Research can be a misunderstood process. But it underpins the insight on which new ideas rely.
Research is the first step in the creative thinking journey.
Steve Jobs famously said that he “didn’t build the Mac for anybody else. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could.”
It’s true that research can become a misconceived ‘pass or fail’ test for new ideas, another complexity in an over-engineered process, or boxed within rigid parameters. But knowledge matters for every business. Markets are evolving at pace, with DTC brands and mobile-first technologies driving marked shifts in consumer expectations. "Transient advantage is the new normal”(1) as digital competition proliferates and research helps us evolve and discard ideas fast.
User research can become a “tool to identify appropriate hypotheses to test at scale, or a means of further investigating experimentation results we don’t understand. [And] it can help speed up [its own process]. Quantitatively identifying groups of users who interact with the product differently, for example, helps target research to segments of interest”(2).
Customer input combines with market analysis to create the melting pot of data from which insights are distilled. For a rolling pipeline of ideas, insights are the fuel.
“The way you get innovation is to fund research and learn the basic facts”(3).
That begins with a brief.
Who in your business has direct knowledge of customer activity, touchpoints, sales patterns and industry trends as well as overarching goals? Get them in a room and ask them some simple, critical questions:
What specific problem do we need to solve?
Are we trying to change our audience?
How do we need to alter their behaviours?
What assumptions should we test?
The more precise you are around objectives, the more focused will be your findings.
Parameters agreed, you can embark on your fact-finding. The aim is to build certainty around the target audience and uncover what you can about their preferences, attitudes and motivations when it comes to what you’re offering. And it’s also to piece together a sense of the cultural zeitgeist, the macro trends, the market forces and the competitive context you’re working amidst.
Research takes multiple forms and can usually be tailored to time and budget - though it’s important to spread your sources for a balanced view.
Industry reports from generalist sources.
News, reports and opinion pieces from industry-specific sites & publications.
Category analysis for trends, emergent brands, new initiatives & established offerings.
Competitor analysis for positioning, differentiation, product array, innovation & comms activity.
Social keyword monitoring & social listening for emotive drivers / pain points.
Digital forums & consumer ratings sites for attitudes towards related products & services.
Keyword stats from Google Trends and similar sources.
In-house user data for drop-off & trigger points, feature interaction & content consumption.
Quantitative surveys for distilling consumer opinions into statistics.
Focus groups for indicative responses from representative users.
Qualitative interviews for opening up new directions and gleaning detail around perceptions, biases, drivers & blockers. (“Qualitative research excels in hypothesis generation and is helpful in identifying risks with a concept under evaluation”)(4).
Ethnography (observation study) for a real-world understanding of motivations & experiences. (This can help uncover the reality of digital or physical interactions, but can be trickiest to set up.)
Next, taking the time to sort your data pays dividends. Check for gaps and contradictions, weed out the irrelevancies, then cluster your findings so you can pick out patterns at a glance.
Consumer profiling may come into play here. Grouping decision vectors can help you segment your market in the interest of providing a more targeted service. Taken further, demographics and psychographics can be combined into a set of distinct customer personas to guide product design, messaging and campaigns.
“The customer’s perception is your reality”(5). So getting inside their head is key. In other words: “Whoever understands the customer best, wins”(6).
Across markets, there’s an expectational swing towards experience-building and personalisation, and this is bleeding from B2C into B2B relationships. Value is generated through custom solutions, social interaction and data exchange. “A brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is — it’s what consumers tell each other it is”(7)— and consumers favour brands that make them feel part of a two-way conversation. Turning research data into empathetic insight has never been more important.
Insights get to the heart of consumer behaviours: shedding light on how people seek out your service, what hooks them in and turns them off, or what external forces might be swaying their perceptions. By revealing the deep ‘why’ behind individual actions, insights become building blocks for your brand offering, targeting, positioning and language.
Whether you’re working at brand, product or feature level, reaching the insights is simple. First, look at patterns. Are customers drawn by challenger brands, or turning away from traditional formats? Are they baulking at registration walls, irritated by pop-ups, or looking for a full ecosystem of services in one place?
Look holistically at what the data is telling you. Are people looking for convenience? Reassurance? Clarity? Are their expectations being answered, or frustrated? When specific reactions are triggered, what’s the reason why?
Spot the recurring answers to zoom in on the things that matter - the commercial possibilities and the gaps that need filled. Use them to explore questions like:
What’s going on in the marketplace? What are people excited about and talking about?
How do we make our business better all the time, regardless of the competition?
Should we be framing our brand or products differently? Have attitudes changed?
Should we expand or adjust our product range or pricing? Are people looking for something that isn’t there?
What’s stopping people from purchasing in the first place? And what triggers the decision to go ahead?
Where are the pain points, glitches & irritations? Have customers developed their own workarounds?
Can we create ways for our audiences to do things differently and better?
Are our challenges what we thought they were?
These thought-starters can inform SWOT analyses, Brand Keys and ‘How might we’ statements to inspire your first cycles of product or service ideation.
To use a well-known quote, “The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away”(8). It’s a balance of openness and ruthlessness: “The hard part is letting go of what worked for you two years ago, but will soon be out of date”(9). But you can’t do any of this without the right information.
Think of your insights as landmarks on a zoomed-out map - ways of helping you navigate a landscape of infinite choice. Your job is to plot the route that’s right for your business.
“Strategy is circular, not linear”(10), and any business should be continually evolving, testing and adjusting its products, services and assumptions. Facilitating this flow is where your insights come into their own.
If you want to discuss anything strategy related, let’s chat!
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References
1 Rita Gunther McGrath, Innovation & Growth consultant and Professor at Columbia Business School
2/ 4 Sara Belt, Senior Director of Growth Insights, Spotify
3 Bill Gates
5 Kate Zabriskie, Learning & Development and CX consultant
6 Mike Gospe, marketing strategist and author
7 Scott Cook, co-founder of Intuit
8 Linus Pauling (1901 – 1994), Nobel prize-winning chemist, author and educator
9 Roger von Oech, creativity consultant and author
10 Fritz Shoemaker, business improvement strategist and author