Getting Qualitative into the Boardroom

Stephen Philips

Published in Research World January/February 2011.

The best and worst example of qualitative research playing a critical role in the boardroom is the Dove story. Dove’s agency had understood the needs of women and wanted to showcase, not stick thin models, but the beauty of ‘real’ women. Showcasing natural, not airbrushed, beauty was a brave move particularly in an industry that has grown up on being almost unnatural. So how to get this about-face agreed by a hardened group of commercially minded men?

The solution was to talk to the women behind those men, their wives and daughters. The agency talked to them about the difficulties of being bombarded daily by images of perfection and the feelings that provoked. Armed with this footage they had their pitch to the board who, of course, were bowled over by it and the rest is history…

So why is this story the best and worst example for qualitative? It is the best because it shows the potential power of stories, of being faced with real people and their lives. Of consumers being placed in the boardroom and the board being forced to take their views on board. Of course it is the worst example because no qualitative research agency seems to have been involved at all!

The opportunity…
We all hear how quickly life is changing right now. New media, social networks, global trends etc. With many of the old certainties gone surely senior decision makers are crying out for explanations. Great qualitative research has always been about these explanations, not just numbers about what people do but showing the underlying reasons behind why they do it.

Without this understanding it is surely impossible to navigate this brave new world. Yet how often is qualitative research showcased in the boardroom?

To be fair, these are two different questions and one of them, I think, we worry about too often. If we assume our mission is to get more qualitative work shown in the boardroom – we can worry about who presents it later – then what should we be doing and what types of research should we be focusing on?

In defence of traditional qual
Not being a big fan of focus groups, particularly with people hiding behind a one way mirror, I am rarely a defender of standard qual groups. However, there is a reason for their persistence and that is often the theatricality of them. There can be something inspiring (or horrendous) about watching and listening to ‘normal people’ talking about your brands or products. Quite often some big and expensive piece of quantitative research will be ignored because of an off the cuff remark made during a focus group that the marketing director happened to sit in on.

What this illustrates is not the power of groups but the power of direct experience with customers. We need to get these experiences into the boardroom and traditional qual can play its role. Video footage of groups and depths are great ways of illustrating or making a point which decision makers find very hard to argue with. In the same way that politicians rarely argue with voters, decision makers don’t argue with customers – they just rarely ever meet them!

So if we accept the power of the genuine experience, of interacting with real consumers and hearing real stories then we can start to look at the new world of qualitative work in a new light. Traditional qual only gets clients close to their consumers through some kind of filter – be it a mirror or a video screen. What we see increasingly now are opportunities where we can bring clients and consumers together as people rather than as subject and audience.

Consumer connects
Giving marketing people, who are often stuck in their glass towers, the opportunity to come out and meet with real consumers on the consumer’s home ground is one way. Meetings can be arranged in homes, bars, coffee shops or stores, wherever the consumer feels comfortable or where a typical brand interaction takes place. Suddenly the marketing executive gets to see how their consumers really live, breathe, interact with their product and the role it plays in their life. They can actually talk to them! This could have a profound impact on the way senior executives think about their entire approach to marketing. It’s no longer about weighing up a series of research recommendations they’ve seen on some slides and choosing to action them (or not) – it’s about fitting products and services to people they feel like they know.

Online
With technological advances, we are finding exciting new methods to see deeper into the consumer’s world and better ways to interact with them, both as researchers but also facilitators of a genuine dialogue with decision makers. As more and more purchase decisions are made online, this is simply an extension of the ‘talking to them where they live’ ethos demonstrated in consumer connects, rather than a poor man’s version of the same thing.

The obvious example of this is the rise of the Market Research Online Community (MROC). These have all sorts of advantages such as speed of response and depth of engagement but one of the most interesting is the ability for clients to become genuinely engaged with people within the community. Nick Priestley of Tuned In recently told me of an example of a client meeting in which the marketing director asked “what would Dave think about this?” when discussing a new potential communications campaign. It was a while before Nick realized that Dave was a member of a community we were running and that the Marketing Director had ‘adopted’ him as a great spokesperson for the consumer. This has the added benefit for many clients of simplifying and clarifying what they are told by researchers. And for researchers, the onus is no longer to argue and convince – but to facilitate useful interactions.

Innovative offline qualitative…
Additionally, we have seen an increase in innovation within approaches that put the consumer in charge such as co-creation (although this can happen online too). With consumers having more brand interaction and becoming more marketing savvy they now expect to be listened to and enjoy coming up with solutions, rather than simply being asked to raise the things they like or don’t like about a product or brand. This again is a great opportunity for clients to fully interact with their target market. Getting researchers, clients and consumers to brainstorm together gives such a varied perspective and gives great opportunities for developing new ideas.

The great thing is that the research output and the resulting decisions become theirs, not something suggested by the ‘research’ but instead something they came to with consumers. We have seen the impact on this on future directions, with research outcomes much more likely to be used and reused within the organisation, becoming part of the company culture and not just another dusty research report on a shelf.

Conclusion – from behind the mirror to in front of the board
So this is an exciting time for qualitative research. We see both an increasing need for qualitative research in decision making and more tools for us to use to engage decision makers and consumers. I believe that to get qualitative work further into the boardroom we need to take the innate power of storytelling, of our natural desire to understand and connect to other human beings, and use that as the basis of our development.

There is the danger of course that by ‘Adopting Dave’, our clients might, whilst getting close to a particular consumer, lose their view of the wider picture that the best qual can deliver. So we as researchers now play a dual role – managing close relationships whilst delivering the bigger picture.

Our tools and techniques to get to insight are tried and tested, we now have new and better ways of interacting with consumers and enabling them to interact with decision makers. We need to take these happy circumstances and have the confidence in our own abilities to engage the board. Hopefully the next story about a great ad campaign will not be about a pitch happening in the boardroom but about the board making the decision whilst chatting to some consumers on an away day at a shopping centre!

Stephen Philips is founder of Spring Research