The team at Keen as Mustard was thrilled to lead the ‘Beyond Storytelling’ masterclass for the ESOMAR Academy in October. This is a 5-star rated, specialised training to guide insights professionals through the essentials of creating compelling communications. From irresistible story hooks to impactful design, attendees learnt how to bring a powerful and visceral understanding of the customer to their internal audience.

If you missed the training don’t panic – you can sign up to see the recording here: https://esomar.org/tr4in1ng5/beyond-storytelling

Not only did the course get a 5-star rating from attendees, but we have also been signing up clients to deliver bespoke training to address their specific communication challenges. To talk about how we can support you, contact Simon Dunn or click here: simon@mustardmarketing.com

What is ‘beyond storytelling’?

Researchers are brilliant at getting data and revealing insights but communicating them often remains a challenge. The past ten years of storytelling training has led to no greater impact for insights. All too often, powerful insights are left unused – wasting time, budget, and missing the chance to fuel strategic decisions.

If you are one of the insight professionals still emailing data-packed PowerPoint presentations we can help! Our research with Coca-Cola revealed that PowerPoint summaries fell flat with stakeholders, compared to videos, newsletters, and infographics. It’s clear things need to change if we want to bring the voice of the customer to the heart of organisations and create customer salience. This training is designed to equip researchers with communication tools that engage, resonate, and drive action.

Lesson 1: Focus the Message and Control the Narrative

We start by advising on your blueprint for a successful campaign – distilling the essential elements, acting as a reference point for strategy and creative at every step.

The training builds on what we need to know before you can do any communication – the audience, the objective for the communication and how we are going to measure success.

Next, we pinpoint what needs to be communicated – the context, insight or key finding, a single key message and a call to action. We share how to pinpoint the message from a host of data and how to ensure you stick to that core message.

Working through these key questions means you can focus your message, control the narrative, and guide your audience to engage meaningfully with your insights.

Lesson 2: From message to story

To go beyond storytelling, you need to master it first. In lesson two, we build from message to story, starting with making titles, headlines or email subject lines work for you, ensuring it is seen, heard, and remembered. Here, we learn how the insights industry can learn from journalists on how to captivate your audience from the start and use our own research to show the five best ways to write a headline.

Another key to planning your message is building a story arc. In the session, we cover identifying your character, setting, conflict, and resolution. In order to further connection and build resonance with your audience with your story, we show how to tap into emotions, using metaphors, and consistently reflecting your company’s unique voice.

Lesson 3: Bringing Your Insights to Life Visually

Design breathes life into your insights, it packages the story you wrote into captivating visuals. It does more than “make slides look pretty” – design plays a pivotal role in communicating findings effectively by making it easier for your audience to follow the material.

We share our foundational design principles to guide you on creating and assessing your communications and show how keeping your single key message and creative brief at the forefront of your mind is foundational in creating impactful designs that  align with your goals.

The three lessons from our ESOMAR Academy masterclass lay a powerful foundation for transforming insights beyond storytelling, into materials which captivate and drive outcomes. In a data-saturated market, strategic narratives that resonate with your audience are vital. Now is the time to make your insights communication impossible to forget.

Don’t forget, you can still view the training if you sign up here: https://esomar.org/tr4in1ng5/beyond-storytelling

If you would like us to tailor the training to your company and specific needs, we are booking into January 2025 now – please email us at simon@mustardmarketing.com.

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Our industry has leaned a little too heavily on storytelling to communicate customer insights to stakeholders and decision-makers. Now, there is nothing wrong with storytelling. It is a fantastic tool in many ways, but it lacks dimension. In insights, researchers typically use storytelling to report findings, deliver them, and move on. The customer‘s voice doesn’t infiltrate the organisation’s decision-making, and insights often go unused. Point and case, the 2023 UK Customer Satisfaction Index shows that customer satisfaction has been the lowest it’s ever been since 2014. According to Forrester study, while 74% of companies want to be ‘data-drive’, only 29% actually are.

So we need a better way to raise the profile of insights, to get the visceral experiences of customers into the heart of organisations to drive informed decisions.

It’s my view that we are sitting on a treasure trove on exciting, inspiring customer content, but it’s not sparking the actions it should. So, how can we change that? At the Customer Salience Summit, organised by FlexMR, I had the pleasure of diving into this very topic: how our industry can take a page from Hollywood’s playbook to make customer insight famous.

