By Kirsten Robinson

Suppliers take up more than 70% of Research’s budget—yet they too often are thought of only as data providers.

We all know that research teams can save a great deal of time and money by utilizing their supplier relationships to provide strategic insights.  The question is how can we break old supplier management models, and what new system will actually improve the insights we receive from vendors?

We spoke with Chris Frank, VP Global Marketplace Insights at American Express, about the company’s strategy to get more insight and consultative support out of their supplier relationships.

AmEx’s Supplier Management System has four key elements:

1. Assess current suppliers rather than search for new ones to uncover additional capabilities.

2. Provide suppliers with a list of essential questions that all projects must tie into.

3. Refocus vendor time to minimize effort wasted on unnecessary reporting.

4. Enable candid feedback through reciprocal evaluations.

MREB members, get more details about how AmEx extracts greater strategic value from their supplier relationships and read excerpts from our conversation with Chris Frank here.  And for more information and best practices in supplier management, check out the following:

• Maximizing Supplier Contribution
• Supplier Portfolio Strategy
• Supplier Identification and Selection
• Supplier Performance Evaluation
• Supplier Feedback Forum

Related Blogs:

• American Express: Vendor Engagement Strategy
• Research, Leverage Your Specialist Suppliers
• Is Your Supplier a Vendor or a Partner?
• Pay-for-Supplier Performance in Research?

By Aaron Field

Open source sounds so great. Just open the gates so the great masses can inundate us with new products and services. If only it worked.

• Open source it is a great way to get blah average.
• New ideas never come from the average.
• Breakout ideas come from innovative people.

When we listen to unusual people it works beautifully. Companies like General Mills have built a whole new business line inspired by “creative customers”

Where do I find creative customers? Harvard Business Review recently profiled Sense Worldwide. The London consultancy builds communities of the most creative and unusual people like a pagan witch, a newspaper editor, an airline pilot, a TV mogul, and a prescription drug addict.

What am I looking for in “creative”? Some people say it’s impossible to say. But Jack in the Box defined creative. In fact they defined different “creative” depending on the NPD development process. It helped them hit home runs with the Acapulco Chicken Salad and Chipotle Chicken Ciabatta Sandwich.

Lest we forget creativity is about us too. Researchers and business executives become strongly oriented to data-based analysis. More creative types – for instance humanities majors – add an innovative spark.

And it works even for B2B companies. I know that companies aren’t people. But companies can co-create like people. Here’s a summary of how B2B companies make co-creation work.

Different communication channels require different communication skills, a fact that I was reminded of by this Fast Company article on writing for the web. In it, the author details 9 writing tips for capturing and retaining people’s attention on the web. Some of these tips are generally good for writing (such as “Address your customer’s needs” – specifically, pre-testing the concepts or topics with a small portion of your audience, and “Avoid self-promotion”), while other tips are unique to the internet as a channel (such as “Use the right keywords” and “Use pictures and videos”).

Successful expansion into new communication channels is a major part of the MREB’s 2011 research on how Market Research can embed insights into the business.  As Researchers take on the challenge of reaching a bigger, broader, more dispersed audience, they will have to develop new rules of thumb for operating in the channels that will reach this audience. Although there is some advice that will hold true no matter the channel, surely the things that make a presentation effective are different from the things that make a newsletter effective.

Have you been experimenting with any new channels? What kind of tips would you have for your fellow Researchers?

MREB members, access the MREB’s existing resources on Communication, including our Extreme Presentation Workshop and Communications Toolkit.

By Anthony Bell

A recent HBR article explains that individuals who study science or business develop the skills to make data-based predictions and assumptions but often struggle to think creatively about problems and larger trends. By contrast, individuals who study history, philosophy, and art are more innovative and skilled at thinking outside the box.  Innovative thinkers are hard to find and are becoming increasingly hard to keep.  When you’re looking to find these innovative researchers, think about three factors that associate with insight-ready researchers:

• Experience in the market research field
• Level of educational attainment
• A personality strongly marked by intellectual curiosity

I bold this last piece because it points to a less obvious, but equally important element of the researcher personality. These are the researchers who ask questions that nobody else does and strive to take conversations (and thought) to a higher level. Everyone believes they are intellectually curious so make sure you have a screening process that involves more than just live interviews. Learn to assess intellectual curiosity here.

