Patience may be a virtue, but it’s one rarely seen in the corporate world. Executives have always wanted to have the information they need right when they realize they need it – and if they could have it before then, even better!

Exacerbating this desire for instant information are some recent developments.  First, executives report that the overall increased pace of change creating more truly urgent decisions – and it’s not the case that urgent decisions are less important than non-urgent ones.

Second, information seems to be everywhere. Need advice or information? You can ask Google, or maybe poll your friends with a Facebook status update. Now, you may wince to hear these sources in reference to a business decision (and rightly so!) but the point is that people expect to be able to access the information they need quickly – social media and the internet have trained us well.

MREB research into executives’ decision-making processes confirms that when faced with urgent decisions, they rely on their gut instinct when they can, or skim multiple sources and make the decision with what they can access quickly, regardless of the quality. Waiting for Research can be a drag.

We’ve seen Market Research functions tackle the challenge of informing urgent decisions two ways:

1. Improving their anticipation of urgent requests by focusing scoping on unarticulated and emerging needs;
2. Improving their reaction to urgent requests by aggregating existing knowledge into “good enough” information in a short time-frame.

MREB members, learn more about focusing Research scoping and execution for fast delivery.

Over the past few weeks, YouTube has been overflowing with spin-offs of the viral video, Stuff* Girls Say. The original, based on the eponymous Twitter feed, inspired dozens of other satires, from Stuff People in DC Say (“Right, but where are you from originally?”), to Stuff* College Freshmen Say (“I’m either going to major in political science, psychology, business, or maybe pre-med.”), to my personal favorite, Stuff* Nobody Says (“Does anyone know how I can make Papyrus my default font?”). I’m still waiting for “Stuff Market Researchers Say”– we’ll leave the comments section open for your suggestions.

These videos are only intended to be humorous – stereotypes and sweeping generalizations are embraced and political correctness and cultural sensitivities are deliberately thrown aside. But in addition to provoking a knowing laugh (or righteous indignation), these videos also made me think about creative ways to collect, manage, and present knowledge about customers.

For Research to have the greatest impact on customer-related decisions, teams need to use effective communication strategies to engage their business partners. If your research team were to make a video titled “Stuff Our Customers Say,” what would it sound like? Would you need to adjust the way you think about segmentation? Not many of these Research videos would ever achieve YouTube fame, but our most progressive members are thinking differently about how to make existing information accessible to researchers and palatable to business partners.

Here’s an example of how Deloitte used video to highlight the many voices of its consumers. (Golf? Golf!)

MREB Members, read about how Heinz uses video to create an appetite for customer learning.

*This is a family friendly blog — the actual video titles all replace the word “stuff” with a more colorful 4 letter word beginning with S.

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.

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.

By Aaron Field

Steve Jobs’ untimely passing sparked a spate of well-meaning and mostly laudatory remembrances.  The memorialists talked about many admirable traits (many very close to my geeky heart) but one thing has bothered me in the coverage.

Jobs was a bad role model for modern companies.

Consider a couple of quotes:

“We didn’t build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not.”

“For something this complicated, it’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

In essence he advised against customer research – relying instead on personal foresight. And it worked beautifully for Apple, Pixar, and Apple again. One can only envy his seemingly effortless understanding of our needs before we knew them.

I envy him. But I would not copy him.

Most products designed for and by the technical staff are dismal failures. Remember the Segway? Steve Jobs among others said it would revolutionize the modern city. To be fair the Segway (and surplus WWII amphibious vehicles) are revolutionizing novelty tourism . (Segways vs. Ducks)

The truth is that Jobs was a once in a generation talent. Not so much for technical know-how but for his uncanny insight into us.

But executives who are not Steve Jobs (i.e. everyone) need researchers who are business partners. They want real insight that can impact the business (not data reporting!). And it really does work. Customer-focused companies outperform their competitors.

In the end we can honor Jobs’ genius by recognizing its uniqueness – not by copying it.

By Aaron Field

We mark the passing of a seminal figure in Market Research. Arthur C. Nielsen Jr. passed away at the age of 92. The son of the eponymous founder Mr. Nielsen worked all his life for the family business, becoming president in 1957 and chairman in 1975. He presided over the company’s growth from $4 million a year $680 million.

The Iconic Researcher:

Nielsens junior and senior not only built a ratings empire but essentially created the popular view of market research. No other researcher came close to touching the American consciousness.

What was that image? Certainly the numbers were the thing. And it was telling that Nielsen Jr. was one of the earliest computer users – a UNIVAC in 1948 for $150,000.

It is worth thinking about the industry’s current problem in recruiting creative business people to what – in many young eyes – is a boring profession. The pioneering generation of Market Research brought unprecedented precision and analysis to business but, ironically, gave a lasting impression of data over creativity.

You might like to know some of the fun things.

Check out Mr. Nielsen’s appearance on What’s My Line.

