In 2017 and 2018, Babbel set out to do a large scale multi country explorative user research project – deep diving into the core of their business: how does the language learning journey of people in different cultures look like… Immediate Excitement! Everyone is thrilled by the prospect. But: How do you transform that initial excitement into sustained impact?
Together, Babbel and Point Blank set out on their own learning journey to try out novel ways of stakeholder engagement. The challenge: How do you craft impact for a project that looks at the underlying fundament of a business and has sprawling scope? Potentially, the project was relevant for: The product design teams, the Marketing teams, the CRM teams, the internal training team, and the local market teams of the countries we did the research in. It‘s all to easy for an endeavour like this to end up as a well-intended, but ultimately ineffective experiment.
Here is what we learned:
- Involve a key stakeholder early and throughout
- Proactively sell your project to the wider stakeholder audience
- Find smart ways of collaborating during the analysis phase
- Custom-design learnings for different internal audiences
A.
At Babbel, the insight team succeeded from the beginning to bring in a senior brand manager on the project. Jim was part of the initial briefing and joined in for all project meetings. He also took an active part in the analysis phase – bringing in his views and crucially, his needs. WE already hear you say ‚that takes too much time investment‘. Well, we found the opposite to be the case. In the words of Jim himself: „I was involved quite early in the process, and we were able to meet regularly face to face. This allowed me as a brand manager to think about how this project would be applied from an action standpoint. Usually this is done after the presentation is given, and in this case I was able to really think about it and also guide the team through the process, so that everything we did was driving towards action.“
B.
The Babbel insight team early on decided to treat stakeholder involvement as a Marketing challenge – so the mission was to shout out loud about the project. The first step was to actively involve senior management and get their buy in – they committed themselves to making sure that the relevant team leaders would prioritise the implementation of the project outcomes. In addition, Point Blank created a short teaser video about the project that the Babbel team could use to advertise the project and draw stakeholder engagement early on.
C.
In this project, we tried something that we had never done before: the Babbel and Point Blank teams collaborated throughout the analysis phase, with regular joint working sessions and we ended up creating the report together – with full involvement of the senior brand management, so we built the internal client perspective into the analysis. This was a very time-intense process, but we recommend a system of 2-3 analysis sessions that include key internal stakeholders. This ensures that key players are involve early and fully buy into the outcome.
D.
The Babbel team eventually came up with the idea of insight activation sessions for the different internal teams. Team members that hadn‘t had the opportunity to join the fieldwork watched select interview recordings together and collaborated in group sessions to come up with to dos based on their experience. On top of that, the Babbel insight team hosted separate debrief sessions, each with a bespoke focus perspective depending on the roles and responsibilities of the internal teams involved.
So, in sum, we shifted our own role as client side and agency side researchers from data providers to experience agents. We took it heart that we need to be Marketeers for the projects that we conduct and that we need to shout out loud about the work that we invest so much time and passion into. And lastly, we learned that a little bit of extra time involvement for collaboration throughout the process saves time later on and ensures that stakeholders internally understand, value and apply the learning from the research project.