As a manager make sure that your research environment encourages this innovative productivity. Teaching insight is difficult due to its lack of tangibility. Smart management focuses on open-ended discussion to drive researchers to discover their own creative instincts and encourage them to drive their own insights.  Once you’ve got research focusing on the right goals, promote a supportive team culture and set concrete guidelines that empower researchers. While data information is the most important element to Research, there’s a growing need to develop the story and create more actionable recommendations. This requires more creative thinking and insight-based solutions. Shifting to an innovative research function begins with hiring the right people, developing the proper skills, building the team environment to encourage growth and aligning performance to the new criteria.

By Anthony Bell

Today’s technological world of social media, cell phones, blackberries, iPads, and laptops makes achieving a “work-life balance” increasingly challenging for senior executives. A basic first step, according to Indiggo Associates, is “not stressing over work during downtime and not worrying about the downtime that we are not having while at work. According to the Corporate Leadership Council, companies that effectively manage their work-life proposition can improve employee discretionary effort levels by 21% and increase employee intent to stay by 33%. Interestingly, employees don’t necessarily have to use work-life practices to generate positive returns for the organization. Awareness of the work-life proposition is, in fact, slightly more important than consumption of it. Research Managers can take advantage of this idea of awareness by being a career coach to staff. Traditional approaches to career planning are too narrow to accommodate the ever changing employee. By expanding the scope of career progression and formalizing opportunities beyond the function, managers can motivate high-potential researchers.  Research should create specialty career tracks that introduce new opportunities in evolving research function.  We’ve also seen leading companies  encourage rotations outside of research to lower attrition rates. Who would’ve thought that doing the counter-intuitive thing actually STRENGTHENS your team?

MREB Members, take a look at our Career Planning and Evaluation Resource Center to help tie performance criteria to business impact and expand career opportunities.

Research suppliers consume more than 70% of corporate research budget, and in an attempt to improve efficiency corporate researchers often turn to large research supplier that provide full-service, end-to-end solutions, particularly for our ongoing tracking studies.

But some research departments have noted that working with these large suppliers can compromise the quality of information and limit the opportunity to experiment and partner with smaller, more innovative companies.  Indeed, having full-service suppliers own a study from design through analysis forces some difficult trade-offs:

• Design Consistency-individual studies are designed according to suppliers’ methods and are housed on their networks, making data integration cumbersome for the internal team
• Administrative Efficiency-even with a single point of contact at each supplier, the internal team manages multiple relationships and multiple partners must be communicated to when business priorities change
• Data Accuracy-although you partner with a single, full-service provider, your fieldwork will often be done by a network of subcontractors, making it difficult to ensure consistent data quality
• Analytic Rigor-in the full-service model, analysis is the first thing to be crowded out by execution delays and approaching deadlines.

How can we mitigate these issues?  Microsoft created a new supplier management model, unbundling the research process so that execution is centralized with a single supplier but more specialized suppliers are selected to design and analyze for key customer segments and research types.  Because they feel that truly differentiated information comes from the quality of analytics and other back-end, value-added services they wanted to build partnerships to help them take advantage of unique analytic techniques.  MREB members, learn how Microsoft dealt with the challenges of unbundling their research process here.

Do you have a model in place that allows you to balance the efficiency of full-service shops while also leveraging specialist capabilities?  Share your thoughts on supplier management in the comments section below.  And for more information on strategic supplier management, visit our Supplier Management Topic Center and these related resources:

• Maximizing Supplier Contribution
• Setting Your Supplier Portfolio Strategy
• Identifying and Selecting Suppliers
• Evaluating Supplier Performance
• Supplier Feedback Forum

By Kirsten Robinson

Good segmentation can be the key to competitive differentiation, but for most organizations these studies are extremely costly and difficult to manage.

