Market Research as a Marketing Communications Tool

In Brief: Market Research can provide insights that yields a long running conversation with your customers, if you remember to include them.

Market research nearly always recruits consumers with promises that their responses "will help us improve our service, develop new products, improve your experience, etc." but rarely follows up with those customers to tell them how their answers will or did change the company, and the experience they can expect in the future. 

Market research organizations worldwide seek to distance themselves from spammers and telemarketers, especially those who engage in the deceitful practice of Mugging/Sugging (Marketing/Selling under the guise of research), and are even more concerned with tipping their hand to the marketplace.

These concerns shouldn't stop organizations from engaging with customers after conducting research. Here are a few ideas based on recent work conducted with clients.

1. Say Thank-you: Our client conducts in-depth surveys with customers, which take 15-20 minutes to complete.  At the end of data collection, this client sends a brief thank-you email to all clients. Best practice - include a brief finding from the research, such as "We were glad to see how many people were happy with our reps knowledge, but we'll be working hard to reduce your wait time". 
2. Ask to follow up: Every survey should end with a request "Can we contact you if we have any further questions about your answers". Don't forget to ask for email/telephone. In one instance, our client was surprised by the answers from a particular segment. We contacted 50 of them by telephone, conducted 5 minute IDI's. In under a week, for very little budget, we developed context and insight that would have previously been a question mark.
3. Use market research results in sales efforts: We recently conducted B2B research for a service provider. The outside sales team participated in a debrief of the research. They were able to use this information to tailor upcoming sales calls to clients, whether they participated in research or not (e.g., We understand from recent research that some people want more information about our small business product. Can I take 5 minutes to talk about that?)
4. We're listening - a marketing campaign: Ina recent customer service survey, our client discovered that the greatest pain point of their customers was something that they had already planned to correct - with a new service being launched this Spring. Armed with the insight that this new service is strongly desired by the customer base, a very bold marketing communications plan is being developed to launch the new service with a splash. 

Often, when conducting research on product & service design, it's easy to forget to talk to and listen to consumers at all stages. Here's a few ways that research can be used in that communications process.

Moving Beyond PowerPoint...How to deliver effectively to clients

PowerPoint (and Keynote for Mac lovers!) has been a constant companion for as long as I can remember, going all the way back to my first university presentations, and is the typical standard in my industry - market research. 

Market research suppliers such as myself have a unique challenge in that most of our work must live on beyond our initial presentation, to be re-delivered by client-side researchers,and to be shared via internal networks. It has to stand alone, it can't require our presence or explanation.

No longer used as only as a visual program for live presentations, Powerpoint is now used instead of Word for full reports as well.  We have bent the tools of Powerpoint to meet our needs with multiple bullet points, and indeed full paragraphs on screen in order to convey our thoughts. On the other hand I think we have bent our way of describing and delivering research results to fit into the confines of Powerpoint.

Changes to the way that any managers, but market researchers in particular, present reports, can fall into two major categories:

1. Moving back to a traditional report
2. Finding more multimedia ways to convey results

Traditional Reporting
When was the last time that you wrote a complete paragraph? Or a few in a row? Powerpoint does not lend itself to fully articulating thoughts. Why would it - the software was designed to provide a visual teaser while relying on a live presenter to fill in the details.  Writing in Powerpoint forces you into a "1 point per page" mentality, and makes it difficult to build and show relationships between findings except to build and build slides to a conclusion.

Perhaps its time to turn back to a report developed in Word? Graphics can be developed in any number of programs, and inserted into a document when required to illustrate a point being made.  Reports might even be shorter. 5-10 pages in Word might do the same job as 30 slides in PPT.  If needed, a presentation deck can easily be built, but much more quickly, since it is just for presentation purposes.


New reporting tools

From websites to infographics, people are more accustomed to visual stimulation than ever before.
How have you used multimedia to help convey a message?

Our company recently conducted an internal contest asking for new ways to communicate research findings. Here are some of our ideas...what are yours?

• Infographics
• Audio commentary
• Executive podcast
• www.prezi.com
• Use of HTML or mouse-overs to augment detail
• Project webpage

ESOMAR Best of Canada - The Digital Researcher

This week in Toronto, myself and 100 others in the marketing and research community gathered to hear a sampling of research projects that strive to use the new digital communications tools that are already so crucial to our lives. Coming on the heels of the successful Digital Dimensions conference in Miami (#eso3d on twitter), this sold out event was highly anticipated.

Myself, Annie Pettit (@lovestats) and a few others were live tweeting from the event using the #esobest hashtag on twitter.  Here are my thoughts on the morning's presentations. 

Cam Davies started the morning with a few stats about research worldwide.  The room was surprised to note that in the US, only about one-quarter of research spend is on "online" research. Canada was substantially higher (second only to Bulgaria!) at 42% of total spend. Although this does acknowledge that other methodologies have not gone the way of the dodo quite yet,  it doesn't reflect the proportion of projects that are being moved to online (and mobile!) based research.

Cam followed this up with a challenge for researchers, pointing out all the ways that we can continue to improve ourselves - from live conferences, to now frequent webinars (including this week's virtual festival of NewMR and the upcoming MRIA virtual mobile conference), to reading articles curated by your peers (a.k.a. twitter and blogs).   

We then moved on to the meat of the morning, with three case studies that utilized mobile to enhance and develop research results.

Corrine Sandler and Olga Churkina @FreshIntel started the day with a lively two person presentation illustrating a combination of traditional online quantitative and mobile qualitative.  Citing the feeling that people use their "head, heart, and hands" to shop, this research needed to augment the head with more insight about the "heart". During the online survey, respondents were asked for their mobile numbers and phone details, as part of a potential participation in future research (25% agreed). From this group, 15 respondents were asked to complete tasks throughout a weekend, related to the product in question (air fresheners). They took pictures of the odor problems in their home, they went to their grocer, took pictures and commented on the choices they were faced with. They sent in text messages as responses to questions pushed to their phone. And they did all this for a $10 incentive!



@EliasVeris from InSites Consulting  then showed us how gamification and crowdsourced insight interpretation provides a rich research experience. This project focused on Gen Y, and encouraged participation in a variety of activities over a six week period. We've all worked with MROCs before, but what was interesting here was the idea to ask a sub-set of the participants to curate and interpret responses from the larger group. He showed that the insights generated by respondents  were on par with those developed by willing research professionals recruited prior to an earlier presentation of this work.


Lastly, Sean Conry of Techneos Systems showed the results of a multi-modal monitoring of a major cultural event in the UK - the wedding of William and Kate. Sean's presentation showed that digging deeper, and in particular monitoring individual comments leading up to the wedding that there was more interest than the public may have perceived (the press was reporting a great deal of ambivalence).  Respondents sent texts, were monitored via GPS and provided photos of their activities on the day.


All in all, this morning inspired attendees to continue to modify and improve with the ways that they engage with respondents. These are examples of new solutions to an issue not always well handled by quantitative research - how to engage with respondents in more natural and engaging ways.