It’s worth noting, that despite Hollywood’s famed glitz and glamour, in 2023, the revenue of the insights industry in the US was US$77 billion – more than double the $33.4 billion from Hollywood’s box office. Yet, somehow, our industry doesn’t have nearly the same level of visibility. The answer? Fame.

So, what would the dudes over in Hollywood do in our shoes? Run a campaign.

A campaign is a constant, intentional effort to control the narrative—keeping the conversation going around your content, the information you’re sharing, and the customer’s relationship with your organization. And there are six things the insights industry can do to build this approach.

The star: There are no movies without a star. When you think of iconic films, the actors come to mind first. So, when presenting your findings, think about who’s the best person to deliver and represent your message. It might not be the researcher who did the work – you need someone inspiring to captivate, sell the story and bring it home. Find your star, whether that means hiring someone, training a current employee, or incentivising your team.

Better titles (and one-liners): We all judge a book by its cover, even when we claim not to. A brilliant title and one-liner stick to your mind (see: Ghostbusters – “who you gonna call?”). In insights, we’re famously bad at this. Is it any wonder our insights don’t stick when decisions are being made? A 2015 study analysed 69,907 news headlines and found five key elements that grab attention: surprise, curiosity, questions, negativity, and — wait for it — numbers! Lucky for us, we’ve got plenty of those, so let’s use them!

Trailers: These are quick engaging videos which get you excited for the films. With insights, they can spark curiosity amongst stakeholders and help convey key points you want to highlight. For instance, a testimonial or interview with a customer can humanise your data and emphasise the importance of customer voices. It’s time for us to start putting faces (or even animations) to the data.

PR: Internal public relations help you maintain control of the ongoing insights narrative. To ensure that we are driving action from insights, we must leverage all channels and carefully curate messages that will resonate with our audiences. Constant sharing of insights, nuggets or snippets, will help elevate the insights team, as well as keeping customer voices in the forefront of decision-makers’ minds.

Targeting: Just like films, different audiences have different needs – identifying and targeting them is crucial to designing your campaign. Each stakeholder audience will use your findings in unique ways, so tailoring your materials to their requirements will help them better integrate the insights into their day-to-day decision-making.

Premiere: The premiere is where all your hard work comes together. Don’t let it be dull – engage your audience by encouraging them to think about and interact with your insights. This is how you bring your findings to life and make them resonate with the people who need to understand their importance and put them to use. As a researcher it’s all too easy to work flat out until the debrief, and then sigh with relief and walk away afterwards. Remember, for everyone else, the premiere is only the beginning.

Implementing this fame model will not only boost traffic to your platforms or start provoking more strategic questions from your audiences – it will raise your team’s profile and increase awareness within your organisation. You’ll create lasting impressions that bring insights front and centre in your company’s decision-making.

So, why not go Hollywood on your insights? And if all else fails, give us a shout 😉 We’re keen as mustard to help bring fame to your insights.

The post The Fame Formula: Elevating Customer Insights with Hollywood’s Playbook appeared first on Keen as Mustard Marketing.

I just read ‘That elusive thing called ‘insight’‘, an article on Research Live by Andy Howden of Insight Inside which looks at why insight sometimes fails to gain traction in organisations. Insight Inside asked 30 heads of insight and marketing directors to explore how effectively insight is working in their organisation and how it could work better.

One particular point struck me “it was rare to find a business which actually devoted meaningful budget to communicating insights rather than just spending money on trying to uncover them”.

Now, what has this to do with marketing for researchers? The answer is everything! In marketing terms, insight is your product, and for insight to get attention and impact, it needs to be communicated creatively, powerfully and professionally. This is something many researchers (both agency and client side) struggle with. No matter what the reason, this means research is being left behind in the scramble to present data in exciting and motivating ways. While researchers have been talking about how they need to improve their communications, and not making much progress, the world has changed immeasurably. We are all living in a vastly more visual world than 10 or even five years ago. The internet has given us all access to instant visual and mental gratification. There are hundreds of image sites, videos, presentations and infographics running wild in the digital world.

The result is that more and more consultants, agencies and journalists are communicating insight in exciting and dynamic ways; and research has less and less of a toe hold on corporate decision making.

After many years working in branding and communication, I started working in the research industry about 12 years ago. I found that, like alcoholics, the researchers I met were aware that they had a problem with how they communicated yet most had not yet taken the first step to creating client materials that were motivating or had impact. Since then I have spent a great deal of my time using my knowledge of communication and design to work with researchers to improve the quality of what they deliver to clients. Although I have seen some great new developments, overall I have been frustrated that, although the world is moving very fast, researchers are not keeping up. We need to find new approaches to improve our outputs – and we need to find them fast.

