Making a persuasive difference

Editor's note: Myriam Benlamlih is senior research manager at the District Communications Group, a Washington, D.C., PR and communications firm.

It is 9 p.m. in a small Asian country. Inside the U.S. embassy, the public affairs officer (PAO) is still at his desk. He is deciding where in the country he should bring a pair of American hip-hop artists when they visit for a two-day, embassy-sponsored goodwill tour. Will, ponders our PAO, touring them in the north of my country or touring in the south do more to build goodwill toward the United States?

Meanwhile, in an east European country, it is one hour before the largest national newspaper’s print deadline. The PAO in that country is hurrying to finish a 500-word editorial that urges better U.S.-European relations. Which arguments, she wonders, should I keep in because my audience will find them more persuasive? And which less-persuasive arguments should I omit, to keep to my word limit?

Back in Washington, D.C., it is 9 a.m. In a set of nondescript cubicles, in a building across the street from the U.S. Department of State’s main offices, R/PPR Research gets to work. This week it will draft questionnaires, scrutinize data files and release several new marketing research reports – all to help answer questions like those asked by the example PAOs above and by actual PAOs all over the world.

Traditional diplomacy is one country’s diplomats negotiating with another’s; public diplomacy is one country’s diplomats engaging the people of another country, whether through cultural exchanges, embassy-sponsored events, press work, social media messaging or other means. In this way, public diplomacy resembles a communications campaign. Just as a politician employs political messaging to win votes or a large corporation uses advertising and consumer engagement to build its brand, so too do PAOs practice public diplomacy in order to generate goodwill toward the United States or, sometimes, to influence foreign opinion on specific topics of international relations.

Using marketing research

That is why, ever since the early 2000s, various government commissions, oversight agencies and think tanks have urged PAOs to adopt the best practices of effective political campaigns, marketing campaigns and other private-sector communications campaigns. One of those best practices is using marketing research. And by the 2010s, the State Department had indeed begun to supply PAOs with marketing research, including publicly-available survey data, such as data released by think tanks, original surveys and other specially commissioned polling along with purchased syndicated research on worldwide media trends and other select topics.

Unfortunately, this effort yielded few tangible changes to how PAOs practiced public diplomacy. That unfortunate truth was the main finding of an informal review carried out by the State Department’s public diplomacy offices. The department was supplying its PAOs with marketing research but they were not using that research to improve how they did public diplomacy.

“We had research that answered the question, ‘What is happening?’ What we needed was research that answered the question, ‘How do we win?’,” says one anonymous PAO, remembering one of the reasons why he and his colleagues rarely used the research that State provided: Much of that research consisted of polling toplines or census figures or other raw statistics devoid of any real strategy. All too frequently, PAOs would receive only data, not data-derived guidance on how to achieve their public diplomacy goals.

Furthermore, the guidance the research did provide often could not be acted upon effectively with the modest resources that most PAOs have available. “It just wasn’t practical,” that same PAO recalls. “We didn’t have the budget or the staff to put a lot of the polling into practice.”

Also, State’s “business process” for supplying market research was failing its PAO customers. “Research would sometimes get to us six, seven, months after it was commissioned,” recalls another anonymous PAO. “Our embassy’s planning cycle was already complete. And it was expensive, too.”

Insufficiently strategic

In short, the State Department was providing PAOs with research but not research they could use. Much of it was insufficiently strategic; much of it was not actionable, given the resource limitations that PAOs face; and much of it was slow to roll out and expensive to execute. The research was accurate, done by skilled experts employing rigorous methods and it might have been useful for an academic study, perhaps, or for a thought leadership paper. But it was a poor fit for public diplomacy: a marketing research product that was not satisfying its users’ needs.

The Office of Policy, Planning and Resources for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs (or R/PPR – pronounced “ripper”) is the State Department office in charge of policy matters for public diplomacy. R/PPR Research is a subunit of R/PPR. It was launched in the summer of 2015 by Tanya Ward, an experienced PAO, and Josh Miller, a marketing researcher with over 16 years of experience who was brought to State from the private sector.

R/PPR Research’s mandate was to arm U.S. diplomats with a better class of marketing research and by early 2016, R/PPR Research had already released 60 marketing research reports. Each report is derived from an original survey of foreign public opinion; each report identifies good targets for public diplomacy engagement and promising messaging for public diplomacy communications; and each one does so by applying standard marketing research techniques to the survey data. Some reports advise on goodwill-building in general; others on how to shape foreign views on specific topics (for example, several reports on Asian countries advise on driving support for the TPP trade treaty).

Reactions have been enthusiastic. “This is exactly what market research should be. It’s a breath of fresh air,” says one officer at State who has worked in public diplomacy positions. “Now, our people actually use the research – and understand why research, in general, can be valuable to what we do.”

The Public Diplomacy Council (PDC) agrees. The PDC is a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit that advises government policymakers on public diplomacy matters. In January, it named R/PPR Research to its yearly “10 Best” list, describing R/PPR Research as a “long overdue public diplomacy innovation.”

Valuable lessons

And that sentiment has been echoed by many PAOs themselves, who cheer the fact that State is providing research that its diplomats can actually use. It’s a big turnaround and R/PPR Research’s experience in bringing it about has valuable lessons for market researchers who, like R/PPR Research, are working to integrate private-sector research techniques into public-sector communications.

Lesson 1: Good market research is strategic – and a tool for strategic planning.

Before R/PPR Research, much of the research that State gave its PAOs was not strategic. It was raw facts and figures, not recommendations derived from those facts and figures. The research was descriptive, not prescriptive: it advised on what was happening, not on what to do about it.

