successful no matter where they are placed in the business.

And what does that mean for us as researchers?  Well, it probably means that we’re going to be number one on the newbie’s speed dial.  Sarcasm aside, Research is the first place that marketers or business leads turn when faced with aggressive growth goals—and rightly so.  Where else can they find the original customer and market insights that will fuel new product innovation?

Whether you’re supporting business partners on radical, break-through innovation, or within-category, incremental ideas, we at the Board can help.  Tap into events, tools, templates, and best practices that have been tested by your peers across companies and industries.  Let us work with you to strengthen your own muscle memory.

• Attend our upcoming Webinar on radical innovation: Facing internal resistance to radical innovation?  Learn how companies have used internal crowdsourcing to build credibility within the organization, share quick wins, and maximize collaboration and idea refinement.
• Tap into our Innovation Support Center: Is there one area in particular where your team needs help?  Check out this section of our Web site.  There are resources for trend identification, ideation and opportunity assessment, concept development, product refinement, and product launch.
• Finally, take a look at some of our research on lead users: We’ve heard from a growing number of members that engaging lead, or highest-value, customers throughout the new product development process can really pay off.  We’ve all struggled to help our organizations in innovation and new product development at some point.  This work can help in a few different areas: identifying and screening for customers who can contribute to new product development, teaching team members and cross-functional partners how to work with progressive customers, and getting actionable product ideas from customers.

Not sure where you need help?  Let me know!  We talk to members about these topics on a daily basis—just consider us your personal trainers. J

What’s your New Year’s resolution?  More staff?  A larger budget?  Restructuring to better support business partners?

Despite early reports that the struggling global economy would pick up steam in 2010, it was a pretty challenging year for business.  Unemployment remained high, previously larger teams continued to do more with less, and consumer confidence remained “so-so.”

As our members close the books on 2010 and start thinking about 2011, we hear a lot of “What will 2011 look like?”  And as Research Heads start to think about what the coming year holds for their teams, we receive lots of questions around budget, spend, team size, and team structure.

One of the best ways that we can support all those questions is through our annual benchmarking survey.  Keep an eye on our site.  Each year, we upload member responses into an interactive tool that allows members to slice and dice the data to compare their own responses to peers across several different dimensions.  Business model, industry, team size, and revenue are all popular cuts.  And once you’ve cut the data—you can download it into PowerPoint to enhance presentations and business cases!

So what did we learn coming out of 2010?  Here are just a few insights from this year’s survey: Read More »