Archive for the ‘market research reporting’ Category

By Walt Dickie, Executive Vice President

One of the advantages of sticking around an industry for a long time is that you have a decent chance to have known someone who left a mark on its development. I was lucky enough to have known Saul Ben-Zeev, one of the guys who developed the focus group as a marketing research tool. I went to work for Saul in 1978, fresh out of graduate school, and I worked beside him as a junior analyst, then a senior colleague, and then, eventually, as a partner in the business.

I say that Saul was, “one of the guys” because focus groups, like most things, came about because several people were working with similar ideas at about the same time, and, in this case, all of them contributed to the “group depth interview,” as focus groups were then known.

Groups were developed from the “focused” one-on-one interviews that were pioneered by Robert Merton and Patricia Kendall in the mid 1940s. The depth, or focused, technique was applied to groups for therapeutic purposes in the 50s, when therapy groups, or T-groups, became a standard tool for psychologists.  Saul, a product of the University of Chicago psychology department, was familiar with the technique and was one of several practitioners who worked to re-purpose group interviews for MR starting in the late 50s, when Creative Research, the predecessor to C+R, was founded.

The motive behind “group depth interviewing,” for both psychology and marketing, was mining for insights. And a great deal of serious thought was given on the academic side to the nature and quality of the “insights” that could be discovered. It was something Saul had spent a great deal of time thinking about, both as a student and a research professional.

So it may seem surprising that I’ve never known anyone in the business who put less stock in “insights” than Saul. He was particularly tough on what he called “gurus” who traded in “insight” without the benefit of rigorous analysis or meticulously constructed argument. And he was equally dismissive of those focus group moderators – several of whom we hired over the years – who felt their wealth of “insights” made up for their poor analytic skills. “Insights,” Saul said many times, “are a dime a dozen.”

What cost much more than a dime, and was the only truly worthwhile goal in Saul’s mind, was the ability of closely reasoned logic to instill a sense of confidence in the reader of a report, specifically, the confidence to make a decision.

What Saul realized a half-century ago is something that the MR industry seems to struggle with, learning and re-learning. Most marketing research is conducted because someone has to make a decision. A team will have to align around that decision, argue for it, and support it through a process involving intense scrutiny and, often, intense pressure from other teams to take a different course.

The industry seems to have learned that no one in business today needs more data, but the blogosphere seems to be all over the idea that they all need “insight.” Saul will be 86 this summer, and he doesn’t come around the office very much anymore, but every time I hear that a client is “starving for insight” I can hear Saul’s voice dismissing the thought.

Dictionaries say “insights” are intuitive and that they reveal some deep truth or essence. Saul certainly recognized that clients needed deep truths, and he delivered them – week after week, report after report – over a long, distinguished career. I went to many presentations with him, and saw the way his clients idolized him. And I can tell you without hesitation that the insights poured out of his pen (or pencil – he never really did get comfortable with a keyboard).

The thing about insights is that they feel deep and intuitive when you hear them and you’ve got the context that they fit into ready in your mind. The key fits the lock, turns, and suddenly, you get it! Without that context, that set up, an insight doesn’t hold up. You may feel its rightness in your gut, but you’ll have difficulty getting your team to align behind it and even more defending it. (It’s more than interesting to look at some famous insights when you’re a bit removed from the right context; often they’re not much more than gibberish without the support structure. “The medium is the message.” “Business is like the Beatles.”)

For an insight to be insightful, the audience has to be ready to get it. And for one to have an impact, they have to be able to get others to get it, even in the face of opposition. And for that, as Saul taught all of us who worked with him, you need to provide the supports.

Maybe one reason that clients feel starved for insights is that they’ve seen too many that were nothing but intuition; insights that evaporated at the slightest hint of a challenge. Or maybe they’ve seen too many tortured arguments that never got down to the deep level where insight lies.

Clients are starved for insights wrapped in a well thought-out supporting structure.

Personally, I think this was one of the many things Saul right. What’s really needed is an analyst who has the experience to understand the decision to be made, who carefully works through how what’s been learned relates to the issues that drive the decision, who can then find insights that will feel deep and intuitive. Anything less really isn’t worth a dime.

