EmergeSmarter Blog

By Lynne Bartos, Vice President

There is nothing more embarrassing for a researcher than to hear a client say “…this doesn’t really address the business questions that we set out to answer.” This is more common an occurrence in research reporting than most of us would care to admit. But unfortunately, much report writing these days falls short of expectations for those on the client side.  This is likely due to more emphasis on methodology or analytic technique at the expense of clear graphics, creative story-telling and actionable direction.

What often happens during the report-writing process is that market researchers have their direct research client in mind.  They neglect the fact that their direct contact must present these findings to the ultimate stakeholder in the process — someone in senior management or the head of marketing who does not function in the research realm. 

We need to take conscious steps to break out of our little bubble to avoid some of the lingo that is prevalent in research circles. You know what I mean if you’ve ever found yourself presenting your findings to marketing folks.  While peppering them with terms such as “mean,” “monadic,” “DK/NS,” “latent class,” and the like, you suddenly notice the deer-in-the-headlights reaction.  Worse yet, your audience’s eyes glaze over completely.  These terms are foreign to many marketers and, frankly, most of them couldn’t care less about such things.  They simply want a viable solution to the particular business need they set out to address.          

So, when writing a research report for my clients it helps me to keep a few things in mind….

Speak to Marketers in Their Language

Focus on what marketers care most about — getting customers, keeping customers, and increasing their share of the customer’s wallet.  So tell them what is meaningful to them….

• How to position their brand
• How best to price it 
• Who their best prospects are and how to reach them
• What message should they be communicating 
• Who are their most loyal and valuable customers
• How do they keep them loyal to their service or brand 

Net, net — put some Marketing-Speak into your report, and leave out the Research-speak.

Tell a good story

A good report tells a good story.  So, how do you tell a compelling story?  Start by getting organized!

• Develop an analytic plan that focuses on business issues and objectives — the questions that need to be answered. 
• Outline how the questions will be. 
• Once the data is in, all team members should know how the data relates to those question, and they can craft the best story together.

Remember, every page in the report should contribute to the story!  If something doesn’t contour well with your story, stick it in the Appendix.  How many hundred-page reports have you been subjected to where the charts are all in the same order as the questionnaire?  Where is the story?  

It’s also important to stick closely to your analytic plan when crafting your story. The analytic plan is what helps to keep everyone focused on why the research was conducted in the first place.

Insightful Headlines and Bullets

What I also find helpful in getting my arms around the story is to write effective bullets and headlines for the data presented.  Too many people think an insight is reiterating the numbers that are in the charts.  Remember, anyone can read the numbers on a chart – our job, as researchers, is to pull the deeper insights from seemingly obvious data.

Be Creative and Have a Llittle Fun

Creativity also comes into play!  Package the story in a creative way. No one wants to see rows and rows of data. Make the report visually appealing so you don’t intimidate those who are going to be using the findings to help drive strategy.  Avoid too much text and too many numbers.

And, don’t be afraid to insert some humor here and there. It reminds your clients that you are human and helps to lighten the tone and keep things relaxed.   

Get to the Heart of It

And finally, probably the hardest part of the report process for any researcher is to get straight to the heart of it… what is the story – conclusions, implications, and recommendations.  Go to the next step to tell them what the data MEANS, and what they might consider doing to maximize their investment.

And there is nothing sweeter to a market researcher’s ears than to hear a client voice saying, “Thanks, this really addresses the business questions that we set out to answer!”

By Hillary Stifler, Research Director

As someone who is on the upper-edge of the Millennial’s age group, I identify more with Generation X, but find Millennials fascinating. They are truly of a different mindset. This is the largest generation since the Baby Boomers, and, so as co-workers, parents, peers and marketers, it is important for us to understand them.

This generation has grown up with convenience at their fingertips. They didn't have to go to a library and flip through an encyclopedia to find information. They didn't have to ride their bikes down the street to see friends. And, they didn't have to leave their homes to go shopping. Everything they’ve needed, all their lives, was literally at their fingertips. However, for them, experience trumps convenience. For them, convenience is expected.

