Archive for the ‘market research tools’ Category

By Robert Relihan, Senior Vice President

One of the most difficult experiences for a focus group moderator is to be in a room with eight people who are supposed to be “loyalists” of a particular brand and discover that most could care less.  The assumption, of course, was that anyone who was a heavy user had to have an affinity for the brand.  So, you made sure that everyone purchased the brand in the past month and had purchased the brand three times in the past six months; they were very heavy users.

But they stared at you blankly when you tried to discuss what the brand stood for or what it meant to them.  The fact is, to develop a meaningful understanding of a brand’s essence, you can’t simply talk to users; you have to talk to people who are passionate about the brand.

So, here are four things to remember when looking for your true (blue) customers

• Users are not always loyalists.

This is the most obvious point.  When you need to talk to or understand people who are passionate about you brand, don’t be coy.  Don’t create elaborate usage algorithms.  You need to be assured that they do use your brand, but it is more important to ask them, “Is this your favorite brand?”

And, a corollary might be the usage is not affinity.  Efforts to build loyalty, such as loyalty programs, can stimulate and reinforce usage, but they do not necessarily build affinity and engagement.

Finally, loyalty and affinity may be as much a feature of the category as it is of your brand.  Coke and Pepsi have spent years and fortunes building up the notion that it is important to be loyal to one or the other.  How could I not be a Coke or Pepsi loyalist?  In effect, you have to be passionate about soft drinks before you can be a Coke or Pepsi loyalist.

• Loyalty is a disposition.

Some consumers seem more disposed to being passionate about the brands they use.  They want to engage with them.  They derive satisfaction from the simple act of choosing a brand and feeling it is “theirs.”

• Loyalists bring as much to your brand as the brand gives to them.

As much as marketers like to see themselves as charting a brand’s essence, users have often been in the driver seat.  In the years of Honda’s rise as a major automotive brand in the US, it crafted an image as a solid, reliable car.  Yet, when I talked with Honda owners, I was always struck by how solid, reliable and careful they were.  How could a car not be reliable when it was driven by such owners?

• Look to their youth.

Loyalty to your brand does not come out of nowhere.  If it is deep, it has been there for a long time.  As a child I remember watching 20^th Century on CBS television. It was sponsored by Prudential Insurance.  The Rock of Gibraltar will always be in the back of my head when I think about my insurance.

If you are really looking to find your loyalists, you might well discover that they have had a relationship with your brand long before they actually purchased it.  A large number of Porsches are driven by people who have wanted to own one since they were twelve.  Ask the question, “What are your first memories of a brand?”  If they can’t go back into their past, they probably aren’t a true loyalist.

This all seems to point to the importance of social media in building a brand and engaging loyalists.  Social media give loyalists an arena to engage with brands, to define both themselves and the brand.  But, there is a trap in social media for marketers.  Recent research suggest that most individuals “friend” retailers on Facebook to get deals.  That is, social media encourages usage.  Does it create engagement and bonding; is it a two-way street?  That is what social media must do to encourage loyalty.

At C+R we are ready to help you understand your “loyal” customers and how to stimulate their engagement with you.

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 Robert Relihan, Senior Vice President

About a year ago, I described how smartphone apps could change the face of grocery shopping.  I had been converted by Grocery Gadgets.  It organized my planning and list making; it guided my trip through the store.  I was focused.  The experience was great.  I was a more efficient shopper.

Well, I have been using Grocery Gadgets for about a year.  I finally came up for air and looked at my fellow shoppers.  During all of that time, I have yet to see a single individual using a smartphone while grocery shopping.  Not a one.  What’s going on?  Where is the predicted mobile commerce revolution in the grocery store?

One answer, is that there are people out there going up and down the supermarket aisles guided by their smartphones and I just haven’t noticed them.  It is also possible that the transition will take a bit more time.  But, the mobile commerce experience, at least in the grocery store, still may be a work in process.

