The 2018 West Coast Quirk’s Event is in the books and I’m happy to say we made it through the late-January conference without a power outage. As you may recall, on the morning of Day 2 at the 2017 gathering, the hotel and many of the neighboring office buildings lost power due to a blown transformer. We all soldiered on just fine and were blessed to see the industry’s can-do attitude kick into high gear to make the best of an unfortunate situation.
No such moxie was needed this time around. We enjoyed a 15 percent bump in client-side attendance and the sessions I sat in on were busy and lively, as was the expo hall.
To shake things up a bit for next year, we won’t have a California Event and will instead stage our usual Brooklyn show in between Events in the new sites of London and Chicago. As producers of English-language content, expanding to the U.K. is a natural fit for us and our audience research has shown us that Chicago is a good location for those exhibitors and client-side researchers who may not want to trek across the country to the East Coast.
In looking back over my notes for interesting nuggets to pass along from the sessions I attended, many themes jumped out but one that stuck with me was the value of looking at the research process from the perspective of those who will be using the data and insights you generate.
As researchers, you are trained to focus on rigor and method and statistical validity – all of which are certainly important. But, as some of the speakers observed, the brand managers or marketers or C-suite people who need to make decisions based on your work typically don’t care about or have time to pore over those kinds of details. And so when a researcher delivers a presentation of findings (and, hopefully, implications) and spends too much time on methodology, some end users may view that as an annoyance at best or at worst as an indication that the insights department doesn’t value their time. If that happens, guess who won’t be consulted next time there’s a need for marketplace intelligence?
As part of his larger talk on how he and two other colleagues transformed the consumer insights division at video game titan Blizzard Entertainment into a trusted and influential part of the company, Mike Swiontkowski stressed the value of understanding stakeholders’ challenges and initiatives, as a way to show them you want to be responsive to their needs and are aiming to deliver valuable insights. Connect with them often so you can keep them in the loop on what you are working on and reinforce that you are there for them when an information need arises.
The value of a research project is entirely determined by the value that the person receiving the information puts upon it, observed Bruce Olson of MMR Research as part of a session on the problems with measuring the ROI of research. Senior management spends a ton of money on things they can’t directly prove the ROI of, such as public relations or human resources, so why are researchers so focused on doing it? One reason is because researchers are, well, researchers and measuring things is part of their DNA.
Instead of grappling with a slippery metric like ROI to prove the value of what they do, researchers should instead strive to understand how their clients define a successful interaction with the research function. Is it merely getting some helpful directional information? A definitive go/no-go decision? Learning about a core consumer segment’s unmet need?
No matter the form it takes, end users want researchers to deliver a point of view, Olson said, rather than mere data. After all, it’s much harder to deliver a point of view than just an insight. Understanding and communicating the business context and outlining the impact on business decision-making of what the research uncovered will go a long way toward showing your internal clients that you’re seeing things from their perspective. And the more they view you as a source of strategic guidance, the more their own perspective on what you bring to the organization will change.