A recent article on Forbes.com examines whether funny people are more successful in business.  And research seems to show that well-placed humor not only lifts the mood in the office, but can make you more successful in your own career. 

As former president of the Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor Steven Sultanoff, Ph.D., puts it, “If someone is using humor then they are connecting with people and building relationships, which creates opportunities that other people may not have.”  [by the way, the AATH is an actual organization; it's the home for humor and laughter professionals.  And I love their logo!]

Studies show that humor can facilitate trust and establish a sense of group cohesion.  And as we’ve blogged about recently, any method you can use to build rapport and influence with your business partners will help Research improve its overall impact on the firm. 

But you can’t just throw humor around all willy-nilly (just ask your friends in HR).  To help you in your quest for funny, check out these office humor dos and the don’ts:

Do focus on empathetic humor—provide levity that arises out of your compassion for a co-worker or situation.  This humor of positive intent can ease awkwardness and help equalize people in the organization.

Don’t fall into the hostile humor trap—targeting someone for a misdeed or character flaw undermines the group and can cause people to actively avoid each other.

Do you think that there is a place for humor in our professional research relationships?  When you are working to understand business needs or effectively communicate new insights?  We have seen researchers build influence with peer-to-peer practicing, but is anyone actively engaging humor in their day-to-day interactions?  

(Note-I dedicate this blog to all of the successful folks who inject a bit of humor into our otherwise difficult days, including my husband, who eases his otherwise stressful working environment with the mechanical flying pig that flaps from his office ceiling.)

Guest blogger Judy Wang is a researcher at the Customer Contact Council, a sister program of the Market Research Executive Board. 

Recently, the Harvard Business Review published an article introducing the “Wallet Allocation Rule.” As the name suggests, this new metric measures the share of wallet that is allocated to companies – or simply, how a customer divides their spending among a company and its competitors.

The theory behind this metric is simple:

1. think about how much your customer prefers your company, and then
2. consider the number of competitors your customer is choosing between.

Knowing these two things will let you understand how your customers spend money, and how your company is doing relative to others. For instance, if you were the customer’s first choice and there is one competitor, then your position is different than if you were the second choice but there are many, many others behind you. Understanding this difference can help define strategy and hone in on certain initiatives.

To me, the key lesson that stood out in general is that metrics can’t be evaluated in a vacuum. It’s nice to know that your company is performing well, but when you discover that the “well” is less well than your competitors, the story changes. It’s important, then, to understand performance in its broader context.

So take customer effort for example. Even though the Customer Effort Score is the best predictor of customer loyalty, merely measuring it in isolation can paint an incomplete picture. More than just evaluating the score by itself, it’s important to consider the context surrounding it.

• How does the score stack up against others in your industry, your geography? (CCC members, use our interactive benchmarking tool to understand how your peers are performing. )
• Does the score change or remain static over time? (Track your score and compare against past performance.)
• What are the causes to a high effort score, and why do they exist? (Craft good survey questions to understand what about the interaction was creating effort.)

More than just a static number, the Customer Effort Score can reveal a lot about your company and your performance if you analyze it in context.  To the point made in the HBR article, you aren’t getting the whole story if you aren’t looking at the context.

Related MREB Resources:

• Driving Action with NPS® and Other Loyalty Metrics: Focusing on Key Success Factors
• Ask your peers for their opinions on metrics on our Primary Research Forum
• Get vendor recommendations from our Supplier Feedback Forum

Communications is a perennial hot topic for Researchers – and for good reason. All the work put into generating insights and business recommendations is a waste if business partners don’t use them!

Unfortunately, recent MREB research into executive decision-making reveals that Research falls very low on the list of sources that decision-makers consult when making decisions:

How to deal with this reality? Trying to change executives’ decision-making process is probably a fool’s errand. Instead, leading Researchers are working with decision-makers’ natural preferences, and tapping the natural information flows within the company. These companies are increasing the resonance and shareability of insight messaging to prompt peer-to-peer sharing.

MREB members, learn more about optimizing your content for resonance and shareability.

By Kate Camp

While most, if not all, of us made New Year’s resolutions on December 31^st, far fewer will carry through on those promises throughout 2012.

Our resolution at the MREB is to help our members have more impact on the business and we’re determined to maintain it through our 2012 initiatives. An article by Forbes Magazine offers 6 tips for attaining your New Year’s resolution. If you’re looking increase the overall strategic impact for the MR function, below are a few tips to help you follow through on your goal.

1. Get Specific

To know where you’re going you first have to determine your current status. It’s hard to write realistic, achievable goals if you’re unclear as to where you currently stand. Having a clear way to measure improvement, and knowing your success will be recognized helps maintain motivation throughout the year.

But what if your current perceived performance and current actual performance differ? The Business Impact Diagnostic can expose areas for improvement and differences in perceived performance across the organization; the report provides a great jumping off point for discussion as to specifically where you want to improve.

