How often do your business partners listen to you? Roughly once every five times (23%), according to our recent survey of a global panel of nearly 13000 business partners from various functions. Four times out of five, Market Insights is either neglected or used for support rather than for illumination – not enough to change the direction of projects and initiatives.

As researchers, the frustration of blocks and burnouts is nothing compared to discovering something disruptive and then having it dismissed or shelved by your business partners. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes your business partners do know better and the “great idea” on paper really isn’t so great in practice, other times however, you are in the right but for some reason the world is showing you little of the love you deserve. It is cold comfort finding yourself in the same boat with Cassandra of Troy who, both blessed and cursed by Apollo, made all the accurate prophecies (e.g. do not bring the Trojan horse in) only to have no one believe in them.

In eerie similarity, business partners think little of the role Market Insights plays for their team – a full 31% have no idea and another 49% assigns it a tactical role as the gatherer of various kinds of information. Armed with intelligence, Market Insights somehow failed to gain the credibility to recommend concrete changes.

This leads us back to our original question: what causes disruptive insights to die on the vine? Is it ineffective communication? Is it political blunders? Is it lack of business acumen? Is it a failure to overcome psychological biases? Any of the above? All of the above? We don’t know yet, and we need your help finding out. If you have recently had a disruptive insight turned down or acted on by business partners, we’d love to hear how it happened. In return, we will send you a summary of our findings detailing:

• Which steps or actions taken by Market Insights functions are most likely to drive insight activation?
• What are the major obstacles to implementing disruptive insights?
• Who are the right stakeholders to identify and engage in order to successfully execute a disruptive insight?

Participate in the survey here.

As I eagerly await the new season of Arrested Development, I’ve been catching up on some old episodes. One of the show’s recurring gags is that George Bluth Sr., the convicted felon patriarch of the family, enlists his one-armed associate, J. Walter Weatherman, to teach his children valuable lessons.

Elaborately staged accidents end in Mr. Weatherman “losing” his arm, a fate that could have been avoided if only the Bluth children hadn’t yelled, or had remembered to leave a note. These lessons – and their disproportionately dire consequences – leave the children traumatized, but you know they will never again leave the door open with the air-conditioner running.

While we hope you never need to resort to fake dismemberment to get your business partners’ attention,  there will be times when you’ll need to jolt internal clients away from their pre-conceived notions and teach them a lesson about your customers. Our research shows that too often, business partners rely on their own experience and judgment, rather than new information, to make customer-related decisions. It’s up to the Market Insights to engineer “gut-busting” experiences to correct overconfidence and misperceptions.

Experiences that are multisensory, engaging, and authentic can break down and rebuild models of customer understanding.  PollStream makes use of an interactive quiz to expose areas where business partners lack knowledge, and uses their increased insecurity to make sure the correct lessons are absorbed. P&G and Alticor immerse their executives in the customer experience and orchestrate debriefs that embed the right customer knowledge. Telecom NZ uses an interactive workshop to encourage executives to interact with insight in an unfamiliar context. This distances them from their existing customer perceptions and increases the likelihood they will learn and apply new information.  

While Market Insights’ lessons will hopefully be quite a bit less dramatic than George Bluth’s, you should seize the opportunity to tap natural learning motivators to embed customer knowledge in the business.

While we’re on the topic of Arrested Development, anyone interested in data visualization might find inspiration in these graphic representations of the show’s intricate and plentiful jokes:

Previously, On Arrested Development

Recurring Developments

Insight workers deal with cognitive biases on a daily basis: we must overcome our own biases when creating new insights and the biases of our business partners as we work to have these insights acted upon.  Not to mention how biases impact customer and consumer behavior!  So I was excited to find this collection of blogs at PsyBlog that explain some of the most common biases in everyday thinking.

Among the list, I found a number that resonate with our day-to-day work.  How often do you run into the following?

• The Dunning-Kruger Effect—the poorest performers are the least aware of their own poor performance.  Solution:  Unfortunately, even with direct feedback, certain poor performers seem to fail to learn from their mistakes.
• The Hindsight Bias—the right answer becomes much more clear (once you already know the answer).  Solution: Force yourself to justify decisions and think more critically to ensure that you learn from your mistakes.
• The Egocentric Bias—I don’t need to take advice, but others should.  Solution: Change perspective-imagine you are someone else facing this issue and think of what they would do.  It makes you more likely to seek and take advice.
• The Memory Bias—when recalling past experiences, we tend to pull emotional outlier (very positive or very negative) experiences that do not accurately reflect reality.  Solution: force yourself to recall multiple instances of similar events…it will help your brain even-out the memory score.
• The Projection Bias—projecting current feelings and needs into prediction of future requirements.  Solution: don’t shop while you’re hungry. 

