How To Make Research and Insights Actionable
Written by Matt Schaefer, Director, Research & Insights, GBK Collective
Is your organization taking full advantage of marketing research, insights, and analytics to improve its business strategy and drive growth? While every company aspires to make data and insights actionable, the reality is that many research and analytics investments fall short or fail to deliver the desired impact.
According to Gartner’s Marketing Data and Analytics Survey, 54% of CMOs and VPs of marketing aren’t impressed by the insights their research or data analytics team provides. They cite “poor data quality, inactionable results and nebulous recommendations” as the top reasons. Time and money, wasted.
In marketing, for those tasked with insights and growth, few things are more advantageous and rare than clarity. And yet, too often, we see other research firms and technology vendors attempt to sell one-size-fits-all solutions to clients, or conduct quick-turn research studies that lack strategic focus. The result is a veritable data dump of information, an all-you-can-eat buffet of data disconnected from strategy, and before long the research report ends up sitting on the shelf, gathering dust.
Our clients’ challenges do not fit into a neat black box. And neither should their research.
Maximizing the strategic impact of research
At GBK Collective, we take a bespoke approach to every research, insights, and analytics engagement. To help our clients to achieve clarity (about their customers, products, and brand) and unlock new insights to apply to decision making, we start with their end goals in mind.
Who are your target customers? What are your strategic priorities? What business decisions do the research and data need to inform? What are the three to five most important questions that you need to answer about your customers - or non-customers - to make better, more confident decisions?
“At GBK Collective, we take a bespoke approach to every research, insights, and analytics engagement.”
It is these questions - and their unique answers - that should guide the design of each and every project. The way we see it, clarity doesn’t come in a box.
Start with the end in mind
To generate unique insights and custom solutions for our clients, we apply the principles of design thinking and customer-centricity to the design of every research study:
We start with the customer need, the business questions the client needs to answer
We translate those business questions into the “product brief,” the high-level research questions that need to be answered to address each business question
We translate those research questions into “product specs” - the actual survey questions and techniques that will address each research question
We collect data and develop a deliverable, a “product,” with the client’s business needs in mind
This order is key. As GBK SVP Brian Smith shares, “to improve ROI, marketers first have to think deeply about the business problem and identify the key strategic questions they need to answer through data and customer insights. In addition to taking a hypothesis-driven approach, companies also have to have the right analytic tools and processes in place to effectively apply better data across the organization. That’s the only way to make the best use of their team’s time and their research and analytics partners. To help our clients, we need to be business strategists first and foremost.”
Designing a bespoke research solution
Let’s consider a profiling study GBK recently completed for a leading global technology brand. When this technology brand reached out, saying it wanted help better understanding its customers in the US, China, Japan, and Germany, we didn’t start by talking about the “product” we wanted to sell. We didn’t immediately reach for the shelf to recommend a cookie-cutter solution. Instead, our team of consultants, academics, and marketers started with the client’s central business question - How can our brand best and uniquely compete in the marketplace? - and worked hand-in-hand with the client to identify the central research questions that underpinned it.
“Together, we align on the specific questions that - if answered - would have the biggest impact on the brand’s product and marketing strategy..”
Together, we aligned on the specific, high-level questions that - if answered - would have the biggest impact on the brand’s product and marketing strategy, and drive clearer organizational decision-making:How do attitudes and behaviors differ for our customers vs. our competitors’ customers?
How do purchase motivators differ for our customers vs. our competitors’ customers?
How do brand perceptions differ for our customers vs. our competitors’ customers?
As part of our proposal, we prepared a high-level survey outline to answer these questions. But, as we made clear, a high-level survey outline is nothing more than a starting point for discussion. After we were awarded the project, we started to peel back the onion of each research question. We interviewed our immediate client and stakeholders across the company to develop a more holistic understanding of the business challenge and the strategic importance of each research question. We also conducted desk research and reviewed the company’s existing data and insights. And only then did we design a detailed outline that broke down each research question into concrete questions and techniques (e.g., Max Diff).
We didn’t ask for sign-off the next day so we could immediately begin programming the survey. Instead, we used the outline, and the initial survey draft that followed, to have an intentional dialogue with our immediate client. Which questions were most essential? Which would truly inform decisions, and which were just nice to know? If we ask the question this way, is that getting you the answer that you are actually looking for? What do other stakeholders think? We used those conversations to confirm priorities, ensure alignment, and finalize the design of our survey and get it into the field.
And before you start to say, I don’t have time for this, I needed insights yesterday - let me spoil the ending. The entire project, from conception through reporting (which I’ll get to next), took place in the span of six weeks. Clarity isn’t instantaneous, but it may take less time than you think.
Keep the end in mind and focus on the story behind the data
We frequently see other research firms try to throw everything but the kitchen sink into the body of their report. Lots of data, a few insights. And sometimes, for a certain type of client, that’s okay. But most of the time, what happens is that the forest is lost for the trees, and no one is happy.
We know from neuroscience research that stories are critical to understanding data. Without a story, reports can feel like an amalgamation of loosely associated data points. It’s much more impactful (with most clients, most of the time), we’ve found, to instead focus on the insights that matter most.
“Stories are critical to understanding data. Without a story, reports can feel like an amalgamation of loosely associated data points.”
So, we like to ask: What data and insights from the study that are immediately actionable? What are the key takeaways for different stakeholders that ladder up to the company’s priorities? Where is there important and relevant nuance among different groups of respondents? And where can we bring qualitative insights and desk research to the fore to bring the findings into high resolution? So that, ultimately, clients not only know what the data is saying, but also what it means for their business. And so they want to keep going back to the report, again and again, to bring it into their planning.
Our analysis plan for the technology company discussed previously, therefore, was remarkably simple. Each slide, we knew, would have to serve a purpose. So we actually wrote out the research question that we were addressing at the top of each slide! We arranged the slides in a coherent order, where each slide built off of the slide before it. And throughout the report, we called out:
Fundamental truths about each customer base - and regional nuances
Significant differences between customer bases
Stakeholder hypotheses that had been validated or rejected
We also used analytic techniques like Max Diff, driver analysis, and fair share to uncover hidden, but meaningful, patterns in the response data. We layered in secondary data sources to provide additional context and support. And we worked hand-in-hand with the client and a designer to create a report that was easy for stakeholders of all stripes to understand, absorb, discuss, debate, and act upon.
The result? A focused, story-driven report that has been widely shared and well-received throughout the company. Moreover, a report that has generated several follow-on workstreams to activate the findings and help the client develop a more customer-led product marketing strategy and roadmap.
As our client put it, “The global research GBK Collective conducts for our company impacts most aspects of our business - what products we build, how we price them, how we market them, and whom we market them to. GBK Collective helps our company stay focused on what matters to our customers.”
In other words, the result has been something rare. Something advantageous. Clarity.
Final Thoughts
Over time, we have found that clients will see much higher levels of engagement, impact, and clarity when data and insights are grounded in business priorities and put into strategic context through storytelling. When their research, insights, and analytics start with the end in mind, and avoid the black box and kitchen sink.This approach not only unlocks more relevant and valuable insights. It also makes the research more memorable, actionable, and enduring.
And memorable, actionable research will rarely sit alone on a shelf, gathering dust.