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!

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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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