How impactful are your insights? …The death of presentations

We have come a long way since focus group discussions. We have more contextual understanding of consumers, observation etc. These have been great shifts in making the consumer world more granular, real and immersive for clients and has enabled us to provide better insights.

However, even if you have a great insight there is often a gap between insights and what eventually gets put out by brands. You know it when a client has done a lot of research but is still stuck in the same old way of thinking. We tend to brush it aside as a matter of poor execution within client organizations.

However, our job as researchers is to ensure that deep insights inspire ideas and bring about change.

Insights become impactful when they are internalized by organizations and people.  Internalization helps insights become learning. Learning allows brands to make new connections that lead to innovation and are the basis of what they do. Moreover, internalized insights can become currency for communication.

It is important to think about how we share learning with clients. Without this we are left with inert ideas – ideas that are not utilised or thrown into new combinations.

What prevents internalisation at the moment:

• Not enough time – the process of making connections requires you to immerse in a subject but then to step out of it and re look at it with fresh eyes/new perspective
• Not engaging different senses – too reliant on one way communication. Internalization requires cognition and empathy
• Not seeking inspirations from different perspectives.

Workshops have been a solution for bridging the gap between insight and idea. But not every project ends up in a workshop.  The opportunity is to see how we can do more to make insights impactful even in a 60 minute ‘presentation’.

Here are a few things to think about:

1)    It is important to engage all the senses – not just listening but visuals and artefacts. What are the ways we can convert insights into artefacts e.g. post cards or a curated wall of learning

2)    Learn by doing – use cue cards or frameworks and get clients to populate these

3)    Bringing other category/brand  inspiration into the thinking process

What this means is we need to re think how we conduct fieldwork (yes even if it is a group discussion) so that we can get more visual and tangible output beyond just conversations.

 “Perhaps the aha experience when everything finally snaps into place marks the culmination of the insight process. Perhaps it isn’t the insight itself” – Gary Klein

PS: This is the second time we have referenced death in our posts – perhaps a sign of the changes in the industry – but we will try and be more optimistic in the subsequent posts!

Serendipity and breakthroughs in research analysis

Today we live in a complex world where causality is not direct. One change in the system can lead to a change in an entirely different part. As such a systematic research process is beginning to keep us away from thinking about the issue at hand in a creative and inspiring way. Research follows an established linear process because the conventional wisdom is that process, routine and control ensure quality of analysis.
In a way, research ends up operating like a packaged tour guide when what we need is a learning journey that allows the traveller to make detours and explore alternative interesting avenues to discover something new and surprising.
That is why we believe that it is important to allow for serendipity in research analysis process. This is particularly true for a Qualitative project where although discussion areas are planned, the consumer behaviour and response cannot be predicted. (last year we blogged along similar lines: Creative structuring, Inspiration during the research process: http://consumerfaces.com/blog/page/2/).
There is already the well-established idea that planned serendipity is a way to enable creativity with chance for better success in business. Our belief is that research analysis process needs a dose of planned serendipity to provide more innovative answers and perspectives to the consumer world we observe today.
In this blog we will share some of the ways we have built serendipity into our analysis process.

Strengthen surprise sensors
James Carse said: “To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated”.
There is evidence that emergency responders e.g. fire fighters who succeed in moments of crises, do so by falling back on identifying certain patterns based on past experience and applying that to the situation confronting them.
Similarly in a Qualitative research project, we encounter behaviour and attitudes which is distinctive. It is important to be prepared for such unfamiliar patterns so that we can make unusual connections when they present themselves to us. We normally begin our projects by researching already existing data and theories in the field we are researching and related fields.
In a recent study to understand cooking habits of women we had understood theories on Food, Gender and Power; Kitchen as a cultural medium, women’s empowerment and changing roles before we even began to speak to our study participants.

Conceptual side explorations
We don’t see analysis as a distinct stage that happens after data has been collected. Like a tree grows under sunlight, gathering information during a Qualitative project adds new understanding as the project progresses.
Even as fieldwork is ongoing, we conduct daily coffee conversations within the team. Through this new ideas may emerge and we begin conceptual explorations of emerging issues.
For example in a recent study we were talking about a new product idea that promised family bonding. Turned out that in today’s time starved world, family time was under considerable strain and convenience was an important element. So we began to explore the idea of convenience visible around us in mass media, retail stores etc. We looked at convenience in food, convenience in lifestyle, new product introductions related to convenience, how other brands were targeting the time starved individual/family in the market. This provided us interesting perspectives on family bonding and essentially helped us contemporize a traditional concept of family bonding.

