For almost one-third of consumers the information is too much and rather than conducting a considered search they drop the work altogether and just zero in on a single brand.  And MLC research has found that decision simplicity in the purchase process is the #1 reason why consumers are likely to buy a product, do so repeatedly, and recommend it to others. 

In fact, brands that simplify customer decision making are:

• 86% more likely to be purchased
• 115% more likely to be recommended

The Council created a 15-question quiz to help you determine how simple—or complex—you’re making your customers’ purchase decisions.  And you can also access their HBR article on the new Decision Simplicity strategy.

Related resources:

• To Keep Your Customers, Keep it Simple
• Boosting the Impact of Shopper Insights

Related blogs:

• Stretching Shopper Insights Resources
• Setting Up a Shopper Insights Shop
• Santa Won’t do your Insight-Shopping for You

The company created an online community to better conduct quick-turnaround, lower-cost research, and used that opportunity to identify “expert consumers” who are knowledge and influential about the industry and scrub them in more specifically to the research process itself.  This process has turned Aviva’s community into a wonderful tool for relationship building and a source of quick and informed opinion on products and communications.

Aviva’s case profile seems to again confirm what many have found over the years: the more you know the source of information, the better that information can be.  For example, we’ve talked before about how social media’s anonymity undermines its ability to provide true customer insight.  But we have seen companies like Southwest Airlines and NASCAR unleash insights from social media by finding or building communities where they know the participants.

Identifying true lead users can be difficult; it’s hard to find lead users in nature, so defining a screener is imperative.  One appliance company we work with found success by leveraging external networks to generate a screener that would reveal truly leading consumers.  We have also seen companies like Visa and Charles Schwab engage consumers on a long-term basis through research by creating joint-benefit research projects or creating a shared agenda. 

Are you fostering long-term relationships with customers through research projects?  Do you see the benefit of identifying and engaging “expert consumers”?  We’d love to hear about it in the comments section below.

Related Blogs:

• Lego’s Building Blocks of Innovation
• Social Media-Listening to the Right Buzz
• 3 Steps to Customer-Focused Innovation
• Right People, Right Question is the Mantra of Open Innovation

Related MREB Materials:

• Creating a Specialist User Screening Process
• Passionate Communities: Using Engaged Customers to Get More from Social Media
• Using Engagement Strategies to Increase Research Participation

I recently saw a lecture by Jonah Lehrer, the Wired blogger and author of How We Decide about his latest book: Imagine: How Creativity Works.  He explores the seeds of creativity, covering a broad range of research on the topic and sharing findings from the wacky (blue walls and collective bathrooms foster creativity) to the practical (individual feedback is usually more effective than group brainstorming sessions).

Two themes particularly interested me:

• What distinguishes creative geniuses from everyone else
• What leads to those moments of insight when you suddenly have a great idea

First, Lehrer looks at new research on what distinguishes creative geniuses (Picasso, Einstein, Beethoven etc.) from the rest of us – and shares some pretty surprising findings.

These people don’t stand out from the average population in terms of IQ. They might not even do better at traditional creativity tests.  The key factor that sets them apart?  “Grit” — persistence and passion for long-term goals.  Grit is the ability and willingness to stick at something far longer than the rest of us – in spite of disappointment and difficulty.  The most talented people tend to be focused to the level of obsession.  Beethoven, for example, would try as many as 70 different versions of a musical phrase before settling on the right one.

“Grit” is a better predictor than IQ of:

• Who’ll win a spelling bee
• Which Ivy league students will get the best test scores
• Who’ll survive the first summer at the US Military Academy
• Which children will end up performing well at school

In fact, to see how well your child will do at school, don’t test their IQ – try the ingenious “marshmallow experiment” . This test leaves a child alone in a room with a single marshmallow on a plate – informed that they will get more marshmallows if they resist the single marshmallow for 5 minutes.  The children who resist the marshmallow end up with significantly higher IQ scores on average.