When segmentation falls short, too often it is because Research hasn’t taken enough ownership of setting objectives, developing practical recommendations, and ensuring segmentation is embedded—the three activities that have the largest impact on study success.

So, how can research take a more proactive stance at these engagement-critical points?

Leading organizations focus on the following high-return, interrelated segmentation imperatives that are vital to a successful study:

1. Alignment. Segmentation studies involve an array of stakeholders—who frequently have different objectives. It’s critical to first develop a systematic process to identify and determine the segmentation needs of stakeholders and accordingly involve them in the appropriate stages of the study.

2. Decision-Support. What’s the use of a study that stakeholders don’t buy into? In order to embed segment-based insights Research should leverage collaborative tools to produce practical recommendations and tailor insight-delivery to specific stakeholders.

3. Embedding. It’s not enough to simply introduce recommendations—Research must ensure that segmentation is entrenched within the firm. Leading organizations create a continuous flow of segment-based data and insight embedded into stakeholders’ workflows and ongoing decisions.

MREB members, get more details on how to migrate Research’s role by viewing our full study. Or, visit our topic center on segmentation and research methodologies.

Related Resources:

Operationalizing Segmentation: Focusing Research’s Role on High Value Activities

Whitepaper: Segmentation: Methodology Selection

Discussion: Segmentation Study Questions

Discussion: Consultant Needed to Socialize Segmentation Results

Discussion: Embedding Segmentation

Companies—particularly retailers—talk a big game about customer focus.  And in our heart of hearts, Research thinks this is right: we are the internal champions of the customer, the voice of conscience that tries to ensure customer focus throughout all business activities.

But, too often, we have trouble transitioning from “flash-in-the-pan” customer focus efforts to embedding that focus at the center of the enterprise.  It’s easy to get executive buy-in for one-off customer focus campaigns over and over again, but unless we align customer needs to strategic priorities can we really say that customer insight is at the heart of our business?

In an effort to thoroughly embed consumer focus, Tesco centralized key customer information sources and analytical disciplines into a single Customer-Insights Team that identifies key customer opportunities for strategic focus in the coming year.  In the early 1990s the UK-based grocery retailer faced declining profit margins, intensifying competition, and some evidence of customer dissatisfaction.  By centralizing its ongoing consumer focus the store reversed its slide and regained their place as the UK’s dominant grocery chain.

Tesco brought together critical customer information by uniting its data analysis, market research, and store location teams with its future assessment specialist.  Of course, consolidating these folks on paper does not a cohesive unit make.  So the Head of the Customer-Insight team instituted the following team building tactics:

1.  Create a cross-discipline editorial team with the heads of each sub-team

2.  Utilize physical co-location to reduce silo mentalities

3.  Staff larger project jointly

4.  Share all project objectives across sub-teams to encourage contribution

The primary purpose of the integrated Customer-Insight Team is to feed Tesco’s annual customer planning process.  As a result, the Team has enormous influence on the strategic priorities of the firm for each coming year.  Read more about Tesco’s Customer-Insight Team in the full case profile.  And for more on integrating analytics with other research teams check out our recent blog and whitepaper on the topic.

By Anthony Bell

Consider all the screens you interact with on a daily basis: smart phone, tablet, desktop, laptop, in-store video, big-screen TV, screens at sports events, screens in automobiles/ airplanes, and many others.  Total adult daily viewing devoted to watching all of these screens: 8.5 hours (for those age 45-54, its 9.5 hours). That’s a lot of time spent peering at a screen and a great place for marketers to reach consumers. But what about all the marketing communication we receive on these screens every day? Do we absorb them all the same way? Do they stick with us equally, regardless of the format?

