One of the best parts of my job is that I get to spend significant time with Communispace clients. My goal is to meet with at least 50 clients in the course of a year, and when I see them, I often ask these questions: What have you learned since we last met? What is changing in your field? What did you used to think was true that no longer is?
The answers are always fascinating—and recently, we synthesized comments from 100 insights professionals about their “New Normal.” The result is a list of 8 New Rules for Listening to Customers. As follow-up, we’ve gotten reactions from another 200 people, and we are currently getting additional responses from attendees at the recent ARF Re:think Conference in NYC where I’ll be presenting these to a large audience for the first time.
#1: Manage Your Social Media Jitters. In these days of Web 2.0 and conversations, it’s a constant that some consumers will tell you that your data is just plain wrong. Sometimes they are right, as in the case of members complaining last year about changes in Facebook’s privacy policy (which Facebook subsequently changed back). However, sometimes their truth is not reality for others. Example: in last year’s Motrin Moms ad “disaster,” we found that the majority of online moms had never even heard about the problem, and most of them thought that the ad was just fine. We need to listen hard to consumers, for sure, but if your target consumers are not on Twitter, for instance, then you don’t necessarily need to change strategy because of an angry tweet or two. Market researchers told us that their internal customers were just plain jittery and that they needed to be ever more educated about social media in this new age of customer engagement.
#2: Game-Changing Insights Don’t Usually Come From Testing. Time and again, clients bemoan the enormous investment they make in research that proves what they already know. This doesn’t mean that testing is unnecessary, but it does mean that equal emphasis needs to be placed on more open-ended discovery—leading to unmet needs, competitive white spaces, and new texture that can transform organizations. The most recent example of this is the Leno/Conan debacle, in which the data seemed to work, but where NBC completely missed how a generation of late-night TV watchers like to see the news, laugh, and go to sleep—in that order.
#3: Go Beyond the Ad-Hoc-Ness of Research. The notion that every time clients have a question or project they need to recruit a new group of consumers is expensive, slow, and impractical. The result of ad-hoc projects is a constant focus on whom to ask and how to recruit them, with little room left to focus on finding insights. Although many thought that the true value of online research would be related to cost-savings, the bigger benefit is that the web enables you to have continuous conversations with customers. Thus, the focus group gets extended (in case consumers have other thoughts or change their minds), the survey can reveal the “what” and the “why,” people can change their answers, and you have a chance to understand more than a small slice of your customers’ lives. This is reinforced by our new research on post-recession consumers, conduced with our partners from Ogilvy, in which a series of ongoing conversations with consumers gave texture about their lives that we could never have gotten from one project. This new research is available here.
#4: Cutting Edge Technology + Poor Research Methodology = Lousy Research. Just because a technology is new doesn’t mean it will result in the kinds of breakthroughs clients are looking for. Clients told us they were becoming more skeptical about “the shiny new thing” in and of itself—especially when it didn’t help accomplish the goal. Bernie Malinoff of Element 54 has done fascinating research to support this issue, showing how new fangled Web 2.0 surveys are often more difficult and less valid. The days of saying, “Let me see your software demo” will be replaced by questions about the fundamentals: How do you get people to open up? How do you create trust online? How do you learn what people really think?
#5: Don’t Mistake Data for Insight. In 1995, a financial services client told me he estimated that he could fill 12 Manhattan skyscrapers with data that his organization didn’t use. That was before the Internet Age, and thus I’d imagine they could now fill several city blocks. It’s just not true that whoever has the most data wins. Executives are hungry for “something I don’t know,” “something that will change how I think about my business,” or the like. We need to synthesize and report our findings in a way that gets to the core issues. The 70-slide PowerPoint presentation just won’t get read because the author can’t net it out.
#6: Top Executives Would Rather Have Fast Than Perfect. When executives have a burning question, the response in 2010 can no longer be, “If you give me $35,000 and 6 weeks, I’ll come back with a binder full of statistically significant information that will knock your socks off.” Too little, too late. The response that works is, “I can’t give you a perfect answer, but how about if I give you an early read from 50 consumers tomorrow morning?” That kind of response is in synch with the urgent pace of business today—and it’s more likely to add value to the process.
#7: Don’t Underestimate the Power of n=1. This is my favorite client quote, told to us recently by our first client, Tom Brailsford of Hallmark. Tom has several degrees in statistics and math, and he knows that there is safety in numbers. Still Tom is struck by how the big breakthroughs often happen away from the spotlight. His quest these days is often for something different than a pie chart: the lone voice that just makes him say, “Hmmmm…” This is substantiated by scores of clients who have told us that one emotional verbatim can move mountains in the executive suite.
#8: The Future Engagement Will Trump Sample Size. In an age when everyone is a professional respondent, the new currency will be less related to how many people receive the survey or how many consumers are in the online community. Instead, the metrics will relate to engagement: How many people actually participate? How much time will they spend? Will they do more than fill out a quick poll? How honest will they be? How hard will they work to help us understand their lives, dreams, and frustrations? Will they be engaged even if we don’t pay them much? The answers to these are the holy grail of 21st century listening.
I’m interested in your reactions: what you like most, what you like least, and what you think is missing. Post them here, or email me at dhessan@communispace.com, and I will send everyone’s thoughts out in the next month.
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Brad Mampe 
Rich Weiss 
Brad Mampe 
Matt D. 
Lil Pro 
Jani Fraga 
Nicole Adriance 
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Annabel Smyth 
Dan 
Great points Bill. Sometimes this can come from not being close enough to a client’s business to be thinking about problem solving and the “what ifs”. It’s a shared responsibility for the client to bring the insight team into their business and the insight team to be thinking proactively about the business. When that happens, real magic can take place.