Michelle Fenstermaker, Executive Director, Consumer Insights from WD offered a glimpse into the future of grocery, as driven by Millennials. She reminded us that the grocery format is really no different today than it was 50 years ago. Yet, technology has changed the way we shop, and Millennials' desire for convenience and an experience eventually will too.

Two grocery chains that are doing it "right" are Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s. Visiting the Whole Foods in Chicago is like an adventure. Recently, my friend from California who used to live in Chicago was visiting. In addition to seeing her friends and visiting a few of her old favorite restaurants, a trip to Whole Foods was on her weekend agenda. "A place where I can get lunch, and then get some groceries while sipping a glass of wine? I can't wait." Trader Joe's doesn't offer this same experience, but it does offer shoppers a culinary trip around the world, and at an affordable price. You can find food inspired by every corner of the globe, and the employees are always helpful and very friendly. On top of the experiences these stores offer, they offer personalization (you can always find something that suits your tastes), healthy choices and fresh foods. All of which, in addition to convenience, are important to Millennials.

It would appear that Millennials, who have become so used to using the internet and their mobile devices to research and discuss purchases, look to the actual store for something else.  The store is no longer the “library” where we research and find items, but it is a “playground” where we find and interact with experiences.

Millennials are a huge market, and as such they have the power to influence change in the well-established grocery industry. How will they impact your industry? Knowing Millennials and keeping up with them will ensure your brand keeps up. You must know them because they're a generation who has the technology to find a solution to meet their specific needs, and they are not afraid to go after what they want. After all, they expect instant gratification. Providing a consistent presence across digital and physical that is an experience and gives them the information they need when they want it is a start to stay ahead of the curve!

By Walt Dickie, Executive Vice President

Marketing research reports tend toward data-laden step-by-step arguments. Detailed discussion about specific data may – or, to the frustration of clients, may not – lead to a conclusion about the overall business implications of the analysis. 

This traditional narrative approach is under pressure from many quarters: a sound bite culture; the sometimes cryptic style of text messaging, Twitter, and email; an increasing reliance on visual display over written exposition; and a general disinterest in, and even distrust of, data and evidence.

How should a report be structured that has the power to change minds and generate consensus?

Many believe that the key lies in more and better graphics and everyone seems to call upon Tufte as a guide to graphic design. His The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (1983), Minard’s famous graph of Napoleon’s march to Moscow and its aftermath, and Tufte’s later books can be found, I think, in every MR industry office, and his influence has been largely responsible for the industry’s infatuation with graphing data.

Yet the more we try to create engaging representations of our data with novel graphical treatments, the more we run the risk of confusing those we hope to excite with our results.

This seems to be an impasse. To grab the attention of an audience that may not already be involved deeply requires novelty, but novelty impairs communication. Now what?

The Poynter Institute is a journalism school in St. Petersburg, and they’ve been conducting studies on the impact of layout and design on newspaper reading since 1990. In 2006, they used three different formats to set up the same news story about bird flu, and then tested the effects of the designs. The information in all three versions was identical. (The three prototypes have apparently been removed from the Poynter web site, which indicates that they have been published in book form.)

The Institute describes them this way (emphasis added): "Prototype 1 was conventional, with headline, narrative and photograph … Prototype 2 contained a narrative story with some of the information broken out in a map and some in a fact box. Prototype 3 was very visual with no traditional narrative. It featured . . . a map, a Q&A, a numbers chart and other graphic storytelling."

The Poynter study used eye tracking to follow what people were looking at and for how long, and they also tested recall of the stories. Miner again: “Readers read the prototypes for five minutes and then were quizzed on bird flu. Readers of Prototype 3, the one that did away with narrative, got the most answers right. What's more, these readers came away most interested in the subject of bird flu and most open to learning more.”