According to the neuroscientists at Neurofocus, the brain receives video stimuli in an identical fashion, no matter what the source, but the subconscious responds to video differently in different formats. The neuroscientists identify three primary measures of neurological effectiveness: Attention, Emotional Engagement, and Memory. They find that the second and third are extremely powerful predictors of purchase intent and marketplace success. To tap into these latent emotional drivers, Research should capitalize on innovative implicit research techniques. They also identify three screen categories: TV, Internet (desktop/ laptop viewing), and mobile (small portable screen based devices). Here are some of their findings from their testing of advertisements across the different screens:

• Attention: Attention is highest for most of the ads in the mobile platform. Voluntary attention is higher on the mobile platform because the smaller screen size requires more focus to understand the message.
• Emotional Engagement: The larger screen sizes of TV help the human elements (human faces) shown in commercials to have the highest emotional engagement. The mobile platform has lower emotion due to its smaller screen size, which does not clearly depict human faces and other emotional elements in commercials.
• Memory Retention: The mobile and internet environments give a significant boost in memory retention. This benefit derives from the intense need to focus voluntarily on the smaller screen.
• Purchase Intent: Both TV and mobile screens – where focus is on video without distracting elements – motivate viewers very well.
• Overall Effectiveness: Ads with high dynamism, fast paced action, and banner-like messaging treatments perform best in the internet setting

Our conversations with various neuroscience experts points to a regular theme: the brain will only afford your message a brief window of time to gain its notice. Therefore, it’s critical that messaging be well crafted to grab the attention of the subconscious. MREB Members, for more, here’s an overview of emotional, sensory, and natural observation techniques.

Let’s say you’re a leading consumer brand, and you’re looking for customer feedback during the NPD process. What do you ask, and how do you ask it? Who are you asking – is it the median user, or a brand passionate, a lead user? Do you go to your potential customers in the end, asking them their opinions on superficial aspects of the new product, or do you involve them from the beginning? For most companies, the answer is simple – customer involvement in the NPD process is a box to check after principal product development is complete, and the people asked for feedback are representative of the mass market.

But if you do nothing in the NPD process but play to the mass market, is there any innovation going on at all? The most innovative products challenge established norms and present such an alluring value proposition that the market adapts. Of course, it’s hard for established brands to radically shift market expectations while retaining brand equity. But what makes Lego’s Consumer-Led Innovation Teams so great is that the program harnesses the best ideas of their most innovative and influential customers, all while reinforcing their brand advocacy.

Lego’s problem was that, due to a wide gap in enthusiasm between median and lead users, their mass-market focused NPD process was spitting out bland, low-risk products that alienated the (quite serious) Lego enthusiast community. The stagnation led to a lull in sales – why upgrade your Legos, if the new ones don’t do anything cool?

The company attacked this problem by shifting their consumer involvement strategy in a refresh of their Mindstorms robot kit: where median users once gave binary feedback about already-developed new products, lead users would now give open-ended feedback at earlier stages in the NPD process. Lego engineers now work directly with brand enthusiasts – who are sometimes engineers themselves – and incorporate those learnings into even the early stages of the innovation process.

Of course, there are other benefits to giving Lego geeks the honor of a lifetime. Giving people that kind of access results in seriously shoring up brand advocacy among the enthusiast community, with members of the user panel actively promoting the new product in online forums and in-person meetups.

MREB members can check out the full case here. But I can hear some of you out there objecting: “Of course Lego can assemble a smart panel of geeks to give the company innovative ideas for free. That would never work in our business.” And maybe you’re right. Clearly, the degree of success that Lego had in involving lead users had a lot to do with the nature of the product – it’s a lot of fun, it enables creativity, and people have generally good memories of it from their childhood.

But here’s something I fervently believe: if it exists, there are people who take it quite seriously on the internet. Even a surface examination of social networks, forums and blogs will reveal people with the most obscure interests – and I’m willing to bet that, even if you sell industrial sealants or embedded systems, you’ll be able to find a good number of lead users/enthusiasts to boost your innovation efforts.

MREB members, for more on innovation and ideation, check out our topic center, as well as the rest of our work on involving leading customers in NPD.