By Robert Relihan, Senior Vice President

Since my blog post on becoming better storytellers, I have been thinking quite a bit about metaphors. Having the ability to think metaphorically is crucial to our understanding consumers and brands. We ask consumers to talk about their experiences in metaphors because it enables them to give voice to feelings that might otherwise remain hidden. As marketers, metaphors enable us to encapsulate the many facets of a brand in a single image.

But I am not always certain that we understand metaphors and their power. Or, perhaps, what may be more the case is that we fear that power because it cannot always be controlled. So, it’s important for us to understand that power.

We all know that a metaphor is a comparison. In its traditional definition, a metaphor does not use like or as — that’s a simile. It’s also important to know that metaphors are figurative, not literal. We feel a metaphor; we sense the connection. It isn’t telegraphed to us.

A way to understanding metaphors is to consider two ways in which they are misused or underused.

• We, as researchers, often ask participants in focus groups to express their feelings about a brand or activity in terms of something else — to create a metaphor. We believe that this activity will force them to take a fresh perspective and unlock perceptions they had not considered. But that is not what happens. We ask a classic qualitative question: “If Brand X were a dog, what breed of dog would it be?” Here is where things begin to go wrong. The respondent thinks, “Well, I like Brand X, and it makes me feel good. Golden Retrievers are friendly and make me feel good. Therefore, a Golden Retriever feels like Brand X.” Rather than expand her vision of the brand, the respondent has simply expressed a single dimension in different words. There is no expansion of meaning. But here is also where we go wrong. In the press of time, we let that pat answer stand. What we need to do is engage the respondent in an extended discussion about Golden Retrievers. There may be a meaningful metaphor there after all. What were the individual’s first memories of Golden Retrievers? What is it like to walk with a Golden Retriever? To sit with one? All of these answers enrich the respondent’s vision of a Golden Retriever and, through the logic of the metaphor, enrich our understanding of the brand.

• As marketers, we often make the same mistake as we think about our brands. We want metaphors that capture the essence of a brand in a single, memorable image. That metaphor can energize and give focus to the brand team. So, after much research and brainstorming, we decide that our brand of ketchup or soup — or whatever — is a ‘hero.’ It rescues consumers from humdrum meals. It helps them conquer the adversity of routine meals. We use the metaphor in a limited, self-congratulatory way. It becomes static, but a metaphor is always active. Every time we return to it, it should enrich our understanding of the brand. This is possible only if the metaphor is specific. If our brand is a hero, is it Odysseus? Robin Hood? Jack Bauer? If we reflect on any one of these heroes, we might discover different qualities in our brand. That is the power of a metaphor. It does not express what we know; it illuminates what we do not.

That’s how to use metaphors. A good metaphor reveals insights, and it does so repeatedly. At C+R we are committed to helping you discover the metaphors that give life to the essence of your brands.

By Walt Dickie, Executive Vice President

The town I live in is about to have elections, and while walking my dog this weekend I noticed that yard signs were blooming with the early crocuses.  Here is what you’d see if you traveled around my neighborhood:

• Blue signs with the names of four people running for the village board on them, with the website of a local voters’ organization printed below.  There are a LOT of these signs.
• Orange signs with the name of one person who is running for a position on the high school board.  There are a lot of these, too, though maybe not quite as many as the blue signs with the four village board candidates.
• Red signs with the name of one person who is running for village treasurer.  Again, there are a lot of these; I can’t tell if there are more or less than the number of orange signs.
• Blue-and-red signs with the name of someone running for school trustee.  Not as many of these compared to the orange or red signs.
• White-and-blue signs with the name of someone running for village president.
• White signs with green lettering bearing the name of a voters’ organization different from the one on the blue signs.

How should we analyze these yard signs?  We could come up with a block-level sampling plan and count the frequencies of the various sign types. That would suggest certain kinds of findings – and some Presidential “polls” were conducted this way. We could also code what little text copy that appears on the signs, but that approach wouldn’t discriminate well, since what text is there is duplicated across many signs (for instance, the title or office the candidate is running for, or claims about “experience.”)

Those approaches wouldn’t tell us much about how the various signs relate to each other, and we need that answer to understand the political meanings reflected in the signs.  And, that’s the key; meaning is found in the relationships among objects.  We want to know how the signs go together with each other, not just how many of each kind there are. To find that, we need to know some correlations. (Because I didn’t have the time or resources to do an extensive count and statistical analysis, I took notes and made some qualitative observations instead.)

