Unsurprisingly the skills of researchers have transitioned over time. Ten years ago we hired ‘all-rounders’ whose skills we could dial up and down to suit all scenarios, from f2f qual interviews and focus groups to complex quant surveys. Today, these researchers are still at the core of our business, managing powerful online communities and ad hoc projects for blue chip companies around the world. However, having witnessed the evolution of research methodologies and the insight industry itself, we’ve had to develop and expand our skills to match. Businesses today face new challenges, consumers have new distractions and research has new barriers. Now more than ever, our online communities must offer both agile and immersive methodologies to deliver faster, more in-depth insights for clients. Consequently, the research skills required to use these methodologies have also increased.
But as the rate of change accelerates, new research methods have come to the fore beyond the realms of online communities and traditional qual/quant studies. The rise of big data requires us to be data scientists, storytellers and strategists all in one. To build the tools, we need to process big data for ourselves and empower our researchers to do what they do best – understand the story in the numbers and provide actionable recommendations from it.
Similarly, a resurgence in ethnography, facilitated through mobile technology, has demanded that we become filmmakers and journalists, learning the technical skills to film and edit footage, as well as developing the ability to look at emotions and body language to see beyond spoken words. With clients requiring a wider qualitative package, we enlisted the help of Siamack Salari, an expert in this field, as well as internal experts, to help us better understand video ethnography.
It’s safe to say that technology and the changing insight landscape, has forced us to constantly learn new skills, acquire new knowledge and create new roles in our business to offer the latest methodologies to clients.
Adding on
As a full-service agency, our collective skillset is broad and diverse. Within our insight ecosystem, we can flex methodologies to ask better questions, listen to organic conversations online and observe human behaviour in context. Our internal training structure is designed to equip our researchers with the skills necessary to implement all elements of this ecosystem. We still have traditional ‘qualies’ and statisticians but we also have designers and strategists, all trained to adapt to the needs of our clients. Underpinning this is a collective desire to understand people, which motivates us all to pursue learning and development opportunities, however they may present themselves.
Upskilling ‘traditional’ research teams in this way is fairly straightforward. But more niche (and often emerging) research methods require a different approach. Our culture and trends team, for example, is a mix of consultants and practitioners including semioticians, anthropologists, project managers and writers. They bring a wealth of knowledge and educate others through cross-team learning. Our rapidly growing social intelligence team on the other hand has required targeted recruitment for previous experience in social scraping and specific skills like analysing and interpreting social data.
In an industry that’s impacted hugely by the macro environment, we’d be naïve to focus solely on research skills, critical as they are for business success. We feel it’s important that whatever the academic or professional makeup of our teams, understanding the intricacies of business strategy and marketing are key to interacting with clients on a commercial level. In addition to formal training on this, our sector-focused structure affords greater opportunities to gain in-depth commercial understanding and peer-to-peer learning in smaller groups. How we communicate is also high on our agenda, knowing that clients are time-poor and impact-focused. Communication is a constant on our training calendar and as five-time winners of the AURA award for Clear Communication, we definitely think it’s worth the investment for our clients.
By understanding our clients and their own pressures, we can adapt how we work to better support their needs. Re-tooling our teams with the skills, understanding and experience to adapt in a rapidly changing industry is key, which is a combined approach to upskilling and recruiting certain skills to offer the most effective route to business success.