This is an amazing result: a non-narrative presentation of the disjointed components of a story generated more reader involvement and better recall of the facts.

This has several implications for MR reporting:

• It isn’t novelty, “creative” graphics, or bright colors that compel attention; it’s a clear presentation of all of the elements of the story.
• We are shooting ourselves in the foot by trying to lead an audience through our arguments in step-by-step fashion. This is yet another indictment of PowerPoint, with its bullet-pointed lists on slide after slide. We need to develop a “collage” mentality and present the parts of the story simultaneously.
• Our reports should encourage a kind of do-it-yourself involvement with the story we want to tell, encouraging the reader to impose order on them. Discussion is likely to be more powerful than exposition. Anything that encourages the audience to work things out for themselves will generate involvement and recall. This means laying out all the steps to the conclusion, but letting the conclusion itself be discovered.
• We needn’t constantly come up with new graphic formats to present the data we include; in fact, we can rely on the familiarity of standard graphic forms to enhance the clarity of the presentation. This doesn’t mean we can’t use more creative graphics; only that we don’t need to rely on them to do the job alone.
• When we use the “infographics” approach, we should avoid a linear narrative, and, instead, strive for a presentation that gives each story element space to breathe and encourages the eye to wander from one to the other.

I’ll let Miner have the final word: “Enjoyable as it may be, linear narrative is nowhere near as predictably efficient as is deconstruction of a story into its…components…the reader creates the narrative rather than having the writer impose it on him or her.”

PS: It is either ironic or pathetic that this post is in the form of an essay.

By Robert Relihan, Senior Vice President

A little while ago I noted that technology, principally Smartphone technology, was changing the way we interacted with brick-and-mortar stores.  Technology is altering the shopping experience and, consequently, the discipline of shopper insights.  I am back with more evidence.

Recent research has asked the question, “Why do consumers ‘friend’ companies on Facebook?”  A good question.  The answer is obvious; they do it to get deals and offers.  They do it because they are customers. Are brands buying love?  We will see.  But, buried in the data was an interesting tidbit.  23% of those surveyed had downloaded a brand-specific App to their Smartphones.

Apps are another way to get offers, but they have another feature — a store finder — that can alter the way consumers shop.  I have often asked consumers, “Say you are driving down the street and you see a McDonald’s on your left and a Burger King on right.  Which do you choose and why?”

But, now, when I find myself in an unfamiliar neighborhood or on the road and the uncontrollable urge for a burger comes over me, I swipe across my Smartphone screen, hit the McDonald’s App, find the nearest Golden Arches, and head for it like a laser.  No scanning the signs, no getting waylaid by a Burger King.  I am there.

When I want a cup of coffee, I do the same thing.  I tap on the Starbuck’s App, and I am there.

These Apps are that nirvana of marketers, something that short circuits the consumer’s normal behavior and puts a single brand squarely before her eyes to the exclusion of all others.  In the future, I may have to ask consumers, “Say you are looking at (driving down?) your Smartphone screen and you see Apps for McDonald’s and Burger King.  Which do you tap?” This example is hypothetical as there appears to be no Burger King App at the moment.

Another way that Smortphones can alter the shopping experience is by blurring the line between on-line and off-line.  Tesco has driven up sales at its Home Plus stores in South Korea by plastering the walls of subway stations with full-size representations of grocery store aisles.  Each item is accompanied by a QR code.  All busy commuters have to do is scan the items they want with the Home Plus App on their Smartphones, and it is delivered to their home that day.  Is this on-line shopping?  Is it brick-and-mortar shopping?  Thanks to the Smartphone, Tesco has converted bricks-and-mortar to paper-and-paste.

Shopping in the future is going to be very interesting and exceptionally varied.

