Editor’s note: Colin Buckingham is CEO of market research firm Rainmakers CSI, U.K. 

In market research and insight, we have long talked about the need to influence the board and the C-suite. Most of these conversations emphasize the broader business skills needed in order to have that influence. But there is one element that is crucial to achieving impact: having a specific and direct influence on the organization’s strategic business plan. 

The strategic plan is at the heart of any organization, spanning all the businesses, geographies, categories or divisions the company operates in. It sets priorities, focuses energy, allocates resources, establishes alignment around desired results and adjusts direction in response to a changing environment.

Strategic plans often contain little or no consumer insight but they should be based on evidence, which the insight team is best placed to provide. By delivering the right information to drive the strategic planning process, senior insight directors can prove the value of insights and get the level of engagement from the C-suite they need to exert further strategic influence. 

But every organization is different and there are many approaches to strategic plans. So, what are six things insights directors can do in order to ensure they have strategic impact?

1. Work with existing processes. 

The best start is to master the way the planning process works within your organization and understand the outputs that you need, when they should be delivered and the format they should be in.

Large corporations have to have a consistent process. And although as a senior insight leader you may have input to what that process should be, once it has been defined, you have to work within it – and preferably be at the heart of it – having the right conversations throughout the planning cycle so that you can truly influence the outcome.  

2. Combine top-down and bottom-up. 

There are two elements to strategic planning – a top-down process likely to be a resource and financial planning exercise, and a bottom-up process that relies on marketing and insights working together to manage brands successfully. 

The top-down element might start with the main items the CEO has on their agenda – financial goals and big-picture initiatives such as restructuring programed and geographical expansion. They’ll be anticipating company-wide support for the principles even if the details have yet to be worked through.

The bottom-up portions are also crucial because these will drive what the company actually does. Consumer insights can play a pivotal role here, working with people who are managing countries, brands or portfolios of brands. This is where listening and responding to consumers enables ideas to be generated, opportunities to be identified and strategies to be created and evidenced.

No prizes are awarded for complaining that the organization is too financially driven and never listens to its consumers or even its own marketing people. If you're the global director for a brand that has enjoyed great success in North America and has enormous potential to expand into other Western markets, you need to solidify that thinking, get it into the strategic plan and ensure it is interwoven into the company’s goals globally and in the relevant countries.

The best way to achieve this is to build an invincible commercial case based on the most robust market and consumer insight you can get your hands on. In my experience, the key often lies in the successful interplay between marketing people, who tend to be passionate and conviction-led, and the insight people who are often more evidence-led. The best strategic plans don’t just have big promises and financial spread sheets, they are rich in both passion and evidence.

3. Focus on where you can have most impact.

You need to make sure that the strategic plan is optimized from both a consumer and a commercial perspective in the areas of the business that you impact. This means anticipating consumers’ needs and demonstrating that it is viable and profitable for the business to deliver on them. Again, establishing a clear line of sight between the strategic objectives and the insight function will place commercial insight – and hence the customer – at the heart of the business.

4. Own the customer.

The insights team should represent the customer. You should know what your company needs to do to champion customers without abandoning fundamentals. This can be done by taking each of your company’s focus areas and providing evidence for consumer-inspired initiatives to feed into the plan. 

Providing proof of how consumer needs convert to commercial opportunities connects the voice of the customer directly into the plan and enables better decisions to be made. 

5. Be fluent in finance.

Of course, different companies have different structures but the responsibility for building and delivering the strategic plan often sits ultimately with finance. And the best way insight people can influence finance people is by spending time with them, understanding how they think, understanding what they need and giving them objective, compelling answers, with decent evidence, in a form that they will understand and find easy to relate to. 

I often work directly with insight, marketing and finance people to create these connections. If there’s a specific pro forma required, as there inevitably is, researchers must convert insights into that format. We fill out the forms, help compile the spread sheets and work with the finance team to understand what they need to deliver, using their terminology.

Without this, marketing can resemble the much-caricatured tourist in a foreign restaurant, shouting his requests more and more loudly in his own language to an audience that simply ignores him and serves up whatever it has on hand.

6. Have conviction.

Sometimes insights professionals need passion and conviction as well as evidence. Believe in your judgement and seek the data to support your view – don’t expect it to come to you. 

Lots of our strategy work revolves around stretching existing brands into new territories. Although it’s usually more efficient to expand the reach of an existing equity across geographies or categories than to build new brands from scratch, consumers are rarely crying out for something they don’t know exists. 

In these situations, researchers’ work often includes uncovering the dreams and hypotheses of the client team (Where could we take this brand if we had no constraints?) and looking at examples of how other companies have reinvented themselves. We then use data to show what the list of ideas could be worth. There will be some madness on the list, but there may just be one or two gems. 

Heads of insight need to trust their convictions but then support them with objective evidence if they want the business to listen and follow their advice. 

Driving change

Impacting the strategic plan is vital if we are to ensure the future of insights. Follow these steps and you will be well on the way to ensuring you drive change proactively within your organization and move insights from box-ticking support to setting the agenda for the future. Â