• Grocery Gadgets is a very elaborate shopping list.  So are other grocery shopping apps.  Even apps from the stores themselves are shopping lists connected to an electronic version of the weekly circular.  Simply moving material from one medium to another is rarely successful.  Something from the original medium is lost.  What is simpler than a list on the back of an envelope stuck to the refrigerator door?  And, it fails to take advantage of the strengths of the new medium.  Reading the local newspaper on my smartphone was never very satisfying, but reading stories related to topics in which I am interested aggregated by Google News is fantastic.
• There is no feedback.  The communication is all one way.  I create a list, I select the items, and I check them off.  Increasingly, consumers expect a sense of community in their mobile shopping experience.  If I create a list of grocery items for my trip to the store, I should be able to see my friends who like the same things, and the store should tell me which of those items are on sale.  Or, it should suggest alternatives that are on sale.
• Think about your grocery shopping.  When you are in the store, what are the questions you have?  Where is an item…or an aisle?  What’s on sale?  What flavor does my family really like?  Which cut looks better?  Which melon seems fresher?  Is a 20 oz. bottle at $1.50 a better deal than a 12 oz. one at a $1?  My grocery app cannot answer any of these questions.  So, it is disconnected from my real in-store experience.  To respond to my real needs in the moment, the store will need to be aware of me and my smartphone.  And, if it can, I am likely to accept its tracking me.
• You do see people in the grocery store using their phone.  They are calling spouses and asking them to clarify something on a list or asking what they can get instead something they can’t find. They ask children what they might like.  In other words, real people use their phones in the store to be flexible.  My grocery shopping app isn’t.
• Some shoppers insist that going to the grocery store is drudgery.  But, I have talked to just as many who say a trip to the grocery store allows them to indulge themselves or their family.  They may not be able to splurge on jewelry at David Yurman, but they can treat themselves to some fancy chocolate or gourmet cheese at the grocery for just a few dollars.  Grocery Gadgets and its’ ilk make shopping more efficient.  They also need to inject some fun into the process.

I am sure there are many more ways that the mobile commerce in the grocery store can become more engaging.  Making me a more efficient shopper was great, but I want more.   I want my smartphone to create a reciprocal relationship with the store that makes it a new experience every time I enter.  At C+R, we are excited to explore what that means for you and your customers.

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 Walt Dickie, Executive Vice President

C+R, like many of the companies that used to happily refer to themselves as “Marketing Research Companies,” is finding itself less and less comfortable with our traditional moniker. We look back and ask, “What have we been doing?” and then look ahead and ask, “And what are we going to do in the future?”, and then face the stark reality of the present, and try, “And just who am I?!” It’s as though we looked at an old picture of ourselves and suddenly felt uncomfortable that we were still wearing our hair the same way or hadn’t gotten new glasses.

One of my colleagues is on the External Advisory Board for a major university graduate program in Marketing Research. In both of their last bi-yearly meetings, there was long and active debate about how the graduate program should position itself… as a “Market Research” degree?  As a “Marketing Research” degree?  “Marketing Insights”?  Marketing Consulting?  Business Insights?  Marketing Analytics?  And many more.  After two such discussions, involving 30 research veterans at the top of their careers, there has still not been a consensus!

Personally, I’m in favor of “marketing insights” — at least for now. “Marketing research” is not only dated, it’s just plain wrong. No one wants “research,” they want the results that come from having done research, by which I don’t mean data or the analysis of data. What’s wanted is at least currently described as “insight.” It’s like the old story about nobody wanting a drill; what they want are holes, and drills are just a means to that end.

I’m not that sanguine about the long-term prospects for “insights” though, because I don’t think anyone really wants them either. “Insights” aren’t decisive enough; you don’t make decisions based on “insights.” If someone hands you an “insight,” you’re still stuck trying to decide what to do about it. “Insights” feels weak to me, but I don’t have a better term that doesn’t feel like over-selling (at least for the moment). But the long-term goal is probably more like a “plan,” “agenda,” or at least a “decision,” and the eventual term for the discipline needs to get closer to those ideas.

