I read a really interesting post in the NewMR group on Linked in. It was a discussion about the barriers clients and suppliers face in making research more strategic/insightful and how they can be more valuable to senior management. I know this is going to be a huge trend in the coming year, and a few people have already made some intelligent posts on this topic.

What really struck me in this thread was a particularly insightful comment by Jim Couch, an industrial designer and design consultant. His point was that the situation that market researchers face is very similar to the one that designers faced a few decades ago. Design did not have the respect of senior management and was not seen as critical to strategic planning and vision. However, over time, the industry was able to reframe how people think about design by demonstrating the contribution and value at a strategic level, thus the rise of “design thinking.” Jim had a great quote;

“(What was) once seen as a non-essential, nice-to-have, we’ll-add-it-later discipline, management has awoken to understand and embrace the power of design – problem solving, customer empathy, simplifying complexity, aesthetics and beauty, balance of emotion and reason, solving for useful/usable/desirable traits, etc.”

The analogy of design thinking is a fantastic one for market researchers, who today want to be more strategic and valuable partners. These are they very same negative perceptions that market research currently faces. It will take time to overcome this, but I think there are three key things we can do to help change perceptions:

1) Classic/analytical market research (though valuable) will not get us the seat at the table we crave. We need to exercise traits of design thinking and specifically use more creative methodologies and processes to build out insights/ideas. We need a more established framework for customer understanding and insights that can lead to innovation.

2) Market researchers are afraid of getting the answer wrong. We need more creative freedom in the research process to eliminate this fear of failure. If we are afraid to fail, we limit our ability to demonstrate true creative thinking. It will often take 10 bad ideas to arrive at 1 good idea. Research needs the freedom to share bad ideas.

3) We need more collaborative and iterative models with our clients to be able to build on insights/ideas. Too often research is tasked with uncovering the hidden idea at one point in time. However, ideas are elusive and we have a better shot at uncovering the idea when there is true exchange and collaboration with our clients, even after the research is completed.

The good news is that with iterative research methodologies we now have more appropriate tools to be able to pursue more creative research thinking.