CEB Market Insights members, here are some tools to help you overcome cognitive biases in your workflow:

• Insight Generation Toolkit—scoping, creative thinking, and articulation exercises and tools to help you create better insights
• Influencing Skills Resources—improve your active listening, negotiation, persuasion, and courage to maximize your impact on the organization
• Embedding Customer Knowledge into the Business—adapt your research and communication processes to fit the way that executives naturally make decisions

Growth-driving insights
As we work to channel and understand the voice of the customer, identify behavioral motivations, or use analytics to discover new trends, we sometimes find disruptive insights— discoveries about the customer, consumer or market that suggest opportunities to drive business growth or profitability. Many of the senior executives that Market Insights serves today have rightly made the link between disruptive insights and a host of beneficial outcomes such as growth, innovation, new business development, and cost/time savings.

But, in order for the growth-potential of these insights to be met, they must to be translated into concrete changes to products, services, processes or strategies.  And while senior executives may publically proclaim they want disruptive insights that drive growth, insight generation activities are often met with resistance.

How do you activate insights? 2013 Insight Activation Survey
As part of our major research initiative this year, CEB Market Insights is trying to understand what drives successful activation of disruptive insights. We need your help in completing a 20 minute survey which is designed to help understand the critical steps Market Insights can take to ensure disruptive insights are acted on.

Benefits to participation
At conclusion of the study, all participants will receive a summary of findings which will provide data-supported answers to the following questions:

• Which steps or actions taken by Market Insights functions are most likely to drive insight activation?
• What are the major obstacles to implementing disruptive insights?
• Who are the right stakeholders to identify and engage in order to successfully execute a disruptive insight?

Participate in the survey here.

Is Market Insights an underused source in your business partners’ decision making process?  We have identified 2 leverage points for MI to inform business decisions:

1. When confident, decision makers act on existing knowledge without seeking additional input.  In this case, MI needs to make sure its insights have been embedded into their business partners’ “gut,” which I blogged about last week.
2.  When seeking information to inform a decision, decision makers skim multiple sources.  So the question is, How can you ensure Market Insights is one of the sources considered?

Look at this challenge from the decision maker’s perspective: they are weighing options in an information saturated environment, and finding and interpreting relevant information is difficult.  And MI insights are not necessarily easier to find or interpret than those from colleagues, external experts, or other third parties.

To become a considered information source, Market Insights needs to ease the burdens associated with using our information:

Bespoke MI Outputs Require Extra Time to Process
With our functions addressing needs across the corporate portfolio and around the world, it’s no wonder that many of our business partners can’t see how we can help them on their specific needs.  If you standardize and formalize research output, you can become a calm oasis in the complicated swirl that is their information landscape—a place where decision makers know what they are going to get.

Unilever, for example, worked with their global stakeholders to create activity standards.  Business partner involvement ensured comprehensiveness and increased stakeholder buy-in the final playbook.

MI Information Doesn’t Clearly Map to Decisions
Determining information’s decision applicability can be difficult for research and non-research sources alike, and Market Insights is in a great position to help business partners know what information is available and relevant to their decisions.  You just need to start from the decision-back.

The Market Insights group at Microsoft stays decision-focused by defining the information consideration set for consistent decisions.  Tying this framework to the decision-making rhythm of the business allows MI to build out detailed research questions, activities, and tools for each decision-making stage.

And for the unpredictable decisions that need to be made, use your business acumen.  Work with the folks on the Insights team who have the best understanding of the business to ensure you’re addressing the right issues in the right way.  To make sure it has a strong business understanding on their team, Motorola Mobile Devices has defined a consultative role, placing increased emphasis on internal business partner impact for those folks on the team.

CEB Market Insights members, see how Unilever, Microsoft, and Motorola Mobile Devices ensure Market Insights is a considered source of information.

Related blog:
5 Steps to Improve Insight Impact

Katie Castagna wrote this entry for our sister program, CEB Marketing.  We have added resources for CEB Market Insights members to help their Marcomms colleagues with these challenges.

As Marketers race to create relevant, resonant messaging that will give them an edge in the Market, the question inevitably arises: “Can we credibly say this?” and the clincher “Do we have the budget to prove it?” Including the right evidence in Marcomms not only validates a claim but also helps you tell a more compelling story. The data these days is part of the narrative, and getting that right can be a critical part of changing how customers think themselves and your product or service.