R/PPR Research advises on both. Its reports describe public opinion as it is and they identify concrete actions that PAOs can take to shape public opinion. “PAOs don’t want us just to ruminate,” says R/PPR Research’s Josh Miller. “They want us to give them recommendations, to give instructions. So that is what our reports do and that is what makes them strategic.”

Those “instructions” tell PAOs whom to target, what messages to deliver and various other things they should do when doing field communications and also when doing the government’s version of strategic planning: budgeting for impact by allocating resources in order to achieve a work goal as effectively as possible. Every year, the PAO in each embassy completes State’s strategic planning modules – a series of proprietary, online tools that help PAOs budget their time, money and other resources over the coming 12 months. PAOs are discovering that the very same guidance R/PPR Research gives for field communications also helps with this planning process.

“Marketing research,” says Miller, “can be a big help for strategic planning because research, at its most basic, is a tool of resource allocation. Its purpose is to maximize the impact of your finite communications dollars – to give you the biggest possible bang for your communications buck.”

“For example,” says R/PPR Research’s Tanya Ward,  “‘target identification’ is really just an eloquent phrase for telling a stakeholder, ‘You’ll do better to spend your time and money on these people, not on those people’ – and when a PAO budgets to that advice, that is strategic planning.”

“Being strategic – giving actual advice – is what makes marketing research valuable. And giving advice that is useful to both your day-to-day public engagement and your broader strategic planning makes market research doubly valuable for the government user,” Miller says.

Lesson 2: Good marketing research fits government’s capacity to use it.

Most PAOs have modest budgets and many work in countries with restrictive media laws. Those and certain other factors limit through what media and at what volume they can message to their audience. Print outreach is typically placed op-eds and walk card-style handouts, not direct mail or glossy magazine ads. Electronic out-reach is social media and occasional television or radio news interviews, not slick paid spots run on prime time. And much of public diplomacy is not done through print or electronic channels at all but through face-to-face interactions between PAOs and very small audiences, such as presentations to local high schools or workshops with civil society leaders.

In this way, public diplomacy is more akin to a small retail campaign than to the campaigns run by major CPG brands or by well-funded presidential candidates and therefore, marketing research that recommends non-retail strategies is unhelpful to PAOs: it exceeds their capacity to use it.

Yet before R/PPR Research, much of the research that State provided was non-retail in its approach. Consequently, it could not be acted on with the resources that most PAOs had. For example, several research products analyzed the psychology and internal narratives of foreign audiences and urged PAOs to exploit those neuroses – an approach far too subtle for the official talking points, handouts with anodyne copy and other “blunt” out-reach products that PAOs actually use. Another example: Several research products directed PAOs to buy lots of television and radio time – in some of the world’s priciest media markets – a non-starter, as big media buys anywhere are unaffordable to PAOs.

“Market research is no good to public diplomacy if it can’t be put into practice with the budgets or staff or outreach products that Washington provides our embassies,” says Ward. “Those are just the realities that no PAO is going to be able to change, so the research needs to accommodate them.”

That is why the only recommendations that R/PPR Research makes are ones that PAOs can actually implement. For example, the messaging R/PPR Research recommends is always simple, not sophisticated: arguments that are straightforward enough to be delivered by the inexact, unsubtle products that PAOs must use. And the targets R/PPR Research identifies are always ones that are ripe for the “ground game” PAOs play: subgroups that a PAO can meet in person or touch via cheap outreach or free media, not subgroups that are reachable only through broadcast communications or that are largely unreachable because of the illiberal communications laws of a given country.

“We recommend the possible,” says Miller, “and eschew the impossible. Even government, with its huge resources, faces limitations on what it can and cannot do when doing outward-facing communications so government users need research that takes those limitations into account.”

Lesson 3: Good market research needs a good business process.

“It isn’t sexy but the business process matters,” says Miller. “Marketing research that is delivered too late or that costs too much is no good to our PAOs, no matter how strategic or actionable it is.”

Obvious enough. But before R/PPR Research, State’s research business process was falling short. Delivery was slow: Turnaround time for an original market research project was often half a year or longer. And execution was expensive: The price tag was often six figures for a small project.

R/PPR Research recognized that State’s business process was broken and it has instituted various fixes. For example, to expedite project turnaround, R/PPR Research developed in-house expertise in government contracting, so that now, the thicket of rules and procedures that dictate how State can contract with data collection houses no longer delays the execution of marketing research projects.

Another example: to cut costs, R/PPR Research streamlines its surveys, asking only those questions that are vital for analysis and omitting questions that would yield information that’s interesting but merely “nice to know.” Plus, whenever possible, R/PPR Research adds its survey questions to recurring omnibus surveys, rather than fielding them as stand-alone projects with higher start-up and interviewing costs. And R/PPR Research has also allowed other government agencies to purchase its raw data, generating revenue for R/PPR Research that has helped cover its research costs.

R/PPR Research has also hired our firm, the District Communications Group, to act as its back office. The DC Group is a PR and strategic communications practice with a focus on marketing research. We manage all data collection activities for R/PPR Research and oversee their work and ensure its methodological integrity.

Looking ahead

In its first year of existence, R/PPR Research has done a lot; over the next 12 months, it intends to do a lot more. A lot more in terms of quantity: R/PPR Research intends to release up to 100 market research reports. And a lot more in terms of variety: In the works are two new product lines, one that will employ qualitative data and a case study method and one that will employ big data analysis.

And also a lot more in terms of acculturating State to marketing research. “To many PAOs – in fact, to many government users – market research is still something very novel. So evangelizing market research, in general, and demonstrating its value to public sector communications is just as important as any particular report that R/PPR Research will ever release,” Miller says.