On April 15, 2021, Ray Poynter hosted the Americas session of the NewMR Festival. Please watch the full session recording soon to be available on the NewMR festival website. Short summaries of two sessions are offered below.

The first panel focused on how to build an insights practice. The speakers included Kerry Ward, Amazon Web Services; Kendra Speed; Pashmeena Hilal, Google; and Carole Gleeson, The Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies.

Building a successful insights practice requires a strong foundation in classical research methodologies including how to adapt those methodologies to today’s evolving needs. You need a team of people who are curious, always asking why, and have a passion for learning. These people need to be persistent, open to continuous improvement, open to doing things differently, and willing to take risks.

Also important is creating a breadth of experience for yourself. This could mean working in a variety of industries or a variety of areas within the business. It’s important to learn how to quickly adapt to being on different sides of the table whether buyer or provider. In particular for senior people, it could mean hiring an executive coach who can provide you with critical, outside perspective and help you think about the external forces playing a role in your work.

We know that insights teams often don’t get the visibility they need so we need to do whatever we can to build trust. This includes:

• Making sure you know who your stakeholders are, what they need, and when they need it
• Thinking beyond specific projects or needs, and looking for comprehensive knowledge that the entire team needs
• Ensuring everyone is at the table throughout the process
• Having a touch point at the end of projects that leads directly to action
• Having frank conversations about the potential risk of any course of action
• Ensuring your role doesn’t become transactional
• Partnering across your organization with experts in big data and user experience to create holistic stories that bring the customer to life

In a case study with The Financial Gym, Katrina Noelle, President, KNow Research and Co-Founder, Scoot Insights, shared how qualitative research and social media research can be used to complement each other.

The client had lots of customer data but wanted to understand the people behind that data. Even more, they wanted to hear it in consumers’ own words.

In the initial study, they gathered a large set of qualitative data in a short time. This helped them to understand what people wanted for their personal finances. Specifically, people wanted to learn how to handle their money, how to grow their money, and how to be in control of their money. The client also learned that there are differences in those desires based on people’s life stage. And, they heard that people were open to a paid service model that would educate them based on their life stage, their goals, and the amount of hands-on help they wanted. Video from these sessions helped to shine a light on participants’ real lives, and provide “punchy reinforcement” of the key results.

Why add in social media? The client wanted to cast a wider net and understand what is organically discussed among their targeted populations. Does customer data mirror consumer data? What discussions naturally happen throughout the year?

With social media research, they gathered 24 months of data on the topic of personal finance, discussions in finance advice channels, and mentions of the client’s brand. These results validated the qualitative results and provided more scope. They learned how people begin financial conversations with fear which later transitions to proactive actions they can take to stabilize further financial goals.

A key concept of “control” of their finances was verified at large scale, including which tools people use and want to understand and grow their money.

As a result of using these two approaches together, the client was able to validate the discoveries and build more targeted messaging and marketing strategies to attract new customers.  Combining qual and social media methodologies could be advantageous when

• There remain big questions with a qual study,
• You want to move beyond a small sample, or
• You need to validate other results.