• Almost any sign can be on the same lawn as any other sign, but the blue signs never appear on the same lawn as the white signs or the white-and-blue signs.
• Orange signs and red signs often occur by themselves, without any other signs on the lawn.
• Blue-and-red signs are occasionally found alone, but most of them are with other signs, often orange ones. Frequently, there aren’t any signs for village board positions on these lawns.
• The village board signs (blue and white-and-blue) are often found alone, although the white-and-blue and white signs are together on many lawns that have no other signs.
• There generally seem to be more yard signs on lawns that had Obama signs in the previous election (2008), but there were so many of those in my immediate neighborhood that it’s hard to tell.

Here’s what I think the signs are telling me about politics in my village:

• The blue candidate for village president is part of a slate of candidates, which may represent a local political “party.”  There seems to be no strong relationship between this party and the national Democratic and Republican parties.
• The white-and-blue candidate running for village president is running against the presidential candidate of the blue slate for village board; that’s why the blue and white-and-blue signs are never on the same lawn.
• The blue-slate party is identified with a local voters’ group, according to its sign.  It’s likely that the white-sign voters’ group opposes the blue-slate group and backs the white-and-blue candidate, although no sign actually states this relationship.
• There are at least two political contests going on in the Village.  One is over seats on the Village Board and the other is over school issues.  Some households are involved in both, others in one or the other, but there is no apparent party alignment between school candidates and village board candidates.
• The orange and red candidates aren’t firmly allied with either of the local parties.  They’re apparently ambitious individual campaigners.
• The blue-and-red candidate and orange candidates for school positions may be allies.

How This Relates To Text Analysis:

Text analysis tools analyze texts the same way this example analyzes yard signs.

• A text is made up of words, which are like the names and voters’ organizations on the yard signs.
• Text analysis looks at how words co-occur the same way the example looked at what signs appeared together on lawns. Most tools represent this graphically as a network of associations of varying strength.
• From these relationships, the tool makes inferences about the meaning of these clusters, which we can think of as themes; in this case, the political parties, issues, and alignments.  The local “blue party” is a theme, as are the ideas of “school issues” and “village board issues.”  We can easily imagine these themes being represented as circles encompassing the varying concepts and demonstrating their logical relationships across the network of co-occurring yard signs.
• This is the same kind of inferences that humans make about relationships that are implied but never explicit. This sort of analysis is absolutely critical to understanding texts because normal language relies so heavily on the human ability to infer meaning.
• This approach is diametrically opposed to traditional marketing research coding. Coding imposes an external set of analytic categories on data – it would code all the signs claiming that a candidate was “experienced” together. Text analysis can produce this result, but it does so by finding that theme within the data. In this example, text analysis would discover the “experienced” theme, but it would not be useful for sorting the signs.

We could push this approach further by wandering into other neighborhoods to see if we could link the themes that emerge in my village with the themes in others, or maybe we could use the linkages between these village election signs to the broader themes that were expressed on yard signs for the recent national elections. We could probably take in other signage (to stay in the visual realm) as expressed on bumper stickers and lapel pins: correlations forming clusters, which themselves correlate with other clusters, revealing higher-level clusters.

By Robert Relihan, Senior Vice President

You are at a party, standing in the kitchen with a small circle of friends. Someone is relating the latest bit of gossip.  You listen with rapt attention.  You are at once surprised and knowing.  You are shocked and involved.  At the end, you feel changed and in possession of a new vision of your friend, the subject of the juicy…story.  Yes, you were listening to a story.  Now, compare your feeling from the kitchen experience to that of reading the typical research report or listening to the standard presentation.  Ugh!

We are being told to be storytellers.  In fact, storytelling is everywhere.  Storytelling has evolved into a model for how a brand relates with its potential consumers, even business consumers.  There is even a “theory” to storytelling.  But, when we sit in the trenches with a mound of data and are asked to be storytellers, we may shutter.  Sometimes it feels like we are just being told “don’t bore me.”  How do I become a storyteller and not just a mere presenter?

First you need to recognize that there are different stort types — mysteries, sagas, romances, etc.  Heroes overcome and triumph, sometimes by guile, sometimes by strength.  And then again, sometimes a story isn’t so much about a hero as it is about a group that comes together and forges a new identity — sometimes a family, sometimes a nation.

