Here’s a more detailed version of what appeared in Research magazine this month.
At Incite we are firmly of the opinion that Researchers needs to communicate better – and can learn a lot about communication from the way that tabloid journalists work.
Never mind MRS code of conduct, this sounds downright illegal!
OK, there might be a bit of a problem with the ‘News of the Screws’ and some of the less salubrious tabloids right now, but I still think researchers can learn from them. Not from the illegal ‘research’ or data gathering processes I hasten to point out, but the way the results of that research are communicated.
Does that not require a rubbish pun and scantily clad women?
Well I think there’s nothing wrong with headline that screams out from the newsstand and some creative visual support, but to learn more, look at how a tabloid covers a story. There’s a big, compelling headline (with or without the pun), which gives the answer or the main story up front. Then there’s a really short punchy first paragraph or couple of sentences which support the headline to make the context really clear. Finally data and information are presented in the rest of the article in support of those key points, not just for the sake of it.
Why bother?
Because if researchers would focus on this journalistic structure in order to synthesise their client communications, the research we deliver would have a lot more impact. With our client Barbara Langer at eBay, we recently ran a survey which showed that one in ten verbal presentations and one in seven written documents were a source of dissatisfaction for clients. And anyone who saw the client panel at the ESOMAR Congress where Lorna Walters talked about how we need to improve our ‘deliverables’, or what she called our ‘product’, will know this is a burning issue for clients. For agencies, the danger is that our ground will be stolen by management consultants, communications and media agencies, as clients think they do this stuff better than us.
OK I get it now. What next?
The approach I am outlining is called the Pyramid Principle. Nothing to do with Egypt, it was popularised by a business writer called Barbara Minto, when she was working with strategy consultants McKinsey & Co. It works by presenting an idea (known as the “governing thought”) in a pyramid form – presented from the top down. The ideas which are included at each level must be a synthesis of the ideas grouped below – for example, ‘mammal’, ‘small’, ‘furry’, ‘playful’, ‘cute’, ‘miaows’, at one level, equals ‘kitten’ at the level above. Each group of ideas must answer the questions raised by the one above – so you cannot describe ‘kitten’ without all those playful furry words listed above. Get the picture?
It sounds simple, but actually it’s quite hard to apply. At Incite, we train all our researchers to use it. Sometimes it takes several months before it comes naturally. Sometimes researchers have to ‘unlearn’ the scientific approach we are all taught and have used before at other agencies. You’ll remember this from school – hypothesis, method, results, conclusions. This is the way we are encouraged to think and structure arguments when we are knee-high and indeed we are particularly taught to show all our workings and earn brownie points by giving lots of detail about the method we used to ‘prove’ our results and conclusions. This might work for a chemistry GCSE, but we are certain it’s the wrong approach for strategic business documents.
Does The Pyramid Principle work?
At Incite we use it with our clients to deliver really tight, compelling communications – and we like to keep our audience lively and engaged, not comatose. This tends to result in action on their part. In particular, our work for eBay has impressed their global insight community and won internal awards. Our work provides clear implications, with messages (from a simple communication test to a complex multi-country conjoint study) really hitting home, where they have not done so in the past. That’s just one example, but we have many others that show how applying the Pyramid Principle and learning from red tops, leads to winning results – Gotcha!