However, when marketers make tough budget allocation decisions, funding research to substantiate messages or insights doesn’t always make the top of the list.  So, how do we get the research we need without increasing the budget we have?  Well, here are a few suggestions to consider when conducting research on a less-than-ideal Marketing budget.

Be clear on what you need to prove

If you look at the component pieces of your message, what are the assumptions and beliefs you MUST change to get customer buy-in?  Break down the perception shift you’re trying to drive and focus your limited research dollars on reinforcing the pieces that really count.   CEB Market Insights members, see the Customer Insight Model Vodafone uses to identify profitable perception shifts they should target.

While you’re at it, be aware that not all messaging needs to be proven by intensive research.  Think about what points will take a lot of convincing and which ones will customers more easily accept? You may decide it’s more important to support critical points with a higher burden of proof, but at least know what the low-hanging fruit is.  Ideally, begin by proving points that are both important and (relatively) easy to prove.

Use what is already available

It’s surprisingly easy to overlook the alternate data sources available within your own organization; data from Customer Service, Market Research, Sales, R&D, or Customer Experience initiatives.  Those functions may be able to provide access to recent customer studies or provide other compelling proof points.  Check out our resources to encourage data collaboration throughout your organization.

There may also be publically available proof points in trade publications or other online sources that could be repurposed.  Check for any online databases your organization has license to access. Third party research often has the added advantage of being more credible to customers than research funded by your organization.  Just be sure to fully understand the existing resources available to you before fielding—and funding—new research.  .

Balance Cost and Functionality

If you do have to fund new research, keep in mind that, depending on the relative burden of proof for the message or insight you’re supporting, you may need more or less compelling evidence. More compelling evidence doesn’t necessarily have to be more expensive, though. For instance, in CEB Marketing’s study last year, Getting Paid for Content Marketing, they found that cheaper qualitative sources such as conversations with SMEs, sales reps, etc. are potent sources of commercially-relevant customer insight. To select the right sources for your initiative, you’ll need to consider tradeoffs between the quality of the data needed to support your message, the relative cost to produce it, and your timeline.  CEB Market Insights members, see how GM set-up and maintains an Informal Intelligence Network to gather and communicate knowledge from internal partners.

We recently compiled information on and rated popular fast-turnaround insight generation techniques on cost, speed and quality dimensions -  these are presented in the image below. As you brainstorm potential insight sources, rather than immediately eliminating options on the basis of cost you may want to organize them by these dimensions to make more informed, relative trade-offs.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been blogging about the 5 steps you can use to improve your insights’ impact on the organization.  The first 3 steps all had to do with your insight generation process:

1. Consistent creativity
2. Differentiated data
3. Valuable business focus

The last two steps of the process are all about insight activation:

4. Get insights into the “gut”
5. Become a considered source of information

More about becoming a considered source next week.  For now, let’s focus on increasing business’s ownership of insights.  All business partners are susceptible to biases—confirmation bias, familiarity bias, focusing effect, etc—that can affect the decisions that they make.    But for some Market Insight groups, theses biases have actually turned into communication opportunities:

• Business partners tend to favor beliefs that they “discover” over those they are taught.  Knowing that decision makers may reject your insights in favor of self-generated explanations, increasing business partners’ ownership of insights by having them participate  more discreetly in the insight generation process can improve the likelihood that they insights will be acted upon.Nestlé created a sustainable insight ownership process by teaching an intro to consumer insight workshop and providing a simple insight generation framework and a suite of flexible tools.  This process embeds insight ownership deep in the business and ensures a consistent level of synthesis even when Market Insights is not present.  And as these business partners are working to create these insights, they are consistently embedding this new knowledge into their gut understanding.
• Firsthand knowledge and experiences are more impactful and memorable than insight communication can ever be.  Business executives rely heavily on instinct, rejecting new information and insights that don’t fit their existing understanding of the business.  Market Insights can co-opt rather than override this trust in “gut instinct” by utilizing experiential learning.P&G designs interactions between business partners and consumers that target specific decision drivers that Market Insights is hoping to influence and boost receptivity to consumer insight.  By focusing on topic selection and providing Market Insights guidance during and after the immersion event, these sessions support immediate business challenge s and over time define the participants’ gut instincts about the customer.

CEB Market Insights members, access all the details on how Nestlé and P&G get insights into business partners’ “gut.”