There may be different types of stories, but they all have beginnings, middles, and ends.  A presentation often feels like a collection of discrete arguments, each slide meant to prove a point.  But a story is like a river, connected at all times — through themes, through characters — to both the beginning and the end.  Storytelling is about discovery; storytelling is immersive.

For those of you who were not raised as storytellers, here are a few specific tips:

• Remember, whatever you say connects what came before with what comes next.  Telling stories is all about transitions.  In telling a story you are not making an argument; you are taking the audience on a journey of discovery.
• Stories have a focus, a main character with whom the audience can relate.  So, give your data a character that moves from the beginning to the final insight.  The audience should always be aware of this “character” and her place in the story.  Sometimes, this means personifying the consumer, the brand, the positioning, or whatever.  And, it can mean personifying the audience, casting them in the role of a hero on the quest of insight.
• Leave room for surprises; no story is exciting without it.  An insight is simply a finding made new and exciting by a sense of discovery and surprise.
• The corollary of surprise is anticipation.  Tell your story as if there is always something better, more interesting and valuable around the corner.  When you reach the “end,” would you rather your audience feel they have been presented with a logical conclusion or experienced the explosion of a new insight?
• When I talk to consumers, I encourage them to find metaphors within themselves.  Metaphors give voice to truths and bring richness to the experience.  Moreover, a great metaphor is memorable.

We can all become better storytellers by being attuned to our culture.  Stories are the ways we all tell the truths about ourselves without realizing it. And, just as in society, stories are what connect the reality of consumers to the needs of marketers.

By Robert Relihan, Senior Vice President

Shopper Insights has proven to be an incredibly valuable construct.  It moves the focus of marketing and of research much closer to the actual decision and purchase.  It is real.  We are not asking consumers (a rather vague and distant term in its own right) in a vacuum how an ad makes them feel about a product.   We are in a store with a real shopper; we observe how a real shelf set of products impacts her decisions.

At the risk of injecting some un-reality back into the process, just who precisely is this shopper in shopper insights?  Well, it’s the person in the store doing the shopping.  D’uh!

Not so fast.

Consider three “shoppers” in a grocery store.

• The first is there making her weekly trip to replenish the pantry and prepare for the upcoming week.  She is a bit harried.  She has a list, although it might have some wiggle room in it.  She may even have a few coupons.  She quickly glances across the condiment section looking at the yellow mustard.  What’s on sale?  Does her family really care what brand it is?  How much should she buy?
• Our second shopper is planning a party for the weekend.  She will be serving a buffet with ham.  She too is gazing at the condiment section, but much more slowly.  How many kinds of mustard should she get to satisfy her guests?  Which mustards look interesting?  Are there mustards that will make the table more impressive?
• Finally, we have the shopper who rushes up to the condiment section and grabs a small jar of Dijon mustard from the shelf.  She wants to make a salad dressing tonight, and she has run out of an essential ingredient.

In each case, we have a shopper looking at the same section of the grocery store, scanning the same array of products.  But, each is sensitive and attentive to different cues.  Each has different needs.  The interplay of these needs and cues drives markedly different decisions.

Of course, these are not three different shoppers. It’s the same person visiting the same store, but driven by a different set of situational considerations.  But, from the perspective of the store trying to satisfy her, she is fundamentally three different people.  It is the situation, not something in her tastes and character, that conditions her decision making.

For many years, our restaurant research has been shaped by this fundamental insight — it is the occasion more than the individual that drives decision making. I may go to the same restaurant with my family that I do with a group of friends. But I do so for very different reasons with very different expectations.

By Walt Dickie, Executive Vice President

C+R does a lot of online qualitative, which means we use a lot of newly designed research platforms and try even more. We’re also very interested in using DIY survey tools as a means of giving our analytic staff a shorter, faster, less expensive path to fielding a client’s project. So, again, we’re constantly looking at new tools.

There are a lot of new tools and platforms entering beta or being rolled out, and they’re increasingly attracting investment and developer interest. There’s a huge amount of variation across tools, of course, but their designs have a lot in common, too. All of them have given a fair amount of thought to how to design an interface for the supplier/user, the people who are going to conduct a project. They have also thought a good deal about the respondent interface. But the interface for the end data – often dominated by a “report” that can be exported to PowerPoint – doesn’t seem to have received the degree of thought given the others.

