On 1st September 2021, Insight Platforms published an article written by FlexMR’s Copywriter Emily James entitled How Insight Professionals Can Tell the Right Stories. With comments from Field and Track Research founder, Peter Foster, this article explores the ways in which insight teams can use storytelling to enhance insight reports.

Insight activation is a tricky topic for insight professionals, as it is the stage of market research we have the least control over. But there are things insight teams can do to help drive stakeholders to act, such as creating an engaging and memorable research report that captures stakeholder attention, enhances the memorability of insights, and ultimately drives insightful decisions. In recent years, insight teams have discovered that storytelling is a key tactic in this situation.

How Researchers Can Tell Insightful Stories

Storytelling is an important skill that insight professionals should attempt to understand as fully as they do data collection and analysis - the data generated from this stage will not be used to full impact if it is not communicated in a way that drives stakeholder action. 

Inspiring stakeholders to act is tricky, especially when targeting stakeholders in the wider organisation too; but it’s worth it if it helps power transformational change for the better, uniting all teams through a single point of insight.

Finding the Story

Finding the story in insights is a skill best developed over time, as the more time insight professionals invest in the data, the more insights they’ll likely find. Figuring out which ones fit in and inform the key themes of the story is essential, especially to the later parts of the process when the story is being constructed. 

Finding the story will be more difficult in quantitative data than in qualitative data for obvious reasons, but don’t be afraid to ask for help - this task can be taken collaboratively with stakeholders themselves, as they can act as a sounding board for which themes and stories are relevant to the objective at hand. 

Storytelling Tactics

Peter finds that incorporating an element of self through video or mobile ethnography can help bring consumer voices to life, and as a result, better connect stakeholders to the consumers they're interviewing for insights.

Videos are fast becoming a staple of insight reports, but for the written reports there are other storytelling tactics to help engage audiences. From creating dedicated characters to represent key consumer segments to steeping the insights in context to better set the scene, insight teams have a wealth of techniques to choose from when creating research reports with storytelling techniques.

Want to learn more? Read the full article here.

About Insight Platforms

Insight Platforms is the leading online resource for learning about digital research tools. The company has their own directory of over 700 market research suppliers in over 30 categories from A/B Testing to Visual Analytics; and also boasts a myriad of blogs, guides, independent reviews from experts in product research, consumer insights, social intelligence, customer experience and digital analytics.