I find myself thinking a lot about whether the time has finally come when we can get past our fascination with collecting and presenting data. We’re much, much closer to it than we’ve ever been – but we’ve all got a lot of historical baggage to overcome. So I’m in favor of “Marketing Insights” as a stake in the ground, and a claim on where we’d all like to be, even if I don’t think it’s really where we need to be yet.

By Walt Dickie, Executive Vice President

I’m not a news junkie, but I’ve always read newspapers. Having grown up and gone to college in New England, I’ve been reading the Times since I was a kid, and I can’t remember a time when www.nytimes.com wasn’t the home page on my computer.

My opinion of the Grey Lady has varied over the years. I’ve always admired how the Times tried to be the newspaper of record, even when it fell short of its own standards. And although I’ve thought they made some remarkably dumb moves over the years (see “Paywall, failure of”) I’ve increasingly come to admire the Times as an online innovator.

Although it’s commonplace today for online companies to have an API, the Times was the first major newspaper I was aware of to do so. It’s also the only newspaper I know of that has an experimental development arm, beta620. And although it’s almost impossible to imagine a news site without graphics, the Times has been especially thoughtful about the graphics they build and how they relate to the principles of journalism.

But the Times has also been working on data collection projects – I first noticed these around the last Presidential election cycle, but there may be earlier examples. I remember sending friends of mine links to an online “mood tracker” that aggregated answers to the question, “What are you concerned about right now?” into a timeline and used type size to indicate the number of people sharing a common concern. It was simple, informative, constantly shifting, and sometimes surprising.

More recently, the Times took a step further and created what looks to my eyes – practiced as they are at looking at surveys – as a truly re-imagined survey. It was in  (a) timeline.” Here’s a small screen shot of what the display looks like:a year-end piece about the future of computing, and it asked readers “to make predictions and collaboratively edit

If you hover over any of the entries, it will open up and show a longer description of the topic. Here’s what you see under “Routine Voice Interaction”:

This is a survey question – something on the order of, “In what year do you expect routine voice interaction to be available on all computing devices?” But, besides displaying the question, the Times survey shows who suggested it (they also link to information about the proposer), the current consensus answer, the number of respondents who have previously disagreed with the then-current answer, and an invitation to vote on moving the date forward or backward. Imagine how grueling this would be set up in a typical online survey. The Times version has 53 separate events – I can hardly imagine a way to make responding to a survey grid that size bearable.

A lot of things are going on here; one being better graphic design than most survey tools can support, of course. But the more I think about this, the more it strikes me that the big change is that the Times has shifted the concept of this “survey” from a model of “we ask questions, and you answer them,” to one that puts more power in the hands (and mouse) of the “respondent,” who is invited to explore this space of topics, to think about topics in a context of their own choice rather than in the sequence that the questionnaire author chose, and to ignore topics in which they have no interest and/or knowledge. The “big idea” here is a significant shift of control from the researcher to the respondent.

I encourage you to go to the site and try it – especially if you’re a tech person who knows and cares about computing. You’ll find that you don’t just respond to one topic at a time – you can, for instance, look across the items that are now all clustered around the same year and think about whether, in your mind, they should all belong together. You may advance one of the items a few years, which may make you re-think one of your earlier answers, so you go back and adjust that one to bring it into line with how you’re thinking now. And you’ll almost certainly give some items a pass.

Let me be clear here: I know the analytic reasons for questionnaire order and error messages that say, “You must answer all of the questions on this page before continuing.” And I’m not suggesting that this exercise represents the future of all surveys or that it’s even the best possible expression of a more user-driven alternative.

But ask yourself whether the ability to conduct certain kinds of statistical analysis based on certain kinds of sampling models, with control over order effects and incomplete data records always and in every case would outweigh the value of considered responses from involved respondents. The MR industry’s answer to data quality issues almost always involves a critique of survey design, so why do we continue to produce surveys that perpetuate the ones we designed for phone interviews in 1992?