And this last interface – which should be designed around the needs of the client, and should have been designed with the awareness that every client is looking for at least some insight and maybe an actual working plan – just regurgitates data in shiny graphic form, delivering “Marketing Research” rather than “Marketing Insight”. Why didn’t the smart engineers and web design people think more about this?

The main reason, I think, is that they’re listening to research providers, not the clients who buy the research and ultimately pay the bills. Either that or they’re just not watching very closely to see how the business is changing. Even if we allow that the model of the research report– delivered to the end client by a firm that conducted the nuts-and-bolts research, analyzed the data, and wrote the report– will be around for some time to come, we should also recognize that it’s already under siege. As time frames compress, team decision making grows, and the quest for insight replaces the delivery of data and analysis, team working sessions replace presentations and reports.

C+R frequently works this way especially for community-based, social, online qualitative projects. It’s also our standard approach for clients using Interactive Query powered by Invoke, a real-time, interactive, collaborative platform that offers surveys with statistically solid base sizes combined with the flexibility of on-the-fly questionnaire changes and one-on-one respondent interaction. Invoke is the only platform I’m aware of that is based on a model of a collaborating team interrogating the data being collected in real time and leaving at the end of the day having achieved consensus on its meaning. Kudos to them for their vision, but I want more, and I think our industry should, too.

So here, in no particular order, is my wish list for tools whose back ends are designed as decision support systems so a team of clients and research suppliers can have tools at hand for getting past the data and on to the decision. Some are pure flights of fantasy that I have no idea how to realize. Others are grounded in currently realizable technology (I think), given sufficient determination and resources.

• The “back room” team should have the same kind of information-sharing and messaging tools that we give the people in our marketing research online communities and that many corporations provide for their day-to-day operations. Every team member should be able to start discussions, join groups, and upload their thoughts and notes for comments or votes. Simply conceiving the team as a group and providing that group with the kind of functionality that we find in many corporate social networking platforms would be a huge advance. It goes without saying that the team should be able to assemble in virtual space, and should not have to be physically together at one site.
• Every team member should be able to independently, or with a group, explore whatever data the platform is collecting and working with. Everyone should be able to keep private notes with the ability to post ideas publicly to other team members at will.
• Team members should be able to tag or otherwise annotate items of interest in the data or produced by other members of the team when they find them especially insightful or meaningful. This is especially crucial in qualitative projects, but could be equally valuable in many quantitative projects. When a team is looking for insight, revealing items and ideas need to be marked as they are discovered so they can be quickly retrieved and easily shared out and discussed further.
• Functionality for data analysis specialists will have to be available. A coding team should be able to code/tag texts or media with the results then being posted for the team(s) to utilize. Video specialists should be able to retrieve tagged segments to compile “highlight reels” for sharing. The team should be able to tap statistical specialists, text or data analytics professionals, or other kinds of specialists as needed.
• Every team member needs access to information beyond the boundaries of the immediate project. This means access to the internet, of course, but the platform should make it easy to bring in information from corporate data stores and libraries, or from supplier data repositories. Being able to retrieve previous work or supplementary data is a key aspect of making good decisions– no project stands alone.
• Teams are often actively led by facilitators whose job it is to help the team move the process along. Tools to help expedite the process like voting and sorting tools that let groups work through piles of ideas to identify areas of interest and consensus would help.
• Displays of the results of the team’s discussions should be designed so that they are, in effect, self-reporting: the final state of the display should reflect the result of the team’s effort. Ideally, someone viewing such a display should be able to drill down into the top, final state to see more of the underline processes that led to the final display state, the “result,” “conclusion” or “decision.” The requirement of producing a PowerPoint “final report” should be left behind for a more powerful metaphor.

I would love to hear suggestions about this topic. Do you work in collaborative teams? What kind of collaboration tools do you have available? Are you using any tools or platforms that have incorporated a “back room” for your team, and, if you have, what do they provide?

By Robert Relihan, Senior Vice President

Those of us involved in marketing and exploring how consumers make the decisions they do should always pay attention to new approaches and constructs.  If we didn’t, we would still be wandering cities, clipboards in hand, conducting man-on-the street interviews.  So, I am extremely interested in the growth and impact of neuroscience on marketing research.

