Speed, Simplicity, and Metrics that Matter
Speed, Simplicity, and Metrics that Matter
So the brief to the modern researcher is clear ? give it to me quickly, in a simple format that tells me the metrics that matter.
Our message to the research industry: ?stop banging on! The approaches that we use, and the outputs we deliver must always be quick, simple to understand, and very actionable!?
Keeping it quick & simple
Take for example our approach to measuring brand equity, a tricky business at the best of times, but we manage to do this in a short 10 minute online interview, yielding a better respondent experience. This shows that Innovation is not always about technology but can also be about reworking, refining, and improving, sometimes simplicity is the innovation. The key is to keep focused on the measures that matter and not allow erroneous questions to creep in.
The key things to measure when thinking about brand strength are:
Connection ? Are consumers emotionally bought into the brand?
Distinguished ? Does the brand stand out from the crowd by doing things differently?
Prominence ? Is the brand on the tip of your tongue?
Making the intangible, tangible
The job of the modern day researcher is not to try and blind clients with science, they haven?t got time for it, use simple constructs that can travel around a clients business but ultimately have to talk to whatever currency that business uses. But it has to be actionable, brand equity is often viewed as intangible, it is marketing?s role to make it tangible and research can play its part here.
Every category is different, once we know which metrics have the higher importance in a category we need to make this actionable for the individual brand owner, so very quickly you can move from knowing the category drivers to what your brands stands for and what are the key areas the brand needs to improve on or to maintain. We make the big category drivers mean something to the individual brand teams, bring them to life, making them actionable and also importantly making them quantifiable. Making the intangible, tangible.
Getting at ?gut feeling?
Technology is also playing a part in making the intangible tangible and at the forefront of that is Neuroscience.
It has taken the research industry quite some time to harness the power of implicit measurement but again some techniques are quite simple in their essence.
For example at Opinium Research we use a technique that does not just measure what the respondent answered but the speed in which they answered. Or to put it another way ?gut feeling?. The speed of your response is a mark of your strength of feeling so the quicker you endorse something the stronger your association / feeling towards that brand attribute.
Make it matter
So yes use technology if it gives you something different or improves what you currently do but don?t use it for the sake of it. Likewise, constructs and models are fine but don?t hide behind them, and don?t be a slave to the approach, it is the action that the research instigates which is key, talk in the brand owners language, and let research be something they can rely on to inspire and guide brand development.
