First, a little insight: at FlexMR, we work with 50 different brands on an ongoing basis, all looking to develop closer relationships with their buying audiences and provide insight that helps drive growth and retention. We regularly consult with clients to bring a little outside perspective to their goals and aspirations, whether you are looking at consumers, B2B sales, student learners, financial advice or even farming communities we have ongoing programmes running that support key business decisions every day.
When working with our clients we tend to find businesses lean towards one of two profiles:
1. Independent, self-reliant - Makes business-as-usual decisions without any guidance from the insight team as they are not used to having this available to them
2. Highly dependent thinkers - Depends heavily on the insights team and sends a high volume of requests that need to be prioritised and re-prioritised in accordance with needs
If your business fits profile 1, then we would always recommend a strategic program of stakeholder engagement for the insight team to educate, build awareness and invite wider teams into the research process; this means stakeholders can see the benefits of using insights for their business function and realise value from customer and audience consultation.
Cross-team collaboration and understanding is an important, yet tricky, part of this process, so if you are in the insight team, establishing the pillars of effective stakeholder engagement is a good place to start here.
However, if like many of our clients, you fall into profile 2 and your business values customer and audience insights to inform better decision-making, then your daily challenges will be more focussed on prioritising where you invest in research and insight and trying to predict where you can use your budget to the most effect.
If that is the case for you then here are three pointers to support you through this process and make those decisions simpler by having the following three points top of mind.
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| Understanding when to invest in research and insights can be tricky, especially if there are other organisational priorities - but here are a few reasons to consider. |
1. Your customers do not know much about your brand
It is easy to assume that others share the same values and ideas as us, and this is something we see a lot as an external agency looking into your business. Your teams are highly educated on the internal needs and goals of the business and can be guilty of assuming that the audience that you are targeting is in the same place.
This is known as the false consensus effect in Psychology and we often see this play out with requests and approaches towards brand research, we assume that we can ask an audience about the brand and that they are capable of giving a direct answer, if we ask your audience about how much they like or love your brand they will give a response but they aren’t necessarily giving you an accurate one. That’s not to say that investment in a brand is not important, but how we measure the impact of that isn’t as directly measurable because your audience doesn’t actually have strong opinions on your brand assets and can’t necessarily articulate what it means to them.
What does this mean for you?
- De-prioritise brand pieces, particularly with customer panel audiences (if a measure is necessary for the business be sure to include a wider sample target in your audience)
- In product and tactical research, consider, change and re-phrase questions to ensure you are asking questions that customers have an opinion on and can then respond accordingly to generate good quality directional insight.
2. Never underestimate or under-value PR research
Conversely, what we often see in the realm of PR research, is that it can be seen as adding little value and more frivolous, a nice to have to measure the impact of PR but not essential. But I would argue that insight-led PR strategies add huge value and protect the business when your industry is in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. Take the example of grocery shopping and supermarkets, much press is dedicated to issues with stock, product recalls and staffing issues which can all tarnish reputations for much longer than the problems take to resolve, therefore combatting this and preparing the right good news stories is actually really impactful. These are also great topics to measure with your audiences as they are very well-equipped to comment and share their opinion.
What does this mean for you?
- Support the business to respond rapidly to news stories with transparency and corrective action
- Prioritise research scheduling to ensure you support a good stream of positive PR pieces
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| While a continuous stream of insight funds would be ideal, it's rarely the case; so, understanding when to inject more funding into research is crucial. |
3. Future-proof the business by looking much more broadly at your competitive set
The other common focus we see in research requests is to run research that focuses on a brand’s key competitive set, it is easy for a business to fixate on competitors that are most similar and therefore compete hotly for market share. But time and time again, the big shifts in an industry come from innovators in the periphery – creating new products and services that we didn’t know we wanted until they arrived, meal box deliveries, TV subscriptions, streaming services, the list is endless. All of these create new services that eat into traditional markets. So my advice to you to ensure that your insight works hard for the business, and spots the developing trends is to ring-fence budget to ensure that you are looking for insights beyond the immediate competitive set.
What does this mean for you?
- When making comparisons in research, include a wider range of options – don’t assume a small market share won’t be significant and regularly review who is making an impact in your sector.
- Think about who sets the bar for that specific product or service
Investing Well in the Right Places
In the current business and economic climate, our experience as an advising insight agency is that insights that drive a strong business reputation and spur your stakeholders to take a broader view of the competitive market have the most impact, and so are a wise area to invest in. Whereas, research budgets invested in reviewing internal brand collateral and assets are much harder to justify and don’t always pay off as quickly for the business.
While there are many foundational similarities between businesses across all industries, each business is unique and faces different challenges and opportunities - as such, getting more specific advice on your current situation will be key to investing in the right areas. Whether that means consulting your own internal insight team or engaging the expertise of external insight agencies, it's important to take into account your own business contexts as well as external circumstances and experience-based advice.
