‘Webinar’ – the word is a portmanteau of web and seminar and encompasses all online workshops and conferences. According to RSM’s survey of research professionals, they are used by 30% of those in the research industry to stay up-to-date with everything research – they’re more popular than Twitter.

On Friday 28^th June, Mustard’s very own Simon Dunn hosted a #NewMR webinar on infographics.

Infotactics’ purpose is to introduce the infographic, and to take the market research professional through the process of developing one. Participants are taken through the why, what and how of the infographic by Dunn, who brilliantly describes the infographic as ‘a poster boy for findings‘.

Watch Infotactics here:

A successful affair, the webinar was watched by 175 people from around the globe – many tweets were tweeted – and many insights taken away.

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There are many brilliant people in the research and consumer insight business, who advise clients on all aspects of marketing, customer experience, innovation and branding but who often do not apply what they preach to their own businesses.

Now, I know how hard it is to step back from your own organisation and see it clearly, warts and all. It is even harder to put yourself in the shoes of your potential clients and see what they see, hear what they hear about your company. I have run a small marketing agency for six years, and guess what we’re worst at? Yes, that would be our own marketing. We are so focused on delivering brilliant work for clients and trying to make some money that we forget to update our own website, write that blog or tweet that message. So, I feel your pain.

But just because something is hard to get around to doesn’t mean we should not focus on it. So, I am going to write a few short and hopefully helpful articles on different aspects of marketing and communications for researchers.  These will be mostly for agency researchers, but I will also focus on how to communicate insights so that clients can ensure their research makes a difference.

As my starter for ten, I am going to suggest that a strong brand is an asset that researchers should exploit much more than they do at the moment. We all know there are books and books written about brands and brand positioning, but here’s what I think really matters for a research brand:

1. Be yourself.  What is it about you, your culture, personality or values that makes you, you? It could be what you do but it’s easier to be distinctive in terms of how you do it, or what the overall experience is working with your company.  You need to express and communicate your values (and no more than three of them please!).  Every organisation has something special and different, however small. Build on it.
2. Stand out. It’s not just for supermarket shelves.  All branding is about being distinctive. Be brave and bold with your brand. This means visually as well as verbally. There are so many hackneyed clichés in research brand imagery – brains/mountains/magnifying glasses/handshakes/ globes/binoculars/grids/charts/ticks….to name but a few. Why do researchers have to be so literal and unimaginative? Break the mould! Look at your competition and make sure you are different.
3. Be consistent – You can stand out with a fresh name, a distinctive logo, a strong strap line a great website or great advertising or even better, a great product experience. But if the name, logo, strap line, ads, website or the product experience you deliver to clients is inconsistent, customers will be annoyed and confused and lack of conviction will hang around you like a bad smell.  If a brand is a guarantee, a sign of trust, you have to deliver it consistently.
4. Focus. Back to point one above. You are you. Build on the special and different. If it’s the same as everyone else, don’t talk about it. Stop listing all the products and services you provide, or focusing on ‘hygiene’ factors like honesty, reliability and the fact that you have SPSS. No one is going to work with a dishonest, unreliable bunch of people who do not have the basics they need to deliver research, but you’d be amazed how many agencies talk about these things as if nothing else mattered. Don’t be afraid to prioritise one part of your offer with your branding. If you are an expert in hard to reach audiences, or ethnography but also very good at a bunch of other stuff, focus on your strengths first.

How to go about this? Do not attempt to do this at home!  You need a professional branding design agency that is experienced in business to business branding preferably in the professional services sector.  They will have a process and the ability to create what you need. Just because you are great at explaining data or managing complex research projects, it does not mean you can design a brand.  I will do a piece on how get the best out of agencies later in this series.

A few years ago I worked on a rebrand with a large global research company.  We worked very hard to get the whole company on board with the changes to the brand and what it meant for the business. We focused on ensuring the internal communication was extensive and involving so that people felt they ‘owned’ the new identity. It worked extremely well but what really made my day was the reaction from clients. “If your own branding is so great, it makes me think you will be able to take care of my brand” was the reaction from one.  A strong brand, consistently managed, is a really powerful asset that many researchers would do well to exploit.

This article first appeared in Quirk’s Marketing Magazine on 27/Jan/2013.

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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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Two weeks ago Team Mustard had a complete office blitz! We chucked out old magazines (can’t believe 2009 is considered “old” already), created organized archives, rearranged the desks and, most importantly and coolest of all renovations, we added a Mustard coloured accent wall. Soon the accent wall will feature giant orange-and-turquoise hotdogs — per Keen as Mustard brand!

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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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Discourse abounds regarding the place of “big data” within market research as the industry groans and shifts under the weight of an influx of data which is increasing at an unprecedented rate. But has market research done enough groaning or shifting to meet the needs of ‘big data’? And do we need a new definition of what market research is or even a new nomenclature for the industry? The Market Research Society looks into this in their recent report in which they estimate the new role of market research as, “defining the ‘business of evidence’.” The thorough report, which stakes an MRX flag in the economic grounds of competing industries such as core film, music, etc., argues market research can “no longer be defined as ‘market research,’ as the industry is embracing “legitimate, sophisticated, and contemporary research activities” that have “up till now been mainly excluded from definition as market research.” More than taking on new activities, though, the report points out just how much revenue the UK industry produces in the UK. The estimate is that MRX contributes roughly £3bn (Gross Value Added) to the economy and employs up to 60,000 folks (that’s more than the UK Newspaper and Music industries combined!) compared to the old MRX definition which employed around 40,000 people, and contributed 0.2% to the UK GDP.

It appears, then, that with the largest and latest surge of available and processable data the world has yet to see, the market research industry is keeping up just fine. But if we are not market researchers, what are we? Data directors? Customer gatekeepers? Insighters? Data giants? Answers on a post card please!

(Side Note: see what Vision Critical‘s Ray Poynter has to say about a few “plasters” the industry is using as it struggles, though successfully, to run along-side “big data.”)

You can find the original MRS report here.

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