By Darren Breese, Director

The recent Youth Mega Mashup Event was a tremendous opportunity to learn the latest trends in the  Youth and Millennial space. There is considerable agreement among leaders in the field.  This is a new generation of consumers who value the environment and social causes, interaction with each other and with brands,  entrepreneurship, customization and personalization, technology, and above all else—authenticity.  The implications for brands and businesses are vast as this new generation’s spending power becomes stronger and stronger.

One of the most anticipated presentations of the Mashup Event came from Jane McGonigal, PhD, an acclaimed game developer, researcher, and author.  Her research in the field of gaming underscores the idea that gaming produces positive stress which creates “Super-Powered Hopeful Individuals.”  She presented the shocking statistic that human-beings spend 3 billion hours/week worldwide playing video games.  In comparison, 100 million TOTAL man hours have been spent creating maybe the most widely used online resource—Wikipedia.  To ask, “Is it worth it?” is an understatement to some.  But, McGonigal is convinced it is, and she answers the question with the acronym PeRMA (Positive emotion, Relationships, Meaning, Accomplishment) created by Dr. Martin Seligman, which she contends is a by-product of playing games.   She contends that games can actually solve larger social problems by increasing individuals’ PeRMA.  Her perspective suggests that researchers should be building more feedback loops into their instruments.  We need an approach to this new generation that is less task-based and more game-like to help engage research respondents and, in turn, elicit higher quality insights and feedback.

McGonigal’s keynote was foreshadowed by an earlier presentation by the insights and research folks at MTV that argued “Gamification” is the future of Marketing.   By making a game of Marketing, brands and companies engage and motivate their consumers while also creating lasting relationships with them.  Brands using games as part of their Marketing campaigns are in a better position to create emotional relationships with their consumers. 

Connecting with consumers by letting them create the content of their Marketing strengthens consumers’ perception of a brand’s authenticity.  Doritos and Ford presented ways in which they engaged their consumers by allowing them to create video content and let their voices be heard.  Brands and companies have seen increased success through transparency and allowing their consumers to tell them what they’re all about. 

The use of social media within the generation was a hot topic as well.  Social media allows Millennials  to share their opinions and recommendations and to spread influence.  This new generation of consumers harnesses the power of peer-to-peer relationships to democratize influence and recommendations.  The term “Repfluence” was used to describe this trend in consumer interaction.  To make an even more informed decision, consumers can decide how trustworthy their peers’ influence is by their Klout score, which measures not the quantity of content but the quality with which they spread it.  The younger generation of consumers is more likely to be influenced by their peers than by traditional advertising, which means today’s Marketers are re-thinking the way they connect with consumers.

By Shaili Bhatt, Senior Analyst

It’s Friday night, and I am logging in to check posts in the online community. It’s true that we can find and recruit people who are ready to talk/type in the day (and night), and yet their enthusiastic, sustained engagement can be an issue for long-term communities.

Your opportunity to connect on a personal level with each participant, particularly at a natural time for conversations, is where the magic happens…

One of my secrets is to spend an hour or two to moderate the discussion on a Friday night.

Friday nights are not just for “going out,” even if it’s one of the first warm Fridays of Spring or Summer (like tonight when I began to write this)—For some participants, it’s their time to connect with friends and family, and even other members in the online community.

My secret is to login to the discussion after work and dinner to connect and let them know that I am right there with them. From prior years of experience, the gesture goes a long way, and the connection that forms among us on these nights is often deep and long-lasting.

Share your questions or experiences with online community engagement in the comments!

By Shaili Bhatt, Senior Analyst

By Walt Dickie, Executive Vice President

A recent article in The Atlantic proclaims that “the mobile payment wars are officially underway.” Visa was the first out of the gate, in late 2010, but a coalition of MasterCard and Google, with partners Citibank, First Data, and Sprint quickly followed. Google’s announcement – just a few days ago as of this writing – has, of course, set the technology world abuzz. Now all eyes are on Apple, which has a filed patent on a mobile payment system but, as usual, is being completely close-mouthed about when the necessary near-field communication support will appear on the iPhone (click here for millions of rumors). And, of course, start-ups, such as tech darling, Square, are appearing around the payment space and clever new applications are showing up to make use of NFC.