The second theme that intrigued me was the exploration of moments of insight.  We’ve all had that experience of struggling with a problem for hours on end and then suddenly experiencing an epiphany… the answer comes to us out of the blue.   New research has shed light on how this works via word pairing tests in which participants are asked to find a word that links 3 other words, e.g., Apple links Crab, Sauce, Tree.  This research has found a few common patterns.  First, when the answer comes to us it just feels right – we instantly sense that this is the solution.  Second – and more surprisingly – before we come up with the solution, we can actually tell how close we are to getting there. This is weird. We don’t know the answer, but we can accurately predict whether we’re nearly there – or nowhere near. But it’s really important.  It helps us know when we need to take a break or change tack vs. keep plugging away.  Third (and related to #2), that insight often comes to us once we’ve stopped consciously thinking about the problem – maybe in the shower or walking home for instance.

But there’s a link between this research on moments of insight and the research on grit.  When that insight comes – and it feels like it was out of the blue – it wasn’t.  Even if we have our revelation while in the shower and not thinking about the problem, the time spent reflecting on the issue beforehand will have helped.  Newton’s discovery of the theory of gravity is a great example of this.  The popular version focuses on that spontaneous moment of genius when the apple fell.  But Newton’s own explanation is almost the exact opposite: “I thought continuously until I reached the answer.”  To make Edison a little more accurate then – genius is 90% perspiration followed by 10% inspiration.

MREB members, use our insight generation tools to help develop your best recommendations.

Related blogs:

• The Best Time of Day to be Creative? Not When you Think
• 6 Creativity Killers
• Research: Turn Creativity into Insight
• Boost Your Insight Creativity the Psychological Way

To truly unlock insights from social media, leading teams approach their social media learning plans not from the perspective of broad monitoring (where we tend to find vague sentiment or trends) but by focusing on specific hypothesis testing. Identifying the specific queries that satisfy hypotheses based on real issues for your business is no small challenge—nor is it the only one Research faces in getting real insight from social.

It is tempting to run to the high-traffic channels of Facebook or Twitter to start listening. But, as Mark Hunter of the INSEAD Social Innovation Center recently said (and the MREB would strongly agree), “it isn’t the social media per se that you should be attending to; it’s the media used by the people and organizations that care most about what you do.” Our second challenge is to identify those channels that are most popular among the audience we care most about (customers, potential customers, or specific segments) and not simply the average “talker.”

Southwest Airlines smartly uses a network “hot spot” screening process to identify the sites where their most meaningful stakeholders are active online. Their approach in 4 relatively simple steps (all steps your social media vendors should be able to support or you can do in-house!) includes:

1. Begin with a list of anticipated influential sites: Start with a list of the blogs, Facebook pages, community sites, or publications where you know your stakeholders are active.
2. Add new candidate sites: Expand beyond “the usual suspects” and identify new sites/discussion threads by searching for keywords like the company, products, competitors, related topics, emotional laden words. A fresh search (we’d recommend bi-annually if not more often), invariably yields sites previously unknown to be smart listening posts.
3. Screen for traffic:  Apply a traffic filter (readership/Web rankings, number of links, popularity) to identify sites that potentially reach more of your targeted audience than the initial outlets on your radar.
4. Screen for activity: Identify the sites where your stakeholders are most actively engaged by filtering for things like frequency of posts, volume of comments, SEO quality, emotional tone, etc.

This process helped Southwest Airlines identify a new set of listening posts where their specific customers or potential customers were more engaged. New hot spots for them include active travel communities online, as well as things like a seemingly unrelated fashion community where there is quite a volume of talk around travel and travel deals to get to various events.

Set yourself up for tangible learning from social media by identifying these passionate communities of high-value customers, specific demographic segments, or even the competition, to listen for insights from social media that can help you confidently shape recommendations on specific issues for your business.

