Through the Looking GlassHow to use client organisations as magnifiers for research projects (and when to get out of the way)

John Griffiths Creative Director

Spring Research

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The mind of the market

“A market is a dialogue between the conscious and unconscious perceptions of those marketing products and those consuming them”

consumersmarketers

Unconscious processes

Conscious processes

Source: Gerald Zaltman: How Customers think

Where does the researcher add value in this model?

Enough command and control – Start listening!

marketers

customer customer

Andrew Walmsley

“Research allows marketers to listen in to the conversations between customers and discover how the brand can add value”

Where does the researcher add value in this model?

What explicit value does the intermediary create?

External perspective

Speed – bypassing the internal politics

Expertise

Analysis

Sampling

Broader market experience

NB Providing access to respondents is no longer

a good enough reason!

The implicit value the intermediary can provide

Helping to put implicit knowledge into words

Seeing what the marketer can’t or won’t see..

Because it lies in the marketer’s unconscious – not verbalised

Or because what customers are saying conflicts with the marketing agenda

BIG IDEAS FOR THE MARKET CONVERSATION

Research once removed – client customer dating

Set up pairing between individual clients and customers – provide an activity/discussion guide then researchers get out of the way!

Source: Tuned in Research

Research once removed - Co-creationbetween marketing team and customers – the best place for it to happen

Role of researchers to prepare and calibrateboth parties – marketers own jewelleryexperience to match customer experience

Creative ‘gangbangs’ future of sport formobiles market

Stimulus as provocation – ‘throw contentinto an online community and watch howthey play with it’

Researcher as gooseberry – less is more !!

Conscription in the research process - Briefing meeting

The research brief & the embedded assumptions

The covert brief

Working hypotheses

Briefing meeting discussion guide

The RFP process misses out on all of this

Conscription in the research process – Assigning roles during fieldwork

Note taking

Issue sheets

Washup sessions - explore the difference between client and participant worlds

(or are they merely a prequel to the debrief?)

Conscription in the research process – Analysis stage

The black box of research - should clients be invited in?

Valuable to find what can be implemented. And what won’t be.

Conscription in the research process – Debrief process Insights will emerge at the debrief stage

The audience needs to be actively involved

Insight sheets

Actions dates and owners

Capture process to pick up insights downstream

Workshops address somebut not all of these issues

You’ve got to know your limitations..

Prospecting for insights is like drilling for oilEven if the research agency finds it and refines it into fuelIts worth nothing if it can’t be put into the engine of the organisationAnd turned into energy - momentum – that is the skill of the insight team

From a conversation with Pauline Williamsincite2action

Plannification..

Account planning after 40 years – embedded worldwide across all communications

Is planning making inroads into client organisations?

The growth of insight departments and learning organisations

How is plannification affecting research agencies?

Subverting the client organisation – Supporting decision making

Deliverables which match the agendas and learning styles of different functions in the client organisation

Audit trails of what has been sent to whom – how far has the knowledge reached?

Source: Mesh Planning

Subverting the client organisation - Supporting implementation

Asking for feedback – Recommendation adopted successfully Recommendation considered and reviewed but business case

does not support changeX Recommendation ignored / not considered

Developing ROIs for each piece of research

Source: Pauline Williams

Subverting the client organisation - Embedding research as an app

Can we turn research into apps – components in organisational processes and not free standing elements which then have to be plugged in

The number of client customer interactions has blossomed – a potential threat to research – can research thinking inform these instead of competing with them?

BIG IDEAS FOR AMPLIFYING CUSTOMER CONVERSATIONS

Trending emergent behaviours – find cool things for people to do

We need to research containers and content not just products and customer journeys

Source: Spring Research

Choice architecture – make it deeper or make it quicker

Designing the architecture of choice

Deep or wide?

How much attention does the marketer need?

What is the role of automated behaviour?

Is the creative content worth giving more attention to ?

More research is needed around the aftertaste– how was it for you?

Understanding how context affects behaviour and content – so much research assumes that context is irrelevant..

Context is a crucial frontier territory

Until now research has ignored context

Needstates belong to contexts as muchas they belong to people

Customers feel brand connections not justwhen they are buying, consumingor advocating..

Identify brand friendly eco systems(where the brand does not need to speak its name)

Conversations are more important than sound bites or keywords

Map the conversations

Branded friendly territory doesn’t meanperpetual namechecking

Explore human microclimates (not mass markets)

“Focus on the little things” St David patron saint of Wales

It is the details of human behaviour whichengage people – not the generalities – isn’t this one of the learnings from reality TV?

The modest size of many marketing budget should be permission to zoom in on the particularities of a small audience

Insight is about somebody like me– not what everybody thinks and knows

Use fiction

A century of positivism means we privilege testimony from authenticaled witnesses and ethnography

We mistrust fiction and imagination as unreliableand self serving

Fiction – the stories we tell ourselvesand which we choose to inhabit

We need to find ways to exploreshared imaginative spaces

Dealing with Disintermediation

What are the signs that our core skills are challenged?

The internet is disrupting every marketplace

Marketers able to take over many tasks formerly delivered through market research

marketers own camera

Vested research interests carrying on regardless

Quant researchers19th C photographers

Qual researchers19th C portrait painters

marketers own camera

To paraphrase..

“A human being should be ashamed to do anything a computer can do”Joseph Weissenbaum

A researcher should be ashamed to doanything a marketer can do by themselves

About John Griffiths

John Griffiths, Creative Director

John has spent more than 25 years as a researcher and planner. As planning director of MHA direct marketing and Grey Integrated he developed numerous through the line campaigns. Since 2000 he ran his own research consultancy Planning Above and Beyond during which time he won the MRS prize for Best New Thinking twice in 2004 and 2010. To date he has run research for clients such as New Look, Tesco, IHG hotels and most recently Kodak. John is responsible for product development at Spring as well as managing specific projects.