Related blog:

• 5 Steps to Improve Insight Impact

Wouldn’t it be ideal to build a magical online community that delivers the specific, groundbreaking customer insights that you need, in real time, and with 100% cost-efficiency? Truth is, this community does not exist and never will.

However, we have good news: you do not have to spend hours upon hours building a massive online community, launch it, and simply hope for the best. After speaking with members like you, we found three factors to consider to help you calibrate a new community to your specific business objectives, greatly boosting chances for success:

1. Ongoing vs. Short-Term: decide how often you’ll really need to access the community…do you need them daily? Weekly? Quarterly? Ongoing communities work well for some companies, while building them on an ad-hoc basis will do the job for others.
2. Public vs. Private: do you prefer a lower-maintenance community that is open to anyone, or a private one requiring more customer engagement and hours, but perhaps generating more in-depth conversations?
3. Dedicated vs. Hybrid: if your function can build and maintain a community dedicated to Market Insights, it might be best to choose that route. On the other hand, should you consider sharing the community with another function to cut costs? One possible drawback is lower-quality customer insight.

CEB Market Insights members, learn more more about building the right community space for you.

I watch a fair share of crime shows on television, my favorite being good old Law and Order that has been around for ages.  Among this genre of shows, I am actually intrigued by the television series Numb3rs (sic). The show features a mathematical genius who (apparently) solves crimes by using numeric patterns to track down and bring the criminal to justice. In market insights terminology, we would call this analytics. Number crunching to find your biggest potential is not a new aspect of market insights but certain companies have taken it to a very high level and like the show Numb3rs, are successful at it.

Hallmark is one such organization where correct and judicious use of analytics has enabled them to pinpoint customer needs and attract customers. What are they doing to ensure that when you buy a card, you buy at Hallmark?  Two simple steps that you too can also adopt:

1. Recognize that analytics is a key business asset.
   This means using analytics as a research tool only when you need this and using this to gain competitive advantage.
2. Use analytics to attack a problem from different dimensions
   When you do decide to use analytics, it should be used to examine a problem on different dimensions. The results will surprise you and give you a depth of understanding that otherwise would not have been obtained.

So the next time you watch Numb3rs, remind yourself that you can too be a mathematical genius and help your business attract more customers. CEB Market Insights members, learn more about utilizing analytics and access Hallmark’s insights on analytics.

After years of working with market insights professionals, we compiled a 3-part definition of insight:

1) Identification of some relationship or meaning,
2) within diverse sets of data,
3) that promises significant business impact. 

We have tools to help you surface meaningful relationships, and profiled great ways you can partner with suppliers and business partners to get differentiated data on which to exercise these tools, but all that effort is for naught if you are targeting unworthy business problems.

We’ve seen Market Insights struggle with two main challenges when trying to focus in strategic issues:

• Business partner objectives lead them to ask more immediate, tactical questions
• Business partners pressure researchers to provide full-service support for all their needs

Devoting resources to the wrong business questions can waste money and negatively impact Market Insights’ credibility as a strategic partner.  To make sure that you are focusing your insight efforts effectively, follow these four steps:

1. Help business partners identify valuable unknowns-great questions will lead to great insights.  Teach your business partners to imagine knowledge that doesn’t yet exist and to focus on these unknowns in the research-scoping process.  In other words, get them to focus on the “I Wish I Knew” needs.
2. Proactively identify customer needs-customer needs must be at the forefront of decisions.  Develop tools to bring innovation-relevant customer, market, and financial information together.  This will make sure business partners identify and prioritize the most viable unmet customer needs.
3. Tier service levels according to business risk-not all decisions were created equal.  Evaluate projects according to risk and allocate more resources and time to those with higher downside risk.  A resource allocation model allows you to support the business initiatives that are most important to the organization.
4. Push-back constructively on low-value requests-ad hoc requests can be the bane of a well-planned insight agenda’s existence.  Establish a project prioritization model to assess individual research requests against organizational priorities.  Business partners will think that they are “gaming the system” by submitting more strategic research requests.

CEB Market Insights members, read more about how Eli Lilly, Reckitt Benckiser, Kellogg’s, and others have put these 4 steps into practice in their departments.

 Related blogs:

• Increase Insight Impact, Step 1: Encourage Consistent Creativity
• Increase Insight Impact, Step 2: Differentiate Your Data
• The Best Questions You’re Not Asking
• 5 Tips: Executing Fast-Turnaround Research
• Tips on Successfully Prioritizing Your Research Agenda