Here are five things that you can do to help achieve this goal:
In-House Insight Managers…
1. Share Your Strategic Brand Plan
Research can’t contribute to strategy if consultants don’t understand how the initiative fits into the big picture and aligns with brand tactics. To find an intelligent and unique solution to your business issue, suppliers need to understand the current brand plan, as well as what’s been done in the past. Without access to the strategic plan, research will lack focus and can never be truly inspiring and forward thinking. Worse than that, it runs a high risk of duplicating what you’ve already done and frustrating research consultants who are in the dark. Establish a concise library of brand resources for suppliers. Ideal assets include a strategic brand plan outlining competitive strengths, weaknesses, key selling messages, as well as current ad campaigns, customer programs and PR initiatives. Short summaries of prior research would also be ideal.
2. Bring Together all the Stakeholders
Research needs to live and breathe throughout a company in order to contribute to strategy. The most successful projects are those that involve key internal stakeholders (brand, sales, corporate communications, etc.) and external PR and ad agencies from the beginning. Bring these players to the table for the project-briefing meeting. Ensure everyone is onside with respect to the business issue. Discuss what each player needs from the research to further brand strategy. Hearing directly from these individuals is critical for suppliers. Reconvene this group when the results are presented. Consultants’ recommendations are the first step to informing strategy. Stakeholders and suppliers should workshop these suggestions to flesh out next steps for each piece of the business.
3. Make Concise and Strategic Storytelling a Condition of Employment
Any research consultant can come up with a glossy sales sheet and claim they excel at storytelling. Push suppliers to demonstrate their strategic and storytelling prowess before you hire them or place them on your procurement list. Level the playing field for all prospective consultants by asking them to create a story from a set of standardized data tables and background information. See whether they can engage you. Once you hire a firm, set strict guidelines for storytelling and insist the team provides concrete solutions to your business issue. Be proscriptive: ten slides or less for an upfront strategic summary and no more than thirty slides to flesh out the story (if you need it). Look for opportunities to leverage dynamic storytelling tools such as interactive dashboards. One caveat: a poignant story isn’t cheaper than the longwinded version. Curating a concise story requires a great deal of thought, creativity and time. There is an enduring truth to American humourist Mark Twain’s quip, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
4. Engage Your Customers
Customers are bored of standard answers to basic questions. Make your research dynamic. Inspire customers with new angles and techniques and they will think more deeply about your business issue. You’re bound to learn something new. Allocate research funds for innovative projects even if it means putting a tracking study on hold. Get people talking to each other and sharing their stories through multiple types of media, after all, that’s what many are doing in their own life with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest. Videos and pictures really bring the story alive for marketers.
5. Move to an Agency of Record Relationship
You have long-term relationships with your ad agencies and PR firms, so why not with your research partners? Hiring different firms for each piece of research isn’t conducive to informing strategy. Moreover, it’s extremely time consuming and inefficient. With an agency of record arrangement you can vet and select research consultants that have the acumen to deliver on a big picture research program for the brand. A deeper relationship will increase the strategic potential of research; research will be more thoughtful and dynamic. Together you and the agency of record can collaborate more effectively to ensure the research plan and resulting brand strategy adapts to changing market realities and informs emerging brand tactics.
What do You Think?
I’d love your feedback. Do these suggestions resonate with you? Do you take issue with any of them? What other approaches will ensure research informs strategy? Let’s collaborate and be more strategic.