By Aaron Field

There’s a lot of noise about monitoring social media. Some would call it the birth of a new insights engine. Others take a more nuanced view. Marshall Sponder’s overview of Social Media monitoring is a nuanced perspectives. His point is that Social Media monitoring is in its infancy. It lacks common definitions or user-friendly tools. Technologies like meme tracking and sentiment analysis promise much for the future. But it is a tool not a new source. It will be best as a merged piece in a larger business intelligence picture. Frankly it’s nice to read a balanced view in a world of hype.

The MREB agrees strongly that Social Media is part of a larger Insights machine. In fact we argue even more strongly for the flip side. Social Media has been a poor source of original insight – despite considerable hype. An informal survey of research functions reported no new insights from their social media monitoring. None. Admittedly it was a small sample but the results have been consistent. For now social media has not resulted in an insight inundation. And it’s been a serious time drag to use monitoring tools.

On the plus side social media has some nice advantages for Research

• Relatively fast confirmation of existing insights
• Quick access to lead users- MREB Members: check out Lego’s Specialist-Direct Model.
• Great collector of customer language (not just teen-speak but the hot terms among business travelers or accountant slang)

And social media isn’t going away. Marketing spend via social media is likely to rise x3 – x4 by 2014 according to the Board’s Social Media Report. And where marketing goes – market research will follow.

So it is nice to read Marhsall’s balanced perspective.

By Aaron Field

Our parent organization the Corporate Executive Board recently released its findings on Achieving Intelligent Growth, and one of their main findings is that the best companies marry the focus on what they sell with an equally intense focus on how they sell.  Insight has always been a vital if not always visible part of sales success. The best sales reps, however, kick off the sales interaction with insight about their customer. Condé Nast reps do this systematically, in partnership with Research.

Condé Nast publishes some of the world’s premier magazines but faces sharp competition. Just about any magazine, website, or TV station can make a slick presentation to potential advertisers. So instead of “selling,” Condé Nast turns to “teaching.” Their insights team partners with Sales to teach advertisers new and valuable insights about how to market to particular consumer segments. In return, Condé Nast enjoys unparalleled access even when competitors are shut out of conversations.

Regardless of industry, the lesson is the same. The right kind of insight is an advantage to any sales force. The Board’s sister program – the Sales Executive Council – calculated that 53% of customer loyalty comes from the “sales experience” and that the primary experience driver is teaching. That is why the Corporate Executive Board’s Executive Guidance for 2011 tells business leaders to:

“Treat sales channels as the education arm of the corporation” Read More »

By Aaron Field

In 2004 Hewlett-Packard’s computer arm looked in deep trouble. Low-cost producers like Dell dominated an increasingly commoditized market. It was so bad that observers even saw HP exiting the PC market.

Today HP leads the American PC market with Dell and others struggling to emulate their success. How did HP engineer the turn-around? They did it with insight.

HP saw customers ready for a personal and emotional connection to their computer. Everyone else saw the office-based customer of the 1990’s who wanted low cost, low cost, and low cost (preferably in black.) Instead, HP rolled out brilliantly colored, personalized laptops supported by Jay-Z advertisements (the CEO of Hip-Hop).

“The Computer is personal again” worked brilliantly and (re)launched HP into market leadership.

MREB members can access three cases – Best Buy, Harrah’s, and HP – where companies used insight to beat the competition. Read More »

By Aaron Field

Does customer insight drive business performance? We think so.

Really impressive companies think obsessively about the customer. Their mantra sounds like this: “We make decisions on customer understanding and never (never) based on doing more of the same.”¹

The iPhone is a striking example. You may know that Apple can’t possibly make an iPhone. The phone’s communications run on an Infineon semiconductor. Its graphics interface through a National Semiconductor chip. Even the distinctive touchscreen runs on Epson, Toshiba, and Sharp technology.

Why did Apple make the phone? They certainly didn’t know much about phones. But they nailed the insight that consumers want easy mobile services merging fun with functionality. You can see that in their stores (fun places to play), their operating system (no complex commands), product design (one button), and their advertisements (tour Paris with your iPhone).

We’ll give Steve Jobs his due but it wasn’t one person. It’s never one person. Lots of people from hard-core coders to marketers work off the same deep customer understanding. That’s very hard.

