A few of us here at Consumer Intelligence were in a meeting at the start of the week discussing how we added just over £100k to a client’s profit in two weeks after they had implemented our pricing insight recommendations.
It got me thinking about what it really takes to make research projects successful and deliver effective outcomes like this one.
I’ve worked in Marketing for nearly 20 years now, and I have worked with some good and some brilliant agency partners in research, creative, media and digital.
The brilliant projects all had 3 things in common, so here are my 3Cs to making the most of your investment in insight.
Collaboration
Imagine going to the doctors with a problem but not sharing your symptoms. Diagnosis is going to be laborious and treatment trial and error until the doctor stumbles on the right thing for you.
So when I hear of companies feeling fed up with their agency partners because they feel they aren’t adding value, I get frustrated. There’s often a really easy solution and it’s called collaboration.
The most successful research projects are collaborative efforts in our experience. Laura Crane one of our Client Insight Executives explains: ”We find it works best when clients share with us the business problem they are trying to fix or the idea they want to test. The more we know about what they are trying to achieve, the more actionable the insights are that we deliver”.
Share as much as you can with your agency partners, work with them as though they are part of your internal team, communicate regularly, share your objective or goal with them, so they can help you work towards it.
We also have some clients who take it a step further by sharing internal insights and data sets with us that we overlay our consumer insights on to. And it’s often these projects where the greatest value is delivered because the outputs are more easily actioned as they are already aligned to the internal position.
Courage
Research is often used to test new creative ideas and propositions or to evaluate new distribution channels or markets. Launching anything new comes with an element of risk but isn’t it better to know any potential problems before you go live?
Commissioning research and acting upon the recommendations takes courage. It might not tell you what you want to hear, it might mean a difficult conversation with your board about a change of plan. But as they say knowledge is power and in this case it could save your business money in the long run.
We recently helped a client develop a new pet insurance product to improve their performance on price comparison websites. They had an internal view about the level of cover they felt should be in the product but when we tested it, we found the sweet spot to be different from their starting assumption. Using our insight, they were able to modify the product before launching. Based on their business case numbers, these changes are projected to achieve a 30% increase in rank 1-5 listings on price comparison sites – driving a benefit to them of £1.5m GWP.
Capability
Are you guilty of sitting through a fascinating research presentation, for the report to sit untouched in your desk drawer because you can’t actually implement any of the recommendations?
To get the most from your insight investment you need the internal capability and indeed capacity to act up on it. Obvious, right? But not always that easy in reality due to clashes of internal priorities, development freezes or lack of budget.
In this case you could consider using the insight to help you build the case for change and demonstrate the opportunity cost for not addressing the issue. Work with your agency partner to scenario plan the impact of making the change and how much cost that could save or extra revenue that could generate.
If you get these 3 things right, ROI will always follow actionable insight.
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