From Information To Intelligence - Better Research
Get the most from your investment in research
'Where is the knowledge we have lost in information.'
T.S. Elliot – The Rock
The heavy lime oak of the boardroom door closes softly behind the departing agency team. The evidence of their protracted three hour research de-brief lies scattered across the board room table - coffee cups, note pads and the many copies of the three weighty volumes that comprise the research documents. The hum of the cooling fan on the data projector is the only noise that breaks the immediate silence the encloses the room as the visitors departed. The board has been cowed by the volume of the data and the sheer grind of the presentation into a stupefied silence.
The chief executive looks down at his note paper, and, instead of the many profound strategic insights he had been expecting to glean from this business critical presentation, he sees his paper covered only elegant doodles, and the only discernible words - a massive, SO WHAT staring back at him, supported by multiple exclamation marks. He looks around the table at his colleagues and finally, settling on the marketing director, gives voice to his only relevant note. "So what?" he asks almost plaintively, and then more angrily "SO WHAT?". His marketing director stares back at him, but in reality she can only agree. The whole expensive exercise has failed to deliver anything of strategic value at all.
A nightmare scenario? Maybe. But certainly not an uncommon one. Now, more than ever, all forward thinking enterprises realise the vital necessity of understanding their markets, customers, prospective customers, competitors and the environmental drivers which shape them all. Yet now more than ever those thirsting for this information find traditional research suppliers unable to deliver the key insights and competitive advantages that those commissioning the work are desperately looking for.
Why is this, and how can this situation be resolved?
Well first perhaps it is important to examine the reasons for commissioning expensive (or even moderately priced) research projects in the first place. These can be expressed in rather broad strategic terms as being about finding out about business development opportunities, assessing and resolving key business challenges and issues, or gaining insights into customers and prospects. To put it a little less theoretically, for the most part, companies, and the individuals within them buy research for any one of five key reasons being to:
1. Calculate a business risk.
2. Gain insights and understandings into existing and / or prospective buyer behaviour.
3. Gain a better view of key environmental drivers and market developments.
4. Discover their relative position in the market place against that of their competitors.
5. Tell them what to do.
In fact, reason 5 could, in part, explain some of the dissatisfaction felt by those commissioning research in the first place. It is always important to keep in mind that if this is what is motivating you to commission the research then you would be better off spending your money on something else. Fortune tellers and psychics, for example. At least these people would be more at home with the idea of telling you what to do. Research cannot, of course, tell anyone what to do. It can merely provide an aid to management thinking, informing views, confirming intuitive insights, and sign posting possible options. It may provide the rationale for the strategy that follows, and often should, but it cannot, in itself and of its own accord tell you what that strategy should be.
Research certainly has a key role to play, though, in fulfilling the requirements of the remaining four points. But even here it too often disappoints too.
If you find your research frustrating rather than insightful and informative what, in fact, you are looking for and deserve to find is the 'missing link' in the evolutionary advancement of the business 'science' of research (and too many of the research practitioners see themselves as scientists rather than business people, and their world as 'para-academic' rather than commercial). This missing link, then, provides the bridge between the information dump of the standard de-brief, and the development of the related strategic business response.
In fact, the last thing this starts with is information. What you do not want, need, hunger and thirst for is information, even if you think you do. The problem for you and for businesses like yours in this, in the first decade of the 21st century, is not too little information it is far, far, far too much. You, like most business people are drowning in information. What you want is intelligence. That gleaming nugget of data, that essence distilled from the reams of information that provides the inspiration which enables you to develop the original, informed, insightful, and unique strategic response.
But you will be very lucky indeed if your research suppliers are able to fulfil this role at all, and especially if you start from the normal starting point for a research project, the specification of requirements, or research brief.
In fact the best starting point is too often missed by those responsible for drawing up the brief. You need first of all to consider your overarching aim, your business mission and your key strategic objectives. Implicit within each of these will be key questions that you need answers to if you are to realise those aims, mission and objectives. You need to begin by finding a way to articulate these questions and this is especially challenging as they relate to what you do not know rather than what you do. However it is worth persevering with as it is these questions that will inform your initial specification of requirements in relation to research and the key intelligence that you need to derive from it.
Once you have these you can then turn your attention or the attention of your colleagues to the research brief. Here too very often organisations put far too little thought and effort into developing their research brief and simply set out a statement of requirements in the broadest terms, or even, more worryingly, brief their suppliers only verbally. A good research brief, well grounded in the key strategic issues facing the company, will set out:
Now there are many contributory factors that are preventing you from getting the best value from your research and many other processes you need to take into account and put in place. They are too many for us to encapsulate within the confines of this short article. But it is this last point in the brief that is one of the major keys to the relative success of the whole research project and the key to getting the very best ROI on your research investment.
You see your real problem can be neatly summarised by a remark made by Professor Robert M. Worcester chairman of MORI (Market & Opinion Research International) who has stated on many an occasion that it is not the job of the researcher to suggest what to do in response to their findings, it is merely to report them.
The whole premise of this article suggests that this is no longer enough. You want more, you need more and your money should buy you more. So what you need to do principally and above everything else is to articulate this 'more' in your briefing requirements.
You need to state that you want to see not simply the reporting of their findings and the information involved, but their analysis too. You want them to begin to prompt and provoke your thinking and the thinking of your colleagues by making recommendations, highlighting insights, challenging existing interpretations and, yes, even being provocative. And you must demand that the pick out the kernel of intelligence that you are seeking in the detail of their de-brief report. You must then demand a de-brief workshop that builds on their presentation and, ideally, facilitated by them so that they can provoke, challenge, suggest, recommend and lead you to develop your strategy, plan, tactics, positioning, or whatever it is that you need to do to make the research data actionable, practical and of direct and immediate use to your organisation.
For sure many of your current or existing research suppliers will balk at this proposal, but some will relish the challenge. And it is those that can help you realise and capitalise on the true value of your research investment. Only then can you begin to recover the knowledge you have lost in the information.
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