I know it’s been quite some time, but some conversations recently have re-energized my passion for making waves in this industry that used to be called Market Research, sometimes still is, but to make ourselves feel more current, we’ve now started referring to ourselves as being “in insights.”
As maybe you can tell, I’m feeling a modicum of frustration with our industry.
Why?
Let’s start with data quality. (I can hear you groaning from here, and you haven’t even read what I have yet to type!) WHY is data quality still a problem? One word: budgets. We have collectively become so accustomed to cheaper insights, we never stopped to ask what we were sacrificing in the name of cheaper insights. Well, guess what we sacrificed? Quality. Because – news flash – just like spending a few extra dollars for a piece of clothing can mean that piece of clothing lives for 20 years instead of 2 years, spending a few extra dollars for quality data can mean an actual informed decision instead of a surface-level-informed decision.
And no, not all extra dollars spent actually result in better quality. But if we actually want quality, we have to spend the money – and time – to get data from humans who actually represent the world in which we live. We have to do the homework on the panels used for our studies. We have to use a wider range of panel companies so we can actually hear from the communities that aren’t represented in the “nationally representative” panels we’ve been using.
Next, let’s talk about how we’re delivering insights.
In the day and age of infographics and, dare I say it, TikTok, we’re …. still making slide decks.
Slides.
At this point, it’s almost embarrassing.
“But that’s what my customers expect!” you say. Yeah, I get it, but who has ever gotten excited about a bunch of slides with charts and headlines and explanatory text?
We talk and talk about being “story tellers.” We take training on how to become better storytellers. We have playlists of our favorite TED Talks. We easily spend hours watching quick videos on social media that amuse us, inform us, entertain us.
And then we go back to….slides.
When was the last time a slide actually made you feel something aside from boredom? When was the last time a slide made you go, “WHOA,” and cause a change in the way you think about something? (And embedded videos on slides don’t count.)
In a former life, I wrote a daily email about an audience I was responsible for studying. The daily notes I wrote were based on studies I’d come across, articles I was reading, and chats with members of said audience. I also ran a massive global study about that same audience. You know what got traction?
Hint: it wasn’t the global study.
Unless I called out a point or two from the study in that daily email.
Look, it’s 2022. It’s actually almost 2023. We have to move on. We have to re-engineer ourselves and our customers to break the chains that bind us.
If we, as an industry, want to stay relevant long-term, it’s going to take more than a name change. It’s going to take behavior change. We can’t keep doing what we’ve been doing, but on nicer slides, and hope it’s going to keep getting us invited to the boardroom to share the voice of the customer.
If we want the industry to change, we have to be the change.