Of course, a lot of our clients are great at always getting along to groups and really involving themselves in the process. Nor is this a criticism aimed at consumer insight departments who spend as much time as we do in the dark, lonely confines of the ‘viewing room’. And, before you ask, nor is it a cry for company on a long and lonely Wednesday night!

My plea is for the real users of the research to make an appearance. Those who take what we do and action it, those who actually make it all happen in their company. Those are often the ones the furthest away from the consumer – and that seems odd to me.

I totally understand that they are busy people – but who is the most important here – them or the consumer who buys their products? In this day and age, PowerPoint does not do the consumer justice, so much is not said and so many reactions are visual and not verbal. Bringing video clips into the presentation just doesn’t do it justice for me, you need to know the context in which things are said and not said – basically you need to really feel and ‘smell’ the consumer.

Moreover, and here is my real bugbear… often important questions that come to light at debrief stage cannot be explicitly answered – but they could have been if the key questioner was at some of the sessions and could use this knowledge to prompt appropriate ad-hoc angles of attack.

Come on, what strategies should we be using to get them there? Holding groups in their boardroom at lunchtime? Free bottles of Krystal on tap? All thoughts gratefully received!

It is then, slightly surprising that in ‘modern times’ this system still exists.  While the punched cards have gone, many systems still work off the basis of 80 column numbering on questionnaires.  The end point of most analysis is still seen to be the production of data tables – produced by a specialist – which often takes a couple of weeks to haggling and negotiating to produce.  While the dot matrix print out has been replaced by shiny new ‘laser printers’ (whooo hooo!), many researchers still think they have to ‘check the tables’ rather than actually look for insights.  And the time spent of getting the data into some sort of shape still often vastly outweighs the time spent thinking about what it says and what implications it might have for the client’s questions.  Multivariate analysis is definitely still a dark art, conducted only by those with a scar on their forehead.

At Incite, we think this whole approach is nonsense.  The purpose of data is to produce answers and insights.  As a result, we train everyone to be able to analyse the data themselves – not by spending hours looking at data tables, but by actually getting their hands dirty using SPSS (and similar software) to drill down into the data, testing and exploring hypotheses.  This means that we can quickly understand what the data is saying and turn the insights into a compelling story before most agencies have finished checking that their tables match the hole counts.  We also train everyone in the use and understanding of multivariate software so that they may run their own segmentation analysis, regressions and maps.  That way we can really pull the data apart, testing twenty or thirty different approaches in the time that most agencies spend briefing the ‘specialist’.  And because we treat it as part of the job, we don’t feel the need to bill the client every time we change one variable in the data.

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!

The hard work has paid off. We have been shortlisted two years in a row as Marketing’s Research Agency of the Year – but for us it is awards from clients that matter most.  My proudest day this year was winning Reckitt Benckiser’s ‘Recognising Brilliance’ Award. Perhaps it won’t be a great surprise that this good work has again led to a strong business performance . One of the top 10 fastest growing agencies in this year’s MRS league table, our investments have helped us grow to a team of 39, of which 36 are senior researchers, totally focused on challenging clients and delivering powerful, actionable insights.  The other three are just as vital as they oil the wheels and free up the rest of the team to dedicate themselves to our clients.  I’d like to thank everyone for their hard work and for helping Incite continue to grow and flourish into 2012.

Click here to read Vision 2011. We’d love your views on the articles, and any other insight that you would like to share. Please email your usual Incite contact or get in touch with me at roger.banks@incite.ws.

Award season is upon us again. And what does that mean exactly?

Well, if we’re honest, at Incite we have mixed feelings about awards. Of course, the little jpeg beneath your e-mail signature proclaiming success looks lovely and can have an impact. But to be honest, how much are awards a recognition of achievement from the industry or our peers and how much are they really in recognition of a damn fine piece of self-promotion? Hollywood has begun to recognise that studios sending goody-bags to academy voters to promote their stars and starlets smacks of not being a genuine talent contest. Is there a way for the market research industry to recognise a fine body of work rather than inviting agencies to pay to perform a one-off dance-off?

At this point we should declare an interest. Last year, having seen 68% growth and huge support from our growing list of clients, we joined the one-off dance-off and entered the MRS Agency of the Year award. We did not win. We were not even shortlisted. So is this just sour grapes? Well I guess a bit of yes and no. We were not happy that we hadn’t even made the nominations cut. Who would be?

But we are delighted that Reckitt Benckiser decided to give us their market research Partnership Excellence Award for 2011. We didn’t ask them to. They don’t have to give it to anyone if they don’t think it is deserved. But they reviewed their experience over the course of a year and deemed us worthy.

