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If you’ve talked to anybody in marketing recently, you’ll know how central customer experience is. Innovative companies have sophisticated Customer Experience Management (CEM) systems to track just about every customer interaction, allowing them to measure fast-changing attitudes and opinions on a weekly or even daily basis, and not wait for a monthly report.
It’s a booming market for CEM. The global industry was expected to grow from $6.5 billion in 2019 to almost $24 Billion by 2027, according to a February 2020 report from Grandview Research. And the thirst for CEM providers has only grown. Qualtrics — which markets a cloud-based CEM platform — debuted on the NASDAQ in late January at $30 a share, quickly rising to $55 a share. Its market cap as of early February was more than $27 billion.
CMOs have made experience-management core to what they do, but not all corners of the marketing world have adapted so quickly. Speaking as a market researcher, I’d argue that our field is still largely stuck in the past, leaning on binders full of data and slide decks full of charts to make our case. In doing so, we overlook the very human role researchers can play in a brand’s success.
Here are five things researchers can learn from marketers to up our game and provide a better overall brand experience.
Related: Conducting Market Research
1. Bring your customer into the boardroom
The best marketers are, at their core, good storytellers, able to combine the necessary quantitative data with compelling visuals, including video.
I like to share the story about a presentation we did for a studio in Burbank a few years back, and watching the roomful of distracted executives with their heads down while fiddling with their phones. As soon as our consumer videos started playing, however, the phones went away and everybody’s eyes became glued to the big screen.
Executives love to see real people interacting with their brand. So when you’re presenting top-line data, make sure to show videos that bring your research to life. Your stakeholders or client may not open that slide deck again, but they’ll never forget seeing the face of their customer, fan or viewer.
2. Get close to the action, and make research an ongoing process
Many of the world’s biggest companies know the value of an integrated, iterative approach to gathering customer insights. Ford Motor Co. is a good example. It formed its Global Data Insights and Analytics (GDIA) unit in 2015 to drive data-based decision-making across the company, embedding GDIA members with each product team.
Getting close to the action is important, and so is building capacity for what Forrester calls continuous discovery. Research used to be like the 1970s space missions: You build a very expensive survey, send it into orbit and hope something useful comes back to earth. Today, the rockets we need are smaller, and can both take off and land, like SpaceX’s Falcon 9.
3. Give clients shareable, easy-to-digest insights
Many organizations have access to a bounty of information, including behavioral, transactional and social-listening data. Market researchers need to find ways to make those insights visually compelling and easy to consume.
If I’m doing research for United Airlines, for example, there is a lot of data that the marketing team might need. But there’s also data that should be shared with the baggage handler (experience at the baggage carousel) or the flight attendant (feedback on a new in-flight menu).
If you’re going to make an investment in research, don’t leave insights gathering dust on a bookshelf. Make sure it gets out to everyone, in bite-sized chunks.
4. Humanize your research — and yourself
If you want to get genuine, authentic responses, you need to be willing to share a bit about yourself. One of our clients films videos of herself, walking her dog, as a way of introducing each research project. Her engagement is huge, she says, because it’s no longer an automated, “Respondent 1741-B, please answer the following questions”; she’s not treating participants as a number or data point.
Related: 3 Ways to Help Your CEO “Get” Marketing
5. Tie your work to ROI
Finally, don’t forget that market research is not a charitable donation but a business investment. Your CMO or your clients deserve to understand: A. How is your insights going to make them money? or B. How is this going to save them money? That’s why, going into discovery calls, we always ask potential rival clients: What is your ROI? How do you get your bonus? What matters to you?
Sometimes the answer is obvious, but other times it’s not. By asking a lot of pointed questions, we can better understand a client’s core metrics and integrate that into our work — delivering a little more purpose, and potentially more value, from the data we collect.