Normally, I take a dim view of buzz. It’s just too simple to jump on board every juggernaut and start proclaiming the end (or beginning) of the world. But marketing researchers should be getting excited about mobile payment because it’s potentially the most important thing since “friend” became a verb.

Here’s what Google said in their press release about Google Wallet: “… an open commerce ecosystem that … will make it possible for you to pay with an NFC wallet and redeem consumer promotions … while shopping offline.” Notice: They’re not talking about “payment,” they’re talking about “commerce.” And this is “offline,” not “online.” But the big idea is hidden behind “redeem consumer promotions.”

Here’s what happens when you haul out your Google Wallet – a phone app – to pay for something. First, your phone provides a unique identifier – it tells the system that you’re you – and, of course, it says that you want to pay for your purchase using your credit card account. But in the middle of the transaction the system also handles “consumer promotions.” It takes data it has – maybe the name and location of the store, your name, the article you’re buying, the price of the thing, maybe whether you presented a “coupon” – and it checks to see if, based on all that, you’re entitled to a special price.

You see the magic part? It checks a database in the middle of the transaction and acts on the data it finds there.

You can easily imagine all kinds of marketing opportunities: bank-, store-, or brand-based, maybe neighborhood-based “reward” or “frequent shopper” systems, “Groupon-like” sign-up promotional programs, and programs based on combining your online and offline purchasing came to my mind almost immediately.

MR-related applications, like in-the-moment short surveys, possibly incented by a discount calculated on the purchase, become straightforward. What if a marketing research supplier acted like the operator of a “preferred shopper” program and collected shopping behavior from a panel, making possible not only accurate in-the-moment research but also day-after, week-after, or month-after follow-ups, or instantaneous online qualitative with purchasers of newly introduced products or low-incidence products?

Accurate, individualized, real-time purchase data has always been available for web commerce, but now the same kind of data could be available in the offline world. Mobile payment makes the real world work more like the web.

Let’s take this a bit further: have a look in your wallet, and make a pile of all the things that could be represented as data records. Everything I carry, with the exception of a compact emergency car key, is nothing but data carried in a wallet-size form factor. Every single piece of it could be on my phone, and all of it could be added to a “mobile wallet” (which won’t be confined to payment for very long). Your membership card at the gym. Your driver’s license. Gift cards. Preferred cards. The pictures of your kids and dogs. A system for sharing those pictures with your “friends” and only your friends.

If you drive a newer car, the spare that activates its keyless ignition is also just a string of data sent via an NFC link. If my car wasn’t so old even my emergency key would fit nicely in my phone.

A mobile phone is nothing but a pocket-sized computer that can communicate with various kinds of networks after providing a unique identifier that identifies you, its owner, as having network privileges. Mobile “payment” or “wallet” systems put databases at the other end of those communications, and take action based on that data. Visa, MasterCard, Google, and Apple all want to control those databases, which will be the most important in the world in a very short time. Ambitious marketing researchers should be planning how they will play in this arena, and doing it sooner rather than later.

By Walt Dickie, Executive Vice President

C+R started moving online in the late 90s, and the trickle became a flood in 2000 when we launched www.kidzeyes.com, our first online panel. From that point on we always had the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) in our minds. The result was that an awareness of online privacy and security issues got baked into C+R’s DNA.

We were lucky because we were prepared when the Sarbanes-Oxley Act made companies re-think their risk management strategies, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act drove our financial clients to focus on privacy, and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act changed the focus in healthcare. And big public privacy gaffes – most recently, the disclosure of customer data connected with 77 million Playstation accounts – brought the importance of protecting customer data to the fore for almost everyone else.

As part of our regular SAS70 review we recently re-drafted our Privacy Policy and website Terms of Use statements to make them easier to understand and to bring them up to date with changing technologies and methods.