There is no doubt that researchers strive to communicate well. They want to create presentations and materials that will impress clients and help ensure their work is used to drive decisions. They are all too aware of the shortcomings of long, dull PowerPoint presentations and reports that gather dust on shelves. But many clients and PR, design or ad agencies that get the results of the industry’s best efforts, say presentations and materials produced by researchers still fall far short of the mark.

Jonathan Todd, head of analytics at advertising agency Wunderman comments “A research presentation always stands out. They contain a lot of information – all structured in the same way. Slide after slide of too much data. They don’t get to the point quickly enough”. Aziz Cami, founder of design agency The Partners and now creative consultant to Kantar, reiterates this point – “successful research communications are ones that create action. We have to provide materials that are motivating solutions to a business issue. Unless we make our outputs vivid, exciting and actionable, it’s just data”.

No story, no point

We can all become great communicators – but we need to work really hard at creating stories and bringing them to life.

From our very first experience of fairy tales, stories are archetypes that allow us to make sense of our world. It’s my view, that without the basic skills of storytelling, researchers are not able to create great communication. And I think we need to think about the research story in the way a communicator would, not a researcher. The ‘story’ is not the output or result of a research project. It is the communication of the output and as such should be treated as a distinctive ‘project’ in itself.

As a communications expert, I have worked to develop a one-day workshop for ESOMAR. The workshop is built around several interactive exercises, designed to help researchers focus on how to turn their communications from dull to dynamic. Starting with the core principles of good communication, the exercises will help researchers learn how to capture insight and turn it into a compelling message in true ‘Mad Men’ style. We look at what techniques journalists use to communicate stories in a really compelling way, how to approach stories visually rather than using words or numbers and how to focus on appropriate and relevant communications for different audiences.

Please researchers, put your money where your mouth is and team up with great communicators to ensure your insights are heard, used and valued!

The post Are you communicating insights or just collecting them? appeared first on Keen as Mustard Marketing.

Readers of this blog cannot have missed that our very own Colonel Mustard, Lucy Davison, has been working hard over the years to find ways of helping researchers communicate better. In particular, her workshops and presentations at conferences including ESOMAR include methods researchers can learn from communications experts to ensure they communicate their insights in ways that are motivating, engaging and that ultimately lead to action.

So we were most entertained to read a piece in Fast Company magazine last Friday on how a Fortune 500 company was struggling with communications between the R&D team of chemical nerds and the marketing team of attention poor ‘creative’ types. This has clear parallels with the way research agencies (and, at times, internal clients) struggle to engage with stakeholders.

The ‘nerds’ wanted to do long PPT presentations, they wanted to talk about the wonderful technical breakthrough of their new formula. They could not think in terms of consumer benefits. The company in question eventually forced the R&D team to think in a new way by getting them to communicate their new formula via an advertising billboard. Once the R&D team was told they could have just three messages — one visual, one informative, and one call-to-action — it forced them into focusing only on the motivating consumer benefit of their new formula, and nothing else.

This exercise is one that Lucy uses in her workshop and it’s incredible how effective the results are when used by researchers to force them to think about their data in a new way.  Catch Lucy in Dubai in March where she will be running a ‘Communicating Insights’ workshop at the ESOMAR congress.

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Market research industry commentators are increasingly throwing around buzzwords like  “story-teller” and  “storymaker” in association with brand. In a post-advertising world where engagement with consumers comes more from brand authenticity and personification, than from didactic brand messages, story telling is the new mantra. A recent blog by Added Value outlined how various brands, like Coca-Cola & Revlon, are adopting the “story-telling” approach. Brand story-telling even made headlines in the Entrepreneur in an article published this past April, calling it a booming business.

While story-telling is often contextualized hand-in-hand with branding, Mustard’s very own Lucy Davison has a similar argument for a different kind of story-telling that can, and should, be used in market research: communicating insights.

Much of market research discourse is getting the ball rolling by identifying story-telling as essential for brands, but few are taking it one step further to realize its enactment, to connect the dots, to move from conceptualization point A, to execution point B.   So, what is the action point to bring story-telling into communicating insights? Davison writes, “The ‘story’ is not the output or result of a research project.  It is the communication of the output and as such should be treated as a distinctive ‘project’ in itself.”

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