Enabling chance encounters
Dating common sense (in the real not virtual world) is that to improve your chances of finding someone, you need to go to places you may have never tried.
Similarly in Qualitative research, we often immerse ourselves in spaces and times beyond the immediate contexts that often lead to interesting chance encounters.
So we often undertake morning trysts as the city is just awakening, conversations with people in public spaces or in spaces where people are willing to open up e.g. hair salons.
In a recent study on beauty in Vietnam, we spent time walking around neighbourhoods looking at people’s balconies. Every single balcony had laundry hanging out! It told us what was fashionable, what was in and what was out etc. (besides being a visual treat) and provided us more insight into how Vietnamese women define beauty.

Looking at change makers
Research is often focussed on the present. However, it is important to look at what change makers in related fields are talking about/ doing and how they see the world. It helps us get an interesting perspective on what the future might look like, the drivers to change and how this may be related to the issue at hand.
On a laundry detergent study we spent time reading interviews among women entrepreneurs talking about their personal challenges in balancing family and personal life. This gave us a unique insight on the pressures women are likely to confront as more of them begin to work in more responsible jobs. The respondents we had interviewed were not game changers but we understood where the world was heading
Perhaps you are already doing side explorations not part of the core/initial project as part of your Qualitative projects. We would love to hear if you have different ways in which you enable planned serendipity in your business/work.
There will always be serendipity involved in discovery – Jeff Bezos

Alive minds: The 5 mindsets a Qualitative researcher needs (needs even more) today

We recently completed a regional Qualitative research study on skin care in South East Asia. The final review got us talking about the variables that led to the project being an inspiring experience that changed the team’s perspective on some fundamental aspects about market and the consumer. There are many different tools that were used throughout the project to ensure success (perhaps material for a later blog entry), but in this entry we want to highlight some of the necessary attitudes/mind sets underpinning the outcome of the project. Used to be, that fact driven decision making predominated the corporate world. It worked well because the world was complicated but still mostly explainable through causal relationships. Qualitative research too followed the “recipe approach” (best practices and established expertise).  However, times have changed, we live in a complex world and often there is no linear relationship between things. This has shifted the role of Qualitative research from being diagnostic or even exploratory to providing inspiration and foresight to brands/clients. This requires Qualitative researchers to adopt a different mind set.

1. Ask questions you do not know an answer to (this is the starting point for innovation)
   • In the new world, we need to re-examine the way we think about problems a brand/client is confronting. It is easy to lapse into classifying a problem in familiar ways like a positioning study. What is more important is to really step back, review existing information and then begin to outline what the problem really is about. It requires a different kind of conversation with the client and the ability to frame the research question in a more defined and inspiring way. Way too often we receive and allow flat, narrow questions to be asked; questions that do not open the field of investigation and are questions we may even know the answer to
2. The curator’s mind set
   • Existing data sources i.e. the primary research itself as well as information from the client’s archives has always been the focus of research analysis. In today’s world information is widely available. It is important to be able to go beyond these sources and expand the sources to include social media, other kinds of ‘experts’ like bloggers etc.
   • That requires a Qualitative researcher to learn to connect the dots across diverse sources and recognize patterns while still keeping the context of discovery in mind. In a way that moves a Qualitative researcher from merely relying on data/facts but to bring in a layer of intuition and expertise that is their own to filter and give a distinctive voice to the information gathered
3. Think of possibilities, what doesn’t exist, extrapolate
   • When Qualitative research takes on the role of inspiring clients and brands, not just informing them; it is important to be able to ignite passions. Imagine the possibilities and bringing these to live for the client/brand is critical. Intimacy with consumer and their lives is one way to achieve this
4. Balance contemplation with collaboration expertise
   • Qualitative researchers have always been good at analysing by reflecting on what they hear or do not hear, what they see. Today, besides solitary analysis, working in a collaborative way with clients and consumers both is important. The ability to build consensus across diverse objectives and view points, bring together different cultures and self awareness are all important aspects of this
5. Finally, Learn to live with ambiguity
   • In today’s complex world where change is on going and unpredictable the Qualitative researcher too needs to learn to be flexible, change course as the project moves along and to remain productive even amid ambiguity

“Learning never exhausts the mind” Leonardo da Vinci