Related MREB Blog Posts:

• Social Media—Who’s Talking?
• Will Social Networks Really Help Product Innovation?
• Yes, You can Unlock Insights from Social Media

Related MREB Resources:

• Passionate Communities: Use Engaged Customers and Consumers to Get More from Social Media Listening
• Unlocking Insight from Social Media
• Using Social Media for Market Research

Cambiar launched the Future of Research Study in 2011, with invaluable help from MREB members. We learned that most corporate market researchers expect major transformation of the research industry that will be evident within three years from now. Further, almost half expect that by 2020 the leading supplier will be Google, Facebook or a company that doesn’t exist today! Corporate researchers believe that social media listening, mining of information and emotion measurement will be part of the standard toolkit. And that the successful market researchers will be great consultants (or risk being replaced by a management consultant!).

In 2012, our study will focus on implementation - on what corporate researchers are doing and what is happening with research transformation in 2012. How much progress are we making, what are the bright spots, what’s working and what isn’t? Here are some of the questions we’ll address:

• Are corporate researchers becoming thought partners, part of the core team, conducting more strategic research and making the “Now What” recommendations using storytelling?
• To what extent are corporate researchers integrating research innovation into their market research solutions? Which new research innovations are taking hold, and for which solutions?  Are processes being reinvented?
• There’s been much talk about the need for synthesis in recent years.  Is synthesis finally taking hold? What types of information are being synthesized, and what processes are being used?
• Hiring and training is more critical than ever. What are the profiles of those being hired? And what type of training is taking place?
• We’ll also keep a few benchmark questions looking ahead to 2020, to see how expectations are evolving

We need your help to chart how research transformation is – or isn’t –progressing.  Participate and provide your email address and you’ll have the opportunity to win one of the two iPad prizes. Plus you’ll receive our Research Transformation: From Idea to Reality report as a “thank you”.

Although government-purchased vehicles make up just a small part of China’s overall care market, the symbolic gesture shows how difficult it can be to compete in the Chinese marketplace.  Many of you are tasked with understanding your next billion consumers, but conducting research in China has its own distinct challenges.  MREB members, check out our newest country profile, Conducting Market Research in China, to learn more.

Related blogs:

• Conducting Research in Russia
• Brazil: What to Know Before Researching Latin American’s Biggest Market

Recently, the Harvard Business Review published an article introducing the “Wallet Allocation Rule.” As the name suggests, this new metric measures the share of wallet that is allocated to companies – or simply, how a customer divides their spending among a company and its competitors.

The theory behind this metric is simple:

1. think about how much your customer prefers your company, and then
2. consider the number of competitors your customer is choosing between.

Knowing these two things will let you understand how your customers spend money, and how your company is doing relative to others. For instance, if you were the customer’s first choice and there is one competitor, then your position is different than if you were the second choice but there are many, many others behind you. Understanding this difference can help define strategy and hone in on certain initiatives.

To me, the key lesson that stood out in general is that metrics can’t be evaluated in a vacuum. It’s nice to know that your company is performing well, but when you discover that the “well” is less well than your competitors, the story changes. It’s important, then, to understand performance in its broader context.

So take customer effort for example. Even though the Customer Effort Score is the best predictor of customer loyalty, merely measuring it in isolation can paint an incomplete picture. More than just evaluating the score by itself, it’s important to consider the context surrounding it.

• How does the score stack up against others in your industry, your geography? (CCC members, use our interactive benchmarking tool to understand how your peers are performing. )
• Does the score change or remain static over time? (Track your score and compare against past performance.)
• What are the causes to a high effort score, and why do they exist? (Craft good survey questions to understand what about the interaction was creating effort.)

More than just a static number, the Customer Effort Score can reveal a lot about your company and your performance if you analyze it in context.  To the point made in the HBR article, you aren’t getting the whole story if you aren’t looking at the context.

Related MREB Resources:

• Driving Action with NPS® and Other Loyalty Metrics: Focusing on Key Success Factors
• Ask your peers for their opinions on metrics on our Primary Research Forum
• Get vendor recommendations from our Supplier Feedback Forum

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.

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.

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.