At a recent market research conference of over 1,200 research and insights professionals, the #1 challenge they faced was their “inability to impact business direction and engage organizational leaders” through their market research and customer insights efforts.   VP’s and Directors struggled to get their research agenda or even completed research results onto the business agenda, leaving them feeling unvalued, ineffective and in many cases, fearful of their job insecurity and career progression. 

Without a high level of engagement by business leaders, their departments faced 3 big challenges:

• Lower-than-expected awareness and value of their research as well as insight adoption
• Reduction in research investment levels vs. previous years or budget proposals
• Slow research mobilization – which leads to lower engagement and limited impacts

A good deal of time was spent on the value of “Agile Research” and the impact it could make on engaging business leaders and influencing the business agenda.   In our experience with many technology companies who have fully adopted “agile project approaches”, Agile Research needs to have 4 key components:

• Rapid & Frequent Insights Delivery – the ability to deliver insights early in a research effort and follow-it up with frequent doses of insights that both keep the attention of key business stakeholders as well as lead to changes in behaviors, mindsets and actions in the business.
• Flexible discovery scope – adjusting the depth and direction of the research discovery effort based on “learning as you go along” is critical to bringing business sponsors along the journey.
• High engagement review and deliverables – complementing the “standard PowerPoint” research report with video, audio and info graphic insights that can be emailed, texted and delivered via webinars to a wide variety of business users in bite-sized, “just-in-time” packages.
• Activation workshops – at the conclusion of every research effort, Activation Workshops should be designed and executed to put the insights into action, and if there is uncertainty on the validity of the insights, what steps can be taken to improve the clarity and fidelity of the research to make business impacts.

These principles are difficult for many market research departments to adopt because historical research methodologies designed for precision data collection and rigorous analysis take a great deal of time and don’t have the flexibility built in.  These research reports typically dedicate the first 10-15 pages to methodology approaches, sampling plans and statistical validation.  By the time they reveal critical business insights they have run out of their time on the business agenda and lost the attention of the business leaders. 

Key project approaches that enable Agile Research include:

• Leveraging qualitative research to deliver early insights – online focus groups, mobile ethnographic research and in-depth interviews can be executed in a few weeks, providing early insights, business engagement and can test key hypothesis and survey designs prior to in-depth research deployment.
• Multi-media discovery and research insights deployment – the ability to capture customer audio recordings and videos of “on-brand” and “off-brand” experiences bring quantitative research insights to life and can be distributed across a wide employee population to build adoption and change into the project.
• Break down large scale/scope research projects into “Sprints” per agile methodology – allowing for fixed time and variable scope discovery and insights efforts, building on the learning’s of previous efforts and going into the optimal depth & detail in future research activities.
• Bi-Weekly Insights Updates – balancing weekly project updates with every-other-week content updates allows for frequent insights delivery along the way without impacting project efficiency.
• Pre-scheduled Activation workshops at the conclusion of research efforts to “Launch” change per Agile methodology.

Call 1-800-549-7170 or send an email to nitin@goldresearchinc.com for a free consultation on this topic.

Gold Research is an award-winning Customer Journey Management firm with extensive experiences in B2C and B2B journey mapping, path-to-purchase research with a special focus in deploying “real-time” and behavioral/neuroscience research formats to gather in-the-moment customer insights.