Research is research, right?

Editor's note: Eric Whipkey is a client-side market research director based in the Washington, D.C., area.

It is no secret that in consumer insights or marketing research there tends to be a preference if not a demand for industry experience when posting jobs at various levels. From my experience, the opposite can also be beneficial. Having different or new perspectives should be viewed as a positive, not a negative. This is part of what we call diversity of thought.

I suppose that I am lucky in some respects. I have managed to have a career that has crossed over from two disciplines and several industries. As a result, my perspective on this issue may be different from many in the marketing research field. To this day, I still find that I bring slightly different views on approaches, statistics and management that were derived from my time working as an industrial/organizational (I/O) psychology consultant. Likewise, I often draw on my cross-industry knowledge when thinking through financial industry issues. For example, I work for a very member-focused credit union, so my non-profit membership research experience often comes in handy. Similarly, my consulting skills, derived from previous work in the professional services industry, often come into play when working with internal clients or advising my team on such consultations. And, my time in the health care industry has helped me understand the many similarities between the fears and emotions experienced by consumers in both health care and financial services, which translate well to the measures that we use in my current position to monitor and track experiences and needs.

Learn new tricks

Of course, as I switched from I/O psychology and/or industries I have also had to learn new tricks, adjust my ways of thinking and acclimatize myself to different industry and company cultures. That has been challenging, at times, and I am grateful to some previous managers for giving me the time and consideration needed to make those adjustments.

I think, though, that in their hiring practices, leaders across industries sometimes don’t credit candidates with the ability to make these types of adjustments. This potential blind spot could mean that they miss out on adding some valuable new perspectives that could help their organizations. While focusing on industry expertise and/or internal talent supports internal hires and employee engagement, it also leads to insular thinking and decreases the likelihood of diversity of thought and its attendant benefits.

I get that there are actual and meaningful differences across industries. For example, in health care it can be difficult to conduct timely research among hospital patients. There are government regulations in place that place strict rules on access to patient sample (due to government-mandated patient satisfaction measurement programs like HCAPS, run by CMS). Surely, someone coming into the industry should be made aware of that. But once they know the rules of the road, research is still research. Likewise, someone coming out of that environment into, say, CPG may bring new approaches to acquiring sample or avoiding the need for sample learned out of necessity. They may also feel so liberated that they would do other great things for your research function.

Not have enough experience

There are also other presumed reasons for this bias toward industry-specific researchers. In CPG, conjoint is prevalent. Naturally, more obtuse offerings like those found in service industries are not always suited to conjoint or even max-diff, due to their complexity. The assumption might be that these service researchers would not have enough experience or knowledge of conjoint or max-diff. That may well be true but not necessarily. Consider that these same researchers may have developed creative approaches for testing product or service concepts across offerings like seminars, personal services or even housecleaning that could rival conjoint for complexity. They might even be using modified versions of conjoint or max-diff followed up with different approaches to measure the level of interest around the more detailed complexities of these offerings. What might these researchers be able to offer to the thinking around more straightforward research topics like package design or product/concept tests for features and benefits? In many ways, non-CPG research, like that found in service industries, is more complex. Therefore, the diversity of thought that could be brought to bear could be significant.

Likewise, shopper-journey research and shopper analytics are popular in many industries. This type of research may have a different focus across industries or be known by different names like customer or member journey-mapping. But the similarities are great. It would certainly not be accurate to assume based on industry alone that a researcher’s experience with “shopper,” “customer,” “member” or “consumer” journey research would necessarily be wrong for your industry. To the contrary, their approach may add significant value.

Let’s take a look at some possible examples of researchers transitioning to different industries or areas and examine some of the issues that might arise.

An academic researcher coming into financial services marketing research

Method/knowledge to bring to bear:

• In-depth literature reviews.
• Meta-analysis/analyses of other published or unpublished research findings.
• Will likely have solid general research technique background/training.
• May bring truly cutting-edge approaches and/or knowledge.
• Assuming that teaching was part of their academic role, it could translate to mentoring your existing analysts on any number of topics/research techniques.
• Connections with university professors and/or students could result in low-cost research partnerships.
• Students from the management or finance departments could study things like preferred payment platforms among Millennials.
• Students from the computer science department could have a hackathon to help improve things like security, anti-fraud efforts and/or existing or new apps.
• Students from the psychology department could design and develop a series of behavioral economic experiments to understand the emotions and/or fears behind personal finance and/or banking.

They will need to learn/change:

• To be less academic. Like any client-side research shop, there is often a focus on speed over strict rigor. Usually, no one is going to die over a type I or type II error in this context.
• Will need to learn the industry and your company’s corporate politics (perhaps more so than others with more corporate experience).

A CPG researcher entering a large non-profit research think tank or membership organization

Method/knowledge to bring to bear:

• Conjoint and/or max-diff. Most concepts that a non-profit like this would need to evaluate will be too complex for these solutions but the ability set up these types of trade-off studies could result in interesting (new to non-profit) ways of looking at problems.
• Extensive knowledge of the consumer’s path to purchase. Again, there is less purchasing in the non-profit research world but member experience could be relevant as could experience thinking through how consumers approach ecommerce and/or membership.
• Agile research techniques. Quick research turnaround will be appreciated everywhere.
• Co-creation. Working across multiple teams of executives to generate new ideas will be a key skill to bring to the role.
• Behavioral economics/non-rational techniques. This will be a hard sell and difficult to operationalize for non-profit problems but the mind-set will be appreciated.
• Business acumen is sometimes sorely lacking in these types of organizations. Being able to connect business problems to data and research will be highly sought after. As one of my former not-for-profit CEOs used to say, “No money, no mission.”
• Experience with message-testing and/or positioning research will be very relatable.

They will need to learn/change:

• Adjust to the slower pace of research planning and execution. One or more people may die over a type I or type II error in this context (i.e., public policy research, health research, etc.).
• Think more about testing complex ideas and educational offerings instead of products and features. A CPG researcher with a needs-based approach to research would be more at ease.
• Will need to adjust to a non-profit mind-set. It is not all about making money.

A professional services firm consultant (i.e., Accenture, Strategy&, Booz Allen Hamilton, etc.) entering health care

Method/knowledge to bring to bear:

• Consulting skills will come in handy if working across departments is important (i.e., an internal client services model). If not client service-oriented, will be helpful with senior executives.
• The ability to scope out a proposal in a persuasive way will help to sell-in project ideas.
• Will come with a tendency to think about timelines and have a sense of urgency.
• Will have strong research techniques.
• Will have a breadth of experience across either government or industry (depending on the firm that they come in from).
• Will be aware of many techniques with less depth in many specific methods.

They will need to learn/change:

• Stop using consultant jargon, unless the company likes that.
• Figure out what types of methods will fly and get more in-depth training in them.
• Will need to learn the industry and your company’s corporate politics (this will not be hard, as they have had to do that as often as once per month as a consultant).

An opportunity, not a threat

There are, of course, many other possible examples. But my point is that diversity of thought and experience are good things. With the intense focus on Millennials and the gig economy, the client-side research community could benefit from a more relaxed or open-minded industry focus in its recruiting. There are many ways to approach the same problems. A researcher willing to try new things or work in new environments should be an opportunity, not a threat. We should all try embracing these alternate industry researchers or career-changers. They will inevitably have new ways of looking at your corporate world and the research issues you’re facing. When you consider how things are done in different industries or research fields, the potential to innovate methodologically skyrockets. Give it a shot and see what happens. You may open up whole new worlds of opportunity.