I’m sorry it has been a couple of weeks since I posted. I was involved in a very time-consuming protest against a developer’s plan for my neighborhood, and had to cut back on other activities.

This week we continue our look at market research, with thoughts on what to look for in a market researcher, and how to present findings.

.
What to look for in a market researcher

Obviously, the most important aspect of a good researcher is professional competence. You need someone who’s well trained, and has experience in a wide variety of different methodologies. The popular stereotype is that numerical analysts aren’t good at dealing with people, but the best researchers often have an interesting mix of people skills and quantitative analysis skills. You can still be a successful researcher even if you’re an introvert. But I’ve never seen a successful researcher who was bad with numbers.

The other characteristic to look for is the ability and willingness to think beyond the numbers. This is a hard thing to find in market researchers; many of them are very methodical, and reluctant to draw any implications from the facts they’ve discovered. For example, they might report that a particular customer segment has a high percentage of elderly people, but they’ll be very uncomfortable speculating on why there are so many old people in the group.

This is a significant problem because there’s never enough money and time to research everything you want to know. At some point you have to stop gathering data and fill in the gaps with your best guesses and extrapolations. This is profoundly uncomfortable to many researchers because it runs contrary to their training. The whole point of market research is not to guess. And many market researchers aren’t very good at it, either.

To find researchers who are good at drawing implications, talk with them about their previous studies. Ask what they learned, what conclusions they drew, and what actions they recommended. The more insightful and non-obvious their conclusions, the better.

The other thing to watch out for is people who are comfortable forming implications from their research, but form bad ones. Sometimes this will just be because they’re not very insightful. It’s best to avoid hiring these people. But sometimes it happens just because they’re naïve about your industry. It’s going to be almost impossible to find researchers who are both very skilled in their craft and deeply informed about your industry. To get around this problem, have the researcher work with a competitive analyst when thinking about implications. The competitive analyst may be able to give some of the industry background that the researcher lacks.

.
How to communicate market research findings

There’s no substitute for a good presentation when delivering market research. Graphs of research results and video of customers both work very well in a presentation format, and people always have a lot of questions that can best be dealt with in a live setting. A future chapter will give general guidelines on how to present. What I want to focus on here is something you shouldn’t do.

Don’t let an outside research supplier present the findings. As part of their standard service, the company that conducted the research for you will prepare a slide presentation of the findings. They’re proud of this work, and they’ll want to come in and present the slides to your whole management team.

That’s usually a bad idea.

First, remember that your goal is not to present raw data to the company, it’s to make sure the company takes appropriate action on your findings. That means the implications of your study are more important than the actual data, and they need to be tailored to the internal vocabulary and politics of your company. Most outside suppliers can’t understand this; they simply don’t have the context. Most of them will just present raw data — or worse, any implications they draw may not be appropriate to your company, or may be phrased in ways that people in your company will misunderstand.

For example, I’ve had outside researchers recommend my company adopt strategies that were already tried, and failed, years before. Or they have given advice that undercut exactly what we were trying to get the company to do. Once this has happened, it’s almost impossible for you to correct their messages, since you’re the person who chose the research supplier in the first place. At best you’ll look incompetent.

Second, almost every research company I’ve ever dealt with creates terrible presentations. And by using the word terrible, I’m probably understating the problem. Most of the supplier presentations I’ve seen are either ugly or incomprehensible, with a little bit of repetitiveness thrown in for good measure. I don’t know why this is. Maybe the presentations are an outlet for the repressed artistic yearnings of researchers (who, after all, spend most of their time doing very dry numerical work). Or more likely, the researchers are so in love with their data that they try to cram it all into one slide. Whatever the reason, most of the supplier presentations I’ve seen are so complex and poorly structured that you can’t understand them unless you already know everything about the study.

Here are two real-world slides from supplier presentations. Company confidential information has been obscured, and the supplier names have been removed. Both of these slides came from wonderful studies on which the suppliers did great work — they just didn’t do a good job of presenting it.

Here’s a good example of a researcher who couldn’t bear to leave out any data. Even though I remember this study vividly, I had to spend several minutes studying this particular slide before I could figure out what it was trying to say. The actual research finding was, “companies are planning to buy more of our product next year than they did this year,” but good luck getting that from the slide even if you could read it (which no one could do unless they were sitting in the front row of the room).

Some research firms just aren’t very good at communicating visually. This slide is from the final report of one of the most innovative, influential research studies I’ve ever been involved in. It was prepared by one of the best research companies in the country, but you’d never know it from the chart, which I’m still not sure I understand. The supplier’s report had another 111 slides just like this. If I had allowed this supplier to present the findings to my company, no one would have understood the research, let alone acted on it.

Unless the research supplier is unusually good at presenting, and well attuned to your business, you and your company will be much, much, much better off if you rework the supplier’s presentation into words and graphics tailored to communicate clearly to your corporation.

Written documents. These have a role to play, but I think it’s more for reference than as the primary deliverable. If you’ve done an especially large or data-heavy study — for example, a major survey of your company’s installed base — it’s a good idea to give people a reference document on the findings. For an installed base study, the document could include tables on all the key demographics of your users, things like age, geographic distribution, education level, income, how long they’ve owned, satisfaction level, and on and on. This will let people in the company look up any specific information they need, rather than coming to you.

This is also a great document to post on your company’s intranet.

E-mail is a good supplement to presenting your research. Create a message summarizing the most important implications and most surprising findings of the study and send it to key stakeholders (if you are paired with a competitive analysis team, their competitive info mailing list is a great place to distribute this information).

But I don’t recommend that you try to communicate all of a study’s findings in an e-mail. There’s just too much to explain. Use the message more as an advertisement for your presentation sessions, and as a supplement to get your most important messages to people who don’t have time to come to the presentations.

__________

Please click here to rate this section (the link will open a one-screen anonymous survey, and you’ll get to see the results after you take it).

Next week: The online revolution in market research.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 16th, 2006 at 1:19 pm and is filed under Chapter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.