And remember that Mr. Nielsen played competitive tennis until he was in his 80s and had the distinction of winning the United States Father-Son Doubles Championships with his father in 1946 and 1948. He later represented the United States in senior tennis tournaments. He also won Midwest-based father-son doubles championships with two sons, Arthur III and Chris.  Listen to John Powless speaking about the outstanding personal attributes of longtime friend Arthur C. Nielsen Jr. during the Arthur C. Nielsen Jr. Tribute held at the A.C. Nielsen Tennis Center in 2009.

The New York Times published a nice obituary for Mr. Nielsen.

How many times have you had a friend or loved one stop your response to their “how was work” inquiry to ask for the definition of a word you just used?  My husband (and spell check) insist that “Operationalizing” isn’t a word, but that didn’t stop us from using it as a research title (Operationalizing Segmentation Studies—check it out to see how we define the word and how to improve your company’s segmentation efforts). 

Alas, now the folks at Fortune are weighing in, also on the side of cooling it with the corporate jargon.  And the points are valid ones:

• New folks have no idea what you’re talking about.  And they probably won’t ask, which can hurt productivity and morale.
• Jargon and buzzwords can mean different things to different people.   Imprecision is usually not our friend.
• You can frustrate friends, family, and potential clients when no one knows what you’re talking about.

These are important considerations for us as researchers because not only can we load our meetings and presentations with corporate and business jargon, we have an entire technical field of buzzwords to choose from.  C-Sat, VOC, CAWI, blinding (no Mom, I’m not hurting anyone at work).  And the longer I’ve worked in this field, the less aware I am that I’m not speaking regular English.

So, the next time you’re talking to a business partner or supplier, keep in mind that they weren’t in the meeting where you coined that latest phrase.  Who knew that you’d have to translate yourself back to your native language?  Here are some resources to help:

• Reckitt’s Strategic Supplier Onboarding (whoops, another word that spell check doesn’t like)
• Lincoln’s Business-to-IT Translation Process
• Communication Toolkit
• Buzzwords to Cut From Your Communications

A few weeks ago my colleague Rick Karlton of the Sales Executive Council blogged about how pharmaceutical companies are leveraging digital tools during sales visits.  Playing off a Wall Street Journal article from a few months ago that looked to link increasing tablet use with declining sales employment in the pharma space, Rick makes the point that fewer salespeople are almost certainly a function of a slowing R&D pipeline, not technology.

Ideally, the proliferation of digital tools such as iPads will help a sales rep build trust with their clients rather than replace valuable interactions altogether.  In fact, Corporate Executive Board research over the last few years has found that the best way for a B2B or B2B2C company to differentiate itself from competitors is for the sales reps to teach, providing valuable perspectives, new issue education, and ongoing advice during the sales experience.  And this provides a fantastic opportunity for Researchers to partner with Sales in a whole new way.  But…

For many researchers, the relationship between our department and sales has been a bit dicey: while almost 90% of research departments support the company’s sales department, sales partners report substantially lower satisfaction and less impact than the other business partners that we serve.  And how frustrating is it for us when a sales rep comes to us for a single data point or updated sales figures?  But as sales reps work to provide differentiated information during sales meetings we must use our expertise in customer analysis to help select the right insights to teach customers. 

Once our departments work together to determine the insight that is newsworthy, valuable to the customer, and applies to the products and services we have to offer, then the technology can come into play.  As Corey Mull at the Marketing Leadership Council outlined, these applications can be a terrific way to illustrate your key points in a sales visit and a great way to better fit your offering into medical workflow. 

But it all starts with identifying the right insight to embed into the sales process. 

• See how Motorola spotted the research needs it shared with its customers
• Preview the online teaching tools Telus uses to deliver research insights to customers
• See how Condé Nast designed a comprehensive platform study to differentiate itself as an industry thought leader

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.

Fast Company recently profiled Walmart’s most recent launch: @WalmartLabs, a tech start-up working to track the links between people and their interests. 

Walmart hopes that this technology can categorize social media information into streams of data that will help its stores optimize inventory and enhance customers’ experience.  The company also wants to use the data to customize interactions with customers over social media to grow online sales.

If @WalmartLabs provides the know-how to navigate the stream of data from social media this could be a game-changer for the future of shopping (and market research).  Researchers have considered social media data for years, trying to figure out how to turn the trove of information available online into treasure for their companies.   

We’ve talked before about the challenges trying create insight gold from social media (in general, and for innovation in particular too).  And for those of us who don’t have our own tech start-up on the case, social media remains a mostly frustrating source with lots of content but little discernable, specific value to strategic decision making.

We’ve seen some companies succeed by overcoming social media’s anonymity: using social media to locate or create passionate communities.  Are there any other success stories of new insights attributed to social media monitoring?  We’d love to hear about your own social media efforts in the comments section below.

Related blogs:

• Will Social Networks Really Help Product Innovation?
• Social Media–Who’s Talking?
• Why Spend so Much Time on Social Media?
• Using Social Media for PR not Insight