In my effort to get up to speed in this area I have found Roger Dooley’s website and blog particularly useful.  He covers the breadth of the topic although there are fairly frequent references to those who question the approach, labeled “alarmists.”  And, it is true that there is a good deal of overheated reactions to the idea of marketers probing our brains for ways to make us buy products without realizing we want them.

But, there is reasonable questioning of neuromarketing, and in a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, “Brain Scan Overload” by Jonah Lehrer is an excellent example.  He focuses on the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, a device used to provide a picture of the brain as it reacts to different stimuli.  He points out several ways in which the use of the device in such research might be questionable:

• It uses blood flow as a surrogate for the activity of neurons in the brain.
• There are complex algorithms that separate the noise from the signal.  The result can be a simple picture of what might be a very dense psychological state, such as happiness.
• Various areas of the brain play a role in multiple emotions.  So, the insula plays a role in love, disgust, and bodily pain.  Lehrer points to research that associated a spike in activity in that region of the brain with love for the iPhone.  Why not disgust or pain?

But at the very end of his article, Lehrer makes a point about neuroscience that gives me pause.

“What’s worse, the very fact that we’re looking at a brain scan seems to inhibit our critical thinking. Deena Skolnick Weisberg, a psychologist at Temple University, has demonstrated that merely referencing fMRI research can bias the evaluation of scientific papers.

“When she gave neuroscience students and ordinary adults a few examples of obviously flawed scientific explanations, people were consistently able to find the flaws. However, when these same explanations were prefaced with the phrase ‘Brain scans indicate,’ both the students and adults became much less critical.”

Neuromarketing research seems to be another effort to find research methods that give “the answer,” unchallenged or mediated by thought and analysis.  Marketers make decisions influenced by research.  Research helps provide understanding of consumer behavior.  But, when the method is the answer, subtlety and flexibility are lost.  Ultimately, a sensitive marketer can learn a good deal and make successful decisions by listening directly to consumers.

New Study Examines the TV Consumption Habits of Generations X, Y and i

Adults 18-24 and 25-34 Most Likely to Connect Social Media to TV Viewing; Teens Most Likely to Watch with Friends and Family

(National Harbor, MD—November 9, 2011) – A new study released today, “Watching Gens X, Y & i,” paints a detailed portrait of 13-34 year old consumers and how they watch television: often while taking part in up to four or five activities all at the same time, from eating, cooking and cleaning to texting, surfing the web, emailing, playing games or listening to music.

“Many 13-34 year olds are multi-media multitaskers, but their social media activities vary depending on age group,” said Char Beales, president and CEO, Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing (CTAM), and head of the organization that commissioned the study.

Younger generations have been raised in an entertainment world where content is available anytime, anywhere and on numerous platforms. This study exposes what teens and young adults are watching, with whom they’re watching, where, how often and on what devices.

Although about half of 18-24 and 25-34 year olds follow or “like” TV networks/shows, only 38% of those 13-17 do. The leading social networking activities while watching TV are looking up info (31% of 13-34 year olds), discussing shows online (29%), posting updates/tweeting (24%) and visiting a network or show page (22%). However, these activities are almost twice as likely to be conducted among 18-24 and 25-34 year olds compared to teens.

Click Here To View the Complete Article.

This research, conducted by C+R Research, was commissioned by the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing (CTAM) to investigate the effect of lifestyles and life stages on media and technology usage of younger consumers. It included both qualitative and quantitative online phases in the summer of 2011, and also utilizes data from C+R’s comprehensive syndicated YouthBeat study to provide additional context. 2,124 total interviews were conducted as part of the quantitative phase.

By Robert Relihan, Senior Vice President

Those of us who face the daunting task of sifting through mounds of verbal data — forty individual interviews or a three week on-line community — synthesizing all of those words, and presenting our analysis clearly, succinctly, AND with impact have been intrigued by word clouds. They seem simple and elegant; they reduce all of those words to a picture of the important themes.  Now, there are numerous web sites to help us create word clouds, Wordle being only the best known.

So, why do I feel vaguely dissatisfied when I look at word clouds, even the ones I have created?  They often seem to miss the point or be overly simplistic.  Creating a word cloud sometimes feels like I have cheated myself and my audience.

Jacob Harris of The New York Times makes the case against word clouds and, in the process, gives a brief primer on how to report its data.  It is an incredibly useful article.

