Customize Research Deliverables by Audience Appetite
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Thu, Jul 29, 2010
Typically, when I think of how to present research results to different audiences, I think about the different information needs each audience has: Marketing will be interested in seeing the results by their customer segmentation, Product Management will be interested in product attributes and satisfaction, Customer Service wants detailed breakdowns by customer service representative, and Executives want a concise summary of the key answers to their business questions.
What I don’t tend to think of is the different appetites for market research. When Kathryn Korostoff of Research Rockstar presented "Rethinking Research Deliverables: So That Your Audience Will Actually Use Them!" at the MRA Annual Conference in Boston, she shared a powerful framework:
As Kathryn pointed out, besides tailoring results to different audiences, you need to think about how those audiences vary in terms of their attention span for market research and their desire for interactivity. I would imagine this changes on a case by case basis, depending on what subject is being researched. Product Management will have a high attention span and high desire for interactivity when refining a new product concept, but they might have a short attention span and a low desire for interactivity for a survey of customers’ preferred channels for advertising – something very important to Marketing.
As we all struggle to look beyond the PowerPoint deck when delivering research results, we need to consider recipients of our research as invidividuals with different information needs and different preferences for interacting and exploring the data we provide. The days of the one-size-fits-all report are over.
With this in mind, we need to provide our end users with a buffet of research deliverables. Some will skip right towards dessert (the executive summary), others will eat sparingly and some will go back to the buffet multiple times. And some will push the grill chef aside and make their own omelet from the ingredients you provided!