We have a procedure in place for reviewing our data collection partners’ data handling policies and practices to determine whether we can trust them to receive protected data, such as personally identifiable financial or health data. We’ve scored phone rooms and focus group facilities for a while now, but until recently hadn’t considered online community platforms, bulletin board systems, journaling sites, webcam focus group facilities, or other suppliers catering to the skyrocketing online qualitative arena.

We’ve realized two things: one is that we have to be prepared for the explosion of MR methods that’s going to turn the field upside down in the next few years and expand our supplier review to cover new methods as soon as possible; the other is that the MR industry hasn’t gotten the message.

I’m not going to name names; that’s not the point of this post. But having recently scoured suppliers’ websites for Privacy Policies and formally requested documentation from vendors ranging from major software providers to online start-ups, we’ve found an industry that’s at least 10 years behind the curve.

The major MR organizations, such as CASRO, of which C+R is a member, have spoken loudly and clearly about these issues for some time. Any number of conference presentations have been given. Leading edge clients have demanded proof and audited results from us. But we found that minimal steps, such as a well thought out privacy policy, are above the reach of many vendors. And more serious programs, such as security audits and regular penetration testing haven’t generally been so much as considered.

Will it take a Playstation-sized data fiasco for the industry to finally understand what we are risking – for ourselves and our clients – by our cavalier attitude?

By Shaili Bhatt, Senior Analyst

Event coverage of the following session from the 2011 IIR Technology Driven Market Research Event (TDMR) in Chicago, May 2-3, 2011 #TDMR: “Crowdsourcing Your Research as Co-Creation” presented by Kevin Lonnie of KL Communications and Miguel Ares of Bloomberg.

As a fellow Fantasy Sports enthusiast, Kevin Lonnie and Miguel Ares’ TDMR presentation on the use of crowdsourcing a new fantasy football platform for Bloomberg Sports was like getting a backstage pass into the locker room of a big game. (Bloomberg is apparently a resource for much more than financial news!)

Crowdsourcing is an iterative ideation quali-quant method where a crowd is challenged to solve your problem, allowing market research to provide “illumination” rather than “support.” (This invalidates a quote by David Ogilvy involving drunks and lampposts).

Crowdsource the Issue, Weave the Narrative

With crowdsourcing, Kevin encourages the use of “crowdweaving”— the action of weaving the voice of the consumer into collaborative, challenge-solving initiatives.  An exemplary innovation model for crowdweaving is “Idea Sculpting,” where members are first asked to articulate their understanding of the challenge before they present their ideas for solving it.

As Kevin described it, “the race starts with everyone.”  They select the top 3-5 entries, and the challenge is to improve the concepts over a six-week process.  Good ideas transform into better ideas, until they find themselves at the threshold of a “Great Idea.”

Superior analytics have been the foundation for Bloomberg’s tools, including its Fantasy Baseball tool in 2010.  According to Miguel Ares’ from Bloomberg, however, player engagement and retention was not as high as expected.  The question was, “What is the level of satisfaction that the customer is really looking for in the world of Fantasy Sports?”

For Fantasy Football, the objective was to create a new platform to improve the user interface and experience with constant consumer feedback.  Crowdsourcing during game play was right on target!  Kevin also stressed that it is critical to involve all key stakeholders in the process so that the resulting ideas are shared and jointly owned.

Who is crowd-worthy?

This begs the question: “How do we identify who we want to speak with?” Miguel suggests not to pick professional experts, per se, but instead to pick people who think highly of the brand and really want to make a difference.  The crowd works directly with the programmers and developers—an important step for the literal metamorphosis of the ideas—in order to articulate the final product.

The researchers were able to use the crowd to tell them what they needed, and the programmers streamlined the app and the Fantasy Sports experience with this real-time feedback.  According to Kevin and Miguel, “It was a bulletin board on steroids…  In this world, the crowd rules,” and in the end, Bloomberg wins and the customers win.