On 21st March 2023, The Market Research Society’s industry news and thought leadership publication, Research Live, published an article written by FlexMR Content Manager, Emily James, entitled Immersion, Communication & Action: The New Insights Equation. In this article, Emily discusses the reality that insights aren’t well-used in stakeholder organisations and how insight teams can help them harness the true power of insights through immersion, communication and action.
Insights are currently seen as a hygiene factor, necessary but only capable of doing one job. In actuality, we in the insights industry know that this is false, we understand the true power of insights in optimising customer experiences and steering the direction of brands, but we’ve not been as successful as we want to be when convincing stakeholders of this reality. One way to help our quest along is to build better research partnerships.
If insight experts are agency-side and deal with a lot of clients and businesses, or even for in-house experts with the typical barriers that are still in place which work to silo the teams within a business, there are key challenges in place that hinder impactful research and insights; challenges that stop stakeholders gaining a true understanding of research and insights, stop insight experts from obtaining a better understanding of their stakeholders, and ultimately stop any meaningful partnerships from evolving between the two parties.
Better insight partnerships between researchers and stakeholders starts with inclusivity and education. This means including stakeholders and clients in the research process from start to finish.
Inclusivity such as this calls for the right tools to be added to an insight team’s arsenal. More specifically, it requires data generation, communication and activation tools that can be used easily by both researchers and stakeholders, so that while researchers take the onus on the research design and implementation, stakeholders can still influence the right areas of the experience to the right degree and positively impact the research project throughout. Tools like those that can be found on FlexMR's InsightHub.
One way to encourage education is through practical experiences as mentioned above. End-to-end research experiences are an incredible learning tools for stakeholders to take and run with, and researchers can have stakeholders as involved as is possible in different research projects to create the best immersive experience possible.
Communication will be the key to success or the path to failure throughout this process depending on how well it is implemented. If there isn’t enough communication throughout the immersion process, then stakeholders will only obtain a limited and partial view of the capabilities of market research and the research experiences they’re involved in could lose vital relevant contextual information.
To combat this, insight teams can use different channels for different purposes – understand which channels stakeholders use for what purpose and utilise those to communicate in different ways with stakeholders.
To find out more about the how best to implement immersion and communication to encourage action, read the full article now.
Research Live is the world's leading source of industry news, opinion, special reports and feature articles for market and social researchers, data analysts and consumer insight professionals. Covering the latest trends and techniques from behavioural economics to big data analytics, as well as hot topics like polling and privacy. The publication is operated by the Market Research Society.