Research execution

Market research is the foundation of great strategy. Knowing more about your market and your customers than your competitors gives you an advantage when it comes to identifying new opportunities and capitalizing upon them.

There are many kinds of market research, and a wide range of expert services to help you apply them. In this article I will therefore focus on the kinds of qualitative research that is most helpful in strategy development. By now you will have developed a research plan that describes your chosen research methods and plan. In that you will have identified the key questions you wanted answered, and the sources most likely to provide those answers. You will if necessary have identified partners and resources that can help you achieve your goals.

Research execution is an operational problem—following through on all the complexities of running a program that depends on people outside your group and company. Here are some tips:

• Start scheduling customer meetings early. There is often a long lead time getting to customers, especially if it means travel. It’s also important to think about the sales relationship in business-to-business markets: the sales team may be close to finalizing a contract, in which case the last thing they want is someone potentially destabilizing the customer discussions at a sensitive stage.

• Schedule interviews away from quarterly boundaries. If you are part of a public company, or if your customer is public, there’s a crunch time in the last month of the quarter, and it’s much more difficult to carry out good reasearch at these times.

• Work at achieving consistency in the research interviews. As soon as you have more than one interviewer, you have a risk of inconsistency. By preparing and briefing everyone, and by making sure there’s a good script, you can increase the consistency of results. Bear in mind that we’re not looking for consistent answers, but for consistent approaches to the questions, so the answers are able to be understood in aggregate.

• Allow for open-ended discussion. Nobody gets all the right questions out in the planning phase. Inevitably a customer or some other person will come up with a need, or an insight that you didn’t predict. This is gold, because it will cause you to think new thoughts, and to potentially find breakout ideas that can significantly improve your strategy. I always end a meeting by asking “Is there anything else you want to add?” And if a new idea emerges during the discussion, don’t be afraid to let it develop.

• Use knowledgeable interviewers. I’ve been on the end of market research interviews often enough to know how frustrating it is to talk to someone who seems to be slavishly following a script, without any real understanding of the material, or an ability to debate or discuss. Use good people from within your company if possible, bearing in mind that interviewing skills are not universally available. Often product marketing and sales people are pretty good at drawing out the customer.

• Capture information systematically. I have used a database or spreadsheet to capture a matrix of all the answers by interviewee. This allows you to sort and organize and generally increase your understanding of the data. By organizing the data well, you increase the likelihood that insight will be found, and that other people will look at it.

• Write up the narratives. If a new person comes into the team, or if someone wants to understand the research at a later date, transcripts, captured in a common format, make it much easier. Some people are better at understanding the narratives than the tabulated data, so it helps people to understand the information, and will lead to better decisions.

There are many more aspects, but these are some that are particularly important to the team that is responsible for executing market research where the goal is more than statistical data. Insight requires the use of smart interviewers, who can debate and explore with the interviewee.

Once the data has been captured, you can begin to think through what it means. In fact, you may well have some emerging ideas as the research proceeds—by all means capture and test these as you go.

The next step is the generation of a working hypothesis—the first stage of a real strategy.

The hypothesis

This is the point at which the rubber meets the road. You’ve developed a problem statement, collected information, developed a research plan, carried out the research, and now you have to decide what it all means.

The goal of this phase is simply to build a logical argument that connects your problem statement to a comprehensible explanation of the market and the opportunities available to you, via the research data you have collected along the way. In other words, a good hypothesis takes your audience on a journey that begins with the problem statement and situation analysis, and proceeds to a clear view of actionable alternatives that will help your business and address the problem statement. Perhaps this seems obvious. It’s not. It’s difficult to simplify all the materials without losing the subtlety of different customer insights. If’t difficult to make tradeoffs, and more difficult to sell them internally to your stake-holders.

The two key concepts are understanding your audience, and organization.

1. Your audience means the people to whom you have to deliver the strategy recommendations. They have prejudices, certain levels of experience, specific responsibilities, and so on. Your hypothesis is actually a test vehicle for a final strategy that you will use to gain the support of your audience. Hypo is Greek for “under”, and so a hypothesis is really an early-stage, slightly unrespectable thesis, or set of assertions. It’s tentative by definition, but it’s also based on your thorough examination of the market, so it’s of high value. Think about the needs and responsibilities of your audience, and try to organize your ideas in ways that those people can support or challenge based on what they already know, coupled with the new data you provide.
2. Organization is about frameworks and what you choose to focus on. Most marketers are familiar with frameworks—systems like the SWOT analysis, or the Boston Consulting Group 2×2 product matrix. These are simply organizational ideas that help position or explain what’s going on in a market. I am a big believer in using existing frameworks and making up new ones to help create clarity. Good frameworks are simple, and don’t require a lot of explanation. Their purpose is to allow your audience to focus on the salient points in your analysis. By building a good framework or two, you can quickly communicate quite complex analyses and suggest specific action plans.

One good book about frameworks that I’ve used is The Marketer’s Visual Toolkit – it explains a number of ways of presenting ideas visually, from a variety of sources.

Some of the elements of a good hypothesis are:

1. A re-iteration of the problem statement—this creates alignment with the audience on the purpose of the hypothesis and strategy project.
2. A reminder of the process you went through—to increase credibility of the results.
3. A situation analysis that connects your problem to the initial data you gathered.
4. An illustration of the opportunity that exists—a clear view of a before and after state for your business.
5. A range of prioritized options—the choices that lie in front of you, with the logic that leads to the proposed priorities.
6. Initial cost and benefit analysis. In the end it all comes down to spending or divesting, or both.
7. Unanswered questions—if there are any significant issues still outstanding.
8. Next steps. The next steps are about validation, answering any open questions, and making firm recommentations. These will be covered in up-coming articles. Your audience will be more comfortable if they know how the process proceeds.
9. Ask for the order. At this stage you’re really asking the audience to accept your logic, your choice of framework, and your priorities. It’s quite OK if they have additional questions, or if they change your priorities, because that’s why you expose the hypothesis rather than waiting for the final presentation.

There are many ways to present a hypothesis, and the right one will depend on the nature of the problem. I have used timelines, risk/reward graphs, spider charts, break-even analysis, brand perception clustering, perceptual axis modeling, and many more structures. But with a well-organized hypothesis, you’re in the best possible shape to get good feedback, and to proceed to validation and final recommendations.

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