We are also delighted to be shortlisted (for the second year running) for Marketing Magazine’s Market Research Agency of the Year Award. Yes, we have to provide a written document to confirm nomination and provide evidence, but we were invited to do so on the basis of our business performance, not because we paid to make a submission. We think that because Marketing Magazine’s awards are from the wider marketing industry and seen by more clients and not from the research industry alone, they are of more value.

Hey…we never said we weren’t shy of blowing our own trumpet. Our own damn fine piece of self-promotion? Or do you agree that the research industry awards need a shake up?

Let us know!

Rather than pouring more and more poor quality ideas into the innovation funnel, in the hope that eventually one will be ‘the big idea’, Incite has developed a way to identify hidden opportunities that lead to genuinely breakthrough ideas which are sustainably big and different…

We conducted a series of extended, wide ranging observation and confrontation sessions with consumers designed to challenge their coping mechanisms and uncover hidden needs.  We developed radical new product ideas off the back of that and tested them. The results were startling.

We are running a free webinar on 6 September to reveal what we found. If you are interested in signing up please follow this link: https://incite.webex.com and use the Registration password: unmet and event password: innovation

But as we all know as with a marriage, building the type of partnership that reaps these rewards is difficult and demanding on both sides. Just as with other types of relationships, communications and mutual respect play a huge part in establishing and maintaining the bond.  To start with, teamwork is paramount.  This means thinking long-term and not as if the two parties are just working on a project by project basis.  Real commitment means nurturing, valuing and investing in the relationship – on the part of the client as well as the agency.

At Incite we were founded on the principles of sharing, challenging and propelling clients to action and try to work in this way all the time. Consequently we are delighted to have just received Reckitt Benckiser’s annual market research award for “excellence”, based on ratings from Reckitt Benckiser’s worldwide market research team.  For Lorna Walters, SVP Global Market Research, Reckitt Benckiser, to say that “Incite has been an outstanding partner to RB over the last year, providing thought leadership on many aspects of our business” makes us come over all warm and smiley. And her assertion that we “have also helped…to harness the collective thinking of all our partners which we see as critical to our ongoing success,” fair makes us blush.  Champagne, flowers and chocolates anyone?

1. Don’t do it unless everyone agrees it is needed.
It’s amazing how many companies don’t get corporate buy in from the outset.  The implications of segmentation studies often extend far outside of the marketing department, but they are the ones who commission the work, then get frustrated that the operations group (for example) don’t take the findings on board.

2.Don’t expect your usual research agencies to be able to cope with segmentations.
Yes, this is a bit harsh and we have nothing against your usual agency: if they specialise in segmentations they will be fine.  Segmentations require a different skill set and working approach from normal research studies.

3. The data will NOT tell you the answer.
Data needs guidance… It is critical that you have a hypothesis about what some of the segments might look like so that you can judge the output from the study against those hypotheses.  Qualitative research provides valuable input to help to develop hypotheses…

4. Qualitative and quantitative segmentations rarely match perfectly.
While broad groups that are identified in qualitative research should emerge in the quantitative analysis, the nuances of a qualitative segmentation will often be lost – not because quantitative research can’t detect nuances, but because the need to reduce a sample of over a thousand people into a few simple groups will force the data to simplify the issues.

5. There is no such thing as the ‘statistically right answer’.
Different software and methodology produces different answers.  Ask your agency about this.

6. Segmentation is as much an art as a science.
I never understand why some clients are so insistent on ‘getting the data to tell us the answer’.  Politics and pragmatism will often have as much of an impact on the solution as statistics.

7. If you need more than one segmentation, make sure that they link together.
Why do organisations decide to conduct multiple segmentation studies and then complain that none of them have become embedded in the organisation? The only way anyone is going to understand and embrace a segmentation is if it is simple and useable.

8. Be prepared to delete lots of respondents.
While we would hope that all respondents answer the surveys correctly, the reality is that many don’t – either because they don’t understand the questions or they are tired and want to do something else.  This is a huge issue for segmentation studies where respondents are being grouped according to how similar they are to others.  To overcome it, it is important to make the questions easy to understand so that people can answer them correctly; to ask the same question twice or more on a couple of occasions (to identify the people who are inconsistent in their responses) – and to delete people who are inconsistent in their responses to the consistency questions.

9. If you want people to engage in the segments, you have to bring them to life.
While many people within the research department will happily look at endless PowerPoint slides, most people will glaze over within seconds.  So rather than spending hundreds of hours trying to design slides that will capture peoples’ imagination, spend a bit of money and creativity to do the job differently.

10. The segmentation solution is only the start of the journey, not the end.
Many people, clients and agency alike, think that all the hard work is done once everyone has agreed the solution.  The reality could not be further from the truth.
Am I too cynical? Let me know your views on segmentation…