Making Research Fit in a Creative Project

The other day, I was talking with a friend who runs a marketing communications firm about the prospect of inserting market research into their creative marketing client projects. He seemed to agree with the premise that market and/or customer knowledge could improve the creative work they deliver by helping shape more effective message development. The problem, he says, is that by the time his clients hire his firm they are “ready for action” and would not want to wait a long time for research to get done. My response? It really doesn’t have to take that long at all. A research piece can be executed in a matter of days. That got me to thinking: Why does make research take so long? The answer is that there are key areas that can become bottlenecks in the process. Manage these and you can fit a very valuable research component nicely into a creative project, and it will yield intelligence that can help shape the direction of a creative project.

Here are a few hints:

• Stay on point: Know your objective and the purpose for your research. A well-defined, explicitly stated purpose statement should keep the questionnaire relatively short, targeted, and focused on the most important questions. Avoid the temptation to ask everything. Have the discipline to know when something is outside the scope of this particular inquiry. And know very early who needs to give final approval to any questionnaire. Valuable days and weeks can be spent waiting for a simple approval.
• Know who to ask: It seems like a simple thing to develop a list of people to contact (especially if the distribution is to existing customers), but this often is the biggest unexpected time killer. The answer is to define the audience’s characteristics and start building your list(s) very early. An organization with a well-controlled CRM system will likely have this at their fingertips (but that’s a story for another time…).
• Know when to say when: Often research is left open for much too long. Organizations are reluctant to close a survey because they might miss those next 10-15 responses. You should know how many responses you need to feel comfortable that their opinions are representative of the population (Now, don’t you wish you stayed awake in your college statistics class?). And when you reach that point, go ahead and pull your database of responses and begin your analysis. It doesn’t mean you can’t leave a survey open while you do your analysis. You can leave it open as long as you want. It’s just that when you reach a representative sample (within a margin of error you are satisfied with) the results from additional data points should not significantly change your results.
• Run the numbers quickly: This, again, is tied to knowing your objective (Are you seeing a theme here?). Knowing what you are trying to learn by your research will focus your analysis. And with today’s powerful spreadsheet and statistics software capabilities, getting your answers should be a breeze.

So, yes, market and customer research can take a long time – and sometimes a longer effort is appropriate and useful. However, it doesn’t always have to be that way. A targeted research effort, focused on the key issues, can provide all the information you need quickly without hindering the creative process.

~ by idiscover on July 14, 2009.