Broadly, I believe that planning cannot go forward with a client or client project without a strong framework of primary and secondary research.  Along with two of my peers, I’ve worked very hard over the past few years to bring structured, focused research to all the work we do with our clients.

A couple of points about this:

1. What I do differently is to begin at the very first meeting to partner with the ECD or CD working on the project and make them my direct partner, equally responsible for the success of the research.  I believe that creative feedback and ideation should begin from the first meeting and continue throughout the research process.  They should attend the interviews, participate in the surveys and even run the sound boom on ethnographic video shoots if needed.  The point is not only that the creative team is aware of the research from the beginning, but that the research plan organically evolve and adapt to the creative ideas produced throughout the research process.  I don’t run research, write a strategic brief, and then brief the creative team—that’s oldthink. This newer, agile, iterative research process collaborative creates research that is directly focused on audience insights that drive creative and account planning.  It’s cheaper, better, and most important it produces great creative thinking.
2. Over-all the idea should be tightly integrated, iterative with creative, adapting to the creative / strategic model that evolves—and low-cost.  Way too much gets spent to get the same results.
3. The research should be both data-driven and qualitative.  Regarding quantitative research methods I think there’s a lot that exists in many clients and that should be reviewed for accuracy, currency and analysis.  I’ve used surveys as well as data analytics to produce behavior models of audience groups.  These generally tend to cluster into major behavior patterns, and sometimes that allows us to begin traditional persona development—Buzz, Jane, George, etc.   The data analytics can be over-laid with additional data from traditional demographic sources like Equifax or First Data, or with online behavioral data from Yahoo and Google.  I don’t run the SAS analysis, but work with people who do.
4. Qualitative research is an