Finding Out What You Don’t Know: Top 10 Things Researchers Don’t Realize About Research
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Wed, Oct 07, 2009
David Weinberger, VP of Insights, Georgia-Pacific, discussed the top 10 items researchers often don't recognize about their work:
10) Understand the business. Who is the target customer? How does the business make money? Connect the dots between different functions? Home Depot only learnt a few years ago that 3% of their customers made up 30% of their revenue.
9) You don't need to reinvent the wheel. As an industry, we have a tremendous literature representing a wealth of knowledge going back a long time. Motivational research was developed in 1947 and continues to evolve in brand-strategy development; the volume forecasting model was created in 1960 by Fourt and Woodlock. You need to seek out these old and valuable methods.
8) Develop repeatable processes and frameworks. It's faster, cheaper, provides norms and cross-study comparisons. For instance, build a standard advertising-effectiveness model for your organization.
7) It's 10:00 in the morning. Do you know what your customer is doing? One hundred years ago, running a country grocer or butcher shop, you'd know everything about your customers. Look at ethnography, store and lifestyle shadowing, deep dives and immersion excursions to truly learn customer behavior.
6) Try new insightful approaches to understand unmet customer needs. Do you know the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Corollary: "If you do what you did, you will get what you got." Look at deep qualitative research, ethnography and cultural insight. Check out In Your Purse: Archeology of the American Handbag for a study of women's handbags, which uncovered billions of dollars in product innovation and marketing opportunities.
5) Learn to speak finance. Learn to translate your research results into ROI: for instance, quantify sales lost due to customer problems.
4) Can you write a one pager? Tell me the "What" and the "So What". Give your clients the one page with the key findings and the key recommendations. Talking in threes helps people remember it: summarize in threes. Put the insight at the top and the implication at the bottom.
3) Develop actionable insights that drive execution. Use insight strategically and holistically to increase sales and profitability. BCG will publish a study of 45 organizations and how the value of the market research is bringing a broad perspective to the organization.
2) Focus on leadership and execution. Inform the organization with all the research.
1) Don't forget to sharpen your saw. Read, participate and invest the time to improve.