2. Write it Down

Formally documenting your goals ensures that you don’t deviate from the original plan as the year goes on. This exercise also forces you to choose specific wording as to your goals rather than keeping them nebulous. Check out the MREB’s new vision statement which outlines our 4 key aims: embedding insights, inspiring innovation, facilitating customer understanding, provoking action.

3. Make Time

We talk all the time about the value of a strategic research portfolio. In an ideal world we’d be able to execute our 2012 agenda exactly as we mapped it out at our initial planning session. Unfortunately, we live in a world where ad hoc requests frequently cross our desk, and we simply don’t have the time or resources to fully commit to all of them.

Make more time for important projects by rejecting low value requests using Norwich Union’s Project Prioritization Scorecard. Using the objective scoring system will both allow you to say no to projects with little strategic value, and educate internal partners as to why these requests don’t make the cut.

 4. Move Past Doubt

Worried that your goal is unachievable? Breaking your big goal into bite-size pieces can make it feel more manageable. The MREB has identified 5 skills that are crucial to achieving more strategic impact: insight, consulting logic, influence, communication, and synthesis.

The idea of improving your overall skill set enough to achieve greater business impact can seem daunting; so take it piece by piece. Pick the one skill you think is most challenging and sign up for a 1-hour webinar training session on the topic (or view the previously recorded webinar on our event replay page.) In one hour you’ll have made a solid step of progress towards your ultimate goal.

5. Get a Partner

Getting your objectives accomplished are simply easier when there’s someone to cheer you on, or, in the business world, when you have the support of your peers. While getting that support requires having solid data and logic to back your presentation, winning over colleagues also takes some softer skills.

The MREB has discovered that driving action with business partners depends on engaging both their emotional and rational concerns. As researchers, we tend to be pretty strong in the rational department, but we can sometimes overlook the emotional influencing component. Check out our work on Closing the Researcher Influence Gap to learn how to employ the same relationship skills used by consultants to increase your impact.

6. Be Still

Working hard toward your goal is important, but you don’t want to burn out! So whenever you feel stressed take a little time to engage in an activity you enjoy.

Feel guilty taking some time for yourself at the office? You can have the best of both worlds by linking your fun activity to a work-related topic (for example, check out these past MREB blog posts on the topics of bizarre ways to get ahead,  using gossip to your best advantage, and a TV commercial designed for dogs.) They’re all lighthearted, but also relevant to Research.

Segmentation studies are all too often a nightmare for market research departments. Mismatched stakeholder expectations, high costs, difficult to measure ROI, etc., can cause sleepless nights for already overwhelmed researchers.

Now, try conducting a segmentation study with all these problems in mind – but without any demographic or attitudinal data. Sounds impossible, doesn’t it?

Unfortunately, many market researchers trying to segment their online audiences share this dilemma. The concealed nature of the Internet – where anonymity reigns and privacy is valued – means that little personal information is available unless visitors provide authentication information. Since most websites do not require visitors to log-in, lack of data is a major obstacle.

The good news is, there are workarounds. Online segmentation may never look exactly like traditional segmentation but when done effectively, it can still be useful for any companies operating in the online space. The availability of free web analytics tools such as Google Analytics makes behavioral data accessible to all web teams at a basic level. With some know-how and creativity, even limited behavioral information can yield interesting insights.

MREB Members, learn more about how to effectively segment online consumers here.

For additional resources, read our research brief on integrating data analytics with market research or our full study on operationalizing segmentation studies.

Patience may be a virtue, but it’s one rarely seen in the corporate world. Executives have always wanted to have the information they need right when they realize they need it – and if they could have it before then, even better!

Exacerbating this desire for instant information are some recent developments.  First, executives report that the overall increased pace of change creating more truly urgent decisions – and it’s not the case that urgent decisions are less important than non-urgent ones.

Second, information seems to be everywhere. Need advice or information? You can ask Google, or maybe poll your friends with a Facebook status update. Now, you may wince to hear these sources in reference to a business decision (and rightly so!) but the point is that people expect to be able to access the information they need quickly – social media and the internet have trained us well.

MREB research into executives’ decision-making processes confirms that when faced with urgent decisions, they rely on their gut instinct when they can, or skim multiple sources and make the decision with what they can access quickly, regardless of the quality. Waiting for Research can be a drag.

We’ve seen Market Research functions tackle the challenge of informing urgent decisions two ways:

1. Improving their anticipation of urgent requests by focusing scoping on unarticulated and emerging needs;
2. Improving their reaction to urgent requests by aggregating existing knowledge into “good enough” information in a short time-frame.

MREB members, learn more about focusing Research scoping and execution for fast delivery.

With all the Research team members, supplier contributors, and business partners that we deal with every day, we are all sure to run into a few people with whom we find it difficult to work.  An HBR blog recently outlined a few tips for working with people you hate, and I found a few of the recommendations rather actionable:

1. Manage yourself first: don’t think of how they behave, think of how you react
2. Don’t involve others: resist the urge to “commiserate” with others, being negative can hurt your own reputation
3. Work with them more: spending more time with the person may actually help you understand him or her better and develop a better sense of empathy
4. Provide feedback-carefully: share your thoughts if you can outline specific behaviors that the person can control in terms of how they impact your working relationship.  But if you suspect the conversation will not go over well, do not broach the topic.
5. Emotionally Detach: when you have little control over the situation, neutralize the negative feelings by ignoring them

We’ve done the research, and we know that your team environment impacts the quality of your insights.  If you don’t feel supported by your team you cannot embrace the creativity needed to generate great work, so it’s especially important for researchers to figure out how to connect with their colleagues.    Here’s how we can help:

• See how Diageo expands its comfort zone to use a judgment-focus in research
• See how Corning builds a team culture where judgment and unproven hypotheses are accepted and valued
• Access tools to improve communication and consultation with business partners
• Access tools to optimize supplier management

Over the past few weeks, we’ve written about how to improve business impact when it comes to Research skills.  The first that we talked about was insight.  Sure, it’s important that Research functions generate sound insights that promise business impact.  But what if no one does anything with them?

At one of last year’s in-person member meetings, several heads of Research named insight activation as one of their most significant challenges.  And as we got deeper into discussion, here’s what they wanted to know: How do you know when you’ve gone far enough?  Who’s ultimately on the hook for ensuring insights are activated?  I’m not sure anyone will ever have the answer to that question – but we certainly have some points of view on increasing the likelihood that your business partners actually do something with the recommendations that you deliver:

• Screen your insights:  It’s easy to critique others’ insights – especially if your function’s done a good job building a common understanding of what good insight looks like.  When generating insights, ensure that you’re pressure testing your own work as well.  Test your insight output against a standard set of criteria that should be present in any strong insight similar to what we’ve seen members do at Lilly or Nestlé. 
• Create clear, targeted communications that tell business partners what to do with the insight: Make sure that business partners understand what the insight means for their world by creating prescriptive, targeted communications that highlight what the insight means for their function, product, or BU.  One of our insurance members has created a set of four simple filtering questions that enable researchers to cut to the chase when sharing insights with different stakeholders.
• Equip business partners to own the insight: Get the broader organization focused on insight by giving business partners easy-to-use tools , templates, and training to use as part of their day-to-day.  Some companies even work with Marketing to build insight competencies into cross-functional performance expectations.

Interested in learning more?  Join part two in our Next Generation of Research Skills Webinar series this upcoming week (Insight Skill Development).  We’ll cover insight generation and activation – and also highlight some new work we’ll be publishing later on this month.

How well do your business partners know your customers? They’re likely to say they understand them well – after all, years of experience builds a “gut instinct” that is valued in business leaders, and has probably served them well in situations over the years. But what about when that instinct is outdated, or just plain wrong? It’s hard to teach people when they think they have nothing to learn!

We’ve covered a few techniques for breaking your business partners’ pre-conceptions, but have one other idea to share.

One popular training technique, one that I’ve personally sat through in countless L&D courses, is teaching information, then asking the student to use that information in an exercise. This technique can be highly effective. Unfortunately, it fails when a student can complete the exercise based on what they already know – and can completely check out of the “learning” aspect.

A smart solution to this problem is to place the exercise in a new context, one where the “student” (sub in “executive”) can’t rely on what they already know. This effectively neutralizes their existing understanding and requires them to learn anew. 

Telecom NZ exemplified this approach in their segmentation workshop with executives. Sure, a telecommunications executive might be able to design a telecom product for young customers off the top of their head – without learning about the behaviors and attitudes of that segment – but can they design a cocktail for them without learning the same? (I might add – not only does this new context require executives to learn, it strikes me as a little more fun!) So think outside your industry!

MREB members, learn more about Telecom NZ’s workshop and other gut-busting experiences.

The last in our series on skills to build to improve impact, this week let’s talk synthesis.

1. Insight
2. Business Problem Solving
3. Influence
4. Communication
5. Synthesis

Synthesis takes a particular skill set to do well, broad knowledge and an ability to see connections across disparate sources of data, and also required dedicated time/resources—this is NOT something you can effectively do off the side of your desk.  Consider a typical 10 to 11 week synthesis project.  If you have that kind of time you can create a story that resonates in the business for two years or more, as long as you consider the following:

• Select a synthesis topic: Don’t be right, be interesting
•  Know what you know: 4 steps to begin a synthesis project
• Develop a story flow: Using kindergarten tools to build narrative synthesis
• Disseminate your findings: 4 steps to selling synthesis insights

But what about when you have less time?  You CAN address immediate concerns with synthesis in a week or less, it just takes a different approach.  Rather than having a single researcher focus on a project, assign specialized roles, delegating each task to the person who can make the best contribution in the fastest time. 

Motorola Mobility created a quick-fire synthesis process that can be completed in as little as one day by relying on specialized roles and a core information library.  MREB members, read more about their team responsibilities and synthesis approach.