Commissioning research and the fears that come with it
The fear of bad news
Some time ago, a large company hired us to evaluate and improve the usability of its portal, based on how its own customers experienced and navigated it.
Results from a robust sample produced plenty of evidence and several very interesting insights that made an undeniable case for changes.
Every recommendation and conclusion was also backed by audio-recorded testimonials and eye tracking videos of users’ behavior, which made the problems so obvious that a results presentation was almost unnecessary.
Knowing how the organization worked internally, I made a point of scheduling a preliminary meeting with the research team to validate everything we planned to present to senior management.
To my surprise, the people in that meeting (yes, all of them) simply didn’t have the nerve to take these results up the chain.
The company’s portal carried special weight in the organization: the space each department occupied on the web pages reflected how much (or how little) power it had, and any change meant a guaranteed fight with influential managers.
The research team was obviously not willing to pick fights with other departments or to question anything that might put them at odds with colleagues, clearly putting customers’ interests in second (or third, fourth…) place.
The fear of rocking the boat
On another occasion, a different company hired us to evaluate how people perceived its brand and whether they associated it with a street event it had sponsored for several years.
A competing research firm had run the same study in previous years, and this was the first time we had been hired, which already made the team commissioning the research uneasy, to say the least.
Aware of their nervousness, we compared the results as fieldwork progressed to check for any major swings, and we were quite startled to find a huge drop in awareness of the sponsor’s brand.
When we shared the results with the research team and saw how badly the client reacted, we started looking into the reason for such a big difference. It turned out that the other firm had (almost always) conducted its interviews at high-traffic spots plastered with advertising for that very sponsorship!
A few dozen interviews at those same spots were enough to prove it. Without the basic precaution of interviewing people in areas chosen precisely because they had no advertising, the results came out very similar to previous years and, of course, much more favorable to the sponsor.
The problem was that this ‘rose-tinted’ version wasn’t entirely true. It suggested that neither the event nor the sponsorship advertising needed any changes, which made the company’s investment far less profitable than it could have been.
Even though the ‘rose-tinted’ numbers (from interviews near the advertising) didn’t reflect reality, which we assumed was the whole point of the study, that version put no one at risk and had no consequences. Everyone involved (marketing, communications, research, sponsorship…) could stay comfortable ‘pretending’ that everything was under control.
The fear of trying something new
Another situation we run into very often is the reluctance of teams that commission research to innovate and try new ways of evaluating products, services, brands and companies.
Technology now offers more and more ways to conduct research using biometrics, adding the ‘emotional’ or ‘instinctive’ to the assessment of the ‘rational.’
Over the last 10 years, equipment and software prices have fallen and knowledge has built up from a growing number of studies, so there’s no good reason for this resistance, especially since the results are striking and easy to understand, even for people with no background in neuromarketing.
The only plausible explanation is fear: fear among the teams that commission research of innovating, taking risks, doing things differently and displeasing their bosses, despite the clear benefits.
They show enormous interest when they learn about the possibilities, the tools and even the costs, but when it’s time to decide, the pendulum tends to swing back to the ‘safe,’ the ‘conventional,’ the ‘traditional.’
Solving problems, not ‘pleasing’
The fact is that research shouldn’t be done to please anyone. It should be done to provide the clarity people need, support the decisions they have to make, and reveal the reality behind the numbers and the interpretation that best fits people’s behavior.
The pandemic has already forced us to rethink how many things were done, often with surprisingly positive results: CATI from home offices, in-depth interviews via apps, remote presentations, the near-total replacement of F2F interviews by online surveys, and more.
In other words, under pressure, the market (both companies that buy research and the firms that provide it) proved remarkably able to react and adapt to adversity.
What remains to be seen is whether the teams that commission research have the freedom and autonomy they need to do their jobs as well as possible.
Given how consistently this problem shows up across so many different companies that buy research, it seems clear to me that it’s more a cultural problem in certain organizations than a question of these people’s training.
Every company would do well to ask itself:
• how free are the teams that commission research to choose the best methodologies?
• how much room is there to innovate in research, even when backed by reliable data and technical evidence?
• how often is the research commissioned actually meant to find the truth, rather than just to please the boss?