He begins with a concept that should become a mantra to market research professionals.  The critique of data clouds is based on the principles of data journalism.  When many of us began our careers, the model for reporting was the academic paper.  I wrote reports a long time ago with footnotes.  Now we strive for clarity and simplicity.  The magazine or newspaper (on-line versions, of course) is our guide.  Data journalism should be our art.

“Visualization is reporting, with many of the same elements that would make a traditional story effective: a narrative that pares away extraneous information to find a story in the data; context to help the reader understand the basics of the subject; interviewing the data to find its flaws and be sure of our conclusions.  Prettiness is a bonus; if it obliterates the ability to read the story of the visualization, it’s not worth adding some wild new style or strange interface.”

The ways Harris point out how word clouds go wrong provide us with a road map for good reporting or, rather, good data journalism.

• Word clouds are based on a very rudimentary textual analysis.  In most cases, a phrase-level or a thematic analysis would provide richer and more penetrating analysis.  The general lesson of this observation is that we need to focus on the concepts that knit the words together consumers use and not on the words.
• Word clouds are often used when textual analysis is not the appropriate tool.  As Harris says, in our analysis we should not confuse “signifiers with what they signify.” We need to use the appropriate methods for getting below the surface of consumers’ comment.  Simply digesting their words will not do that.
• Word clouds have a dirty secret.  They really aren’t analysis.  They leave readers with the task of peering at the image and discerning the meaning themselves.  Word clouds make the assumption that the meaning is obvious.  But, any analysis worth its salt requires some explanation; it requires framing and focus.
• Finally word clouds miss the narrative.  I am not saying what we write or present should be long, dreary marches through the data. Hardly.  We need to find the thread or threads that bring fresh insight to a particular area of consumer behavior.  There are often several reasons why two words might dominate a word cloud.  We need to create the storyfor the reader or listener that that makes just one of these reasons the most compelling and the most relevant.  And, incidentally, that narrative still can be visual.

A word cloud tries to make us believe its immediacy produces insight when, in fact, it may mask the narrative we “data journalists” should be creating.

By Robert Relihan, Senior Vice President

For as long as the phrase “Consumer Insight” has been used, I am amazed that I still see discussions of its meaning.  Don’t we all know what an “insight” is by now?

Well, maybe not.  The word certainly has been overused; every observation about consumer behavior and attitudes becomes an “insight.”

And, unlike a mere finding, it has an air of inevitability, not to be questioned.  Perhaps, the use of “insight” is an example of language creep —using words of greater and greater intensity to describe our actions in an attempt to endow them with more importance than they deserve.  It is a bit like using wind chill factors to convince ourselves that winters are re-e-e-ally cold now.

Yet, the word is useful.  Who doesn’t want to get into the head of a consumer?  That’s what an insight is — an authentic vision of how consumers view themselves and connect with brands or categories.

So, here’s five ways to know you have a true insight and not a mere observation.

• An insight is clear and simple.  One short, declarative sentence is best.  If you need three sentences to explain it, you don’t have an insight.   Most of all, it can’t be a multi-layered, logical construct.  A syllogism is not an insight.
• An insight is a surprise. You may discover insights, but you can’t necessarily search for them.  Insights into the consumer give us new and fresh perspectives; they are unexpected.  Consequently, we are more likely to discover insights by being open and not wedded to particular methods.
• An insight is a game changer.  If an insight is a surprise, if it gives us an unexpected vision, it must drive the development of different products and different ways of communicating them.  The recognition that consumers wanted small indulgences in every category transformed the coffee shop into Starbucks.
• An insight is often a mash up.  How can you be surprised?  How can you be open to discovery?  If there is one rule to developing insights (I resist calling it a method), it is that you need to combine perspectives.  You might never have had that “Starbuck moment” watching people getting coffee in traditional coffee shops.  But, if you also observed them in bakeries and wine bars, the light would go off…insight.
• An insight is not immediately translatable.  We have spent most of our careers looking for “actionable results.”  It is a laudable goal and, in many circumstances, it is an essential goal.  What good would a taste test be without actionable findings?  But, if insights are surprising, game changers, they may not have a direct immediate utility.  We need to be prepared to follow the insight, to push the insight to its ultimate game-changing conclusion.

Check us out at C+R and discover how we can be your partner on that journey of discovery, from insight to game-changing conclusion.