With shifting sources of competitive advantage, urbanization leading to new mindsets, behaviors and economies, advanced tech-connected living, the world around us is changing fast and change will never be as slow again as it was today. These changes create disruptions and uncertainties in many categories. Digital-native companies benefit from them and seem to thrive in a world of behavioral data, and their ongoing decision making is built on analytics and insights. Traditional companies try to follow, and look for, versatile primary data collection and agile decision making. The good news in all of this is that “customer insight” is the number 1 capability to develop according to the C-suite. Especially translating data and analytics into actioned-upon insights are key.[1]
The bad news is that many CMI departments are underwhelming. They remain order-takers, or are perceived as stuffy librarians, while the demand of them is to be a strategic business partner. In addition, market researchers are no longer the exclusive collector of customer data. Marketers and brand owners have alternatives with DIY-tools, and they are sitting on a firehose of big as well as social media data. The digital disruption from within corporations means that sales, digital, and the CRM function all generate data, and often connect with tens of thousands of people per day, while traditional research scrambles to recruit 10,000 in a month. Not surprisingly, data driven marketing and self-service reduce the perceived need for “market research as we know it” among business stakeholders.
So how do CMI departments on the client-side deal with this? Based on end-client roundtable discussions at ESOMAR conferences, and an industry literature study, we have observed that CMI departments at the end-client-side deal with these changes largely in 3 ways.
1. Reorganizing for impact.
Several CMI departments (are trying to) gain an independent place in the organizational design, independent from the commercial marketing function to operate in full objectivity, and serve business stakeholders cross-functionally. Companies like PepsiCo, Diageo, and Unilever have developed a “purpose” for their insight function, and all make insights accountable for business outcomes and impact. These CMI departments become indispensable internal business partners because they create inclusion and become a part of the business solution itself. When “insights” is attached to the actual business challenge, it becomes business ready and a natural thing to do rather than a last-minute mandatory chore.
To make this work there is a need for explicit talent management and higher investments in action skills. With talent management we refer to managing and positioning “insights as a career”. It implies explicitly attracting, as well as retaining, high level talent and catch them young, but also composing teams with multi-functional roles (e.g. analytics, execution, production, communication).
Some CMI functions develop centers of excellence which innovate and pilot internally and develop knowledge in specific domains. The long-term effect of this is that we connect with stakeholders while they are still open, and the importance of insights spreads as executives move into new roles in the business. “Action skills” refer to, for example, storytelling or crafting and delivering configurable insights, to expand people’s capabilities beyond the expected functional skills of project management, research and analysis, into communicating, persuading, facilitating, creating and leading. “Insights skills” need to be scaled throughout organizations to help all executives become better at turning data into insights and business results.
This goes hand in glove with building a brand and developing an identity that stands for being assertive, taking ownership and being provocative. At Philips, for example, CMI is redefining its role in the persona of an inspirer, explorer or navigator to show its value and re-assert its expertise[2].
The basic table stakes for insight professionals in this is that the delivery and communication of insights need to be relevant and appealing for business stakeholders. This can be achieved by delivering multi-media streams of tiny insights as well as making stakeholders part of the insights initiative.
The insights function that will endure is one that builds the business by being assertive, taking ownership, building belief, showing impact and repeat this!
2. Implementing smart and adaptive research operations.
To address the changing processes that come with “agile management”, certain end-clients develop research capabilities in-house (e.g. Booking.com) as well as automate their repetitive and evaluative quantitative research (e.g. concept testing).
PepsiCo for example has developed its own proprietary digital insights and intelligence platform, called “Ada”. The automation platform not only generates time and cost gains, it also allows PepsiCo to get smarter over time, and unlock meta-insights by means of machine learning. End-clients, such as Nestle and Unilever, also expand their scope to where the data is, e.g. towards customer contact or care data.
As consumers have become more outspoken and assertive, these open communication channels provide a wealth of information for companies to mine from. These are not only complaints, but often free ideas and suggestions and primary data-collection suffers from these self-generated data.
All-in-all, insight professionals must be pragmatic and manage the risk for decision making and the business of those insight projects that are executed faster, at lower cost and potentially along mediocre quality standards. Especially while dealing with behavioral and social data there is a need for reconciling rigor and provenance of these data with the business goals.
The key question is always “what does one want to use it for?”. While used as a concrete option by stakeholders, insight professionals have a lot of skepticism for social media listening, and feel it is their task to educate about the caveats internally. Many clients feel it is oversold and not a true reflection of reality because there is a lack of profiling information, and many conversations are not public.
In order for social media analytics to create added value, it is important to look for what people say on these for and what they do not say on other platforms. It is particularly relevant for monitoring and crisis communication, assess product launches and product reviews or as an exploratory starting point.
What objective, behavioral or social media data does not do, is fill the blanks and getting to “why”. To connect the dots and inform decisions along the way many end-clients do add versatile and immersive primary data-collection methods such as structural online communities and digital consumer connect methods. These allow conducting more research in less time, while saving budget but also provide data with a soul. The upside of communities can lay outside of the digital or online aspect, as senior management sometimes just wants to talk to people, “touch and feel” them. Communities allow for impactful, personal offline engagement as well as for quick dipping in and out and iterative follow up studies.
Business stakeholders are looking for integrated solutions which provide a holistic understanding – independent of whether it is qualitative or quantitative. When we deliver empathy, the data matters less.
3. Developing innovative capabilities.
Clients want to experiment with AI, bots, virtual and mixed reality, and geolocation. With these technology innovations, clients are seeking value in terms of increased speed, reduction in cost, gains in information quality, and transformation to do things that were previously not possible before. As collecting data directly and explicitly from people is harder today, primary data collection methods also need to be aligned with the “next gen” and what people do every day. Hence, agile consumer connections through messaging, chat and video are in vogue.
End-clients need to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff and business partners – e.g. agencies and suppliers – have the task of assisting in this by delivering actionable insights, providing methods that are better, faster and cheaper, and bring innovations that are relevant and not just executional gimmicks.
Vetting of the right innovations is a challenge as well as a need for end-clients. Suppliers all shout they have the next big thing, but the propositions are often executional or methodological and do not focus on the business relevance for clients.
The ultimate goal of us all is to build insight capability engines that are adept at painting a true picture. Algorithms need an overlay with direct consumer input (e.g. surveys or opinions) as no algorithm can analyze a human mind completely, and consumers cannot process all propositions made to them. Only relying on big data or analytics would lead to learning “loops” or “eco-chambers”.
While these evolutions are game changing, and predominantly come from forces external to the insights industry or profession, the fundamental need to connect with, understand and experience people holistically is prevalent as never before!
An ESOMAR originals project.
I am
looking for end-client testimonials that support and illustrate these coping
mechanisms. The interviews and learning will feature in recurring blog posts on
the matter as well as used at ESOMAR conferences for live panel discussions. Do
you have such stories and want to share? Contact me through the Research World
team on contact@researchworld.com.
[1] Barton et al. (2016), Why Companies Can’t Turn Customer Insights into Growth, BCG, Cambiar, Yale.
Frank van den Driest, et al. (2015), Insights2020 – Drive Consumer Centric Growth. Presented at ESOMAR 2015 World Congress by Kantar Vermeer
van den Driest et al. (2016), Building an Insights Engine, HBR (September)
[2] Quinn-de Jong A., (2018). The Mutation of Research, presented at ESOMAR 2018 World Congress