How is your company doing? Try these out with your colleagues. Professors Patrick Barwise and Sean Meahan condensed decades of research into 5 diagnostic questions.^{2 Read More »}

Morten Hansen, a management professor at University of California, Berkeley, recently blogged that organizations should appoint a Chief Collaboration Officer to help integrate the enterprise.  With companies relying on cross-selling to existing customers and innovating with existing technologies, departments need to work effectively across silos.  Hansen isn’t suggesting that companies hire a new C-level executive to fill this role, but rather that a current member of the C-level suite should be well-positioned to take the job.  Candidates include (but are not limited to) the CHRO, CFO, CIO, or COO.

MREB view:  Is it our job to get the rest of the business collaborating?  The Board argues yes. Who else in the company has talks to so many functions on a weekly basis? Our 2009 benchmarking survey results show that the vast majority of Research departments work with the Marketing, Strategy, Sales, and Innovation departments.  More than half also work with Corporate Communications and the General Manager and/or CEO.  Even a full third of departments serve the Finance department as a constituency. To find out more about your organization take part in the 2010 benchmarking survey. Read More »

Tom Davenport, President’s Chair in Information Technology and Management at Babson College, recently wrote about the importance of “ambidextrous judgment,” using both data analytics and business intuition to push your organization forward.  Davenport uses examples from Harrah’s, Netflix, and others to demonstrate companies’ increased focus on working to combine data with business intuition in their decision-making process.   It appears as though traditional “data miners” are looking to build subjective creativity and intuitive courage, while “gut feel” executives are realizing that near- and real-time data can provide valuable prediction tools.

MREB view: We could not agree more that combining traditional data analysis with intuition leads to better business decisions.  In fact, a few years ago we conducted a survey to identify the drivers of insight productivity, and working in an environment that rewards risk-taking and encourages intuitive creativity was one of the four main factors evident in more insightful researchers.  (MREB members, read more about this and the other 3 drivers of insight productivity here.) Read More »

In a recent HBR guest blog, business consultant Ron Ashkenas posits that conflict avoidance is a dangerous source of unintentional complexity in companies.  He notes that as departments struggle to play nice, they create misalignment throughout the organization, leading to lower standards of performance and unnecessary project plan revisions.  He recommends that employees learn to engage more effectively in “constructive conflict” by assessing their own readiness to challenge questionable decisions and then gradually asserting their opinions by saying that they are working on dealing with conflict and hope their comments will come across constructively.  (for companies who have won big through conflict see our diversion post from a few weeks ago—although I’m not sure how “constructive” they were in their comments.)

MREB view: We have seen time and time again that a little forced conflict can lead to great advancements within the Research function.  Read More »

In the last couple of weeks I’ve seen two articles in the business press extolling the virtues and limitations of applying experimentation to business issues.  The first article, in the summer 2010 edition of City Journal, outlines the history of randomized experimentation and its use in criminology and sociology.  But it also goes into business uses for this technique, including specifics from Capital One, Harrah’s, and Google.  The Washington Post then picked up the topic, adding its own historic examples and business examples from Applied Predictive Technologies, including Kraft, Red Lobster, and Family Dollar Stores. While applauding the knowledge gained in these studies, the authors place more emphasis on the challenges and pitfalls of constructing valid, replicable studies of social phenomena.  Read More »

Earlier this summer Jeremy Dean, a PhD candidate at University College London, posted two blogs, each containing 7 psychological techniques to boost creativity and insightfulness. 

Some of his tactics include: 

• Fast forward in time-view your task from one, ten, or one hundred years distant.  In a study, those who were asked to think of their lives one year from now developed more creative solutions than those who were thinking of tomorrow.
• Combine opposites-try ridiculous combinations on purpose.  A study of famous scientists, writers, and artists found that many think of multiple, simultaneous opposites to develop their great ideas.
• Play with word choice and categorization-tweak the language of your challenge by making the verbs more generic and using synonyms to re-categorize the issues.  Focusing on the gist of the issue rather than specifics can help you develop new ways of representing and solving it.
• Develop your own creativity-boosting activities-avoid daydreaming and other forms of passive, unconscious creativity.  Studies have shown that the problem with passive creativity is that any findings will probably remain unconscious, so you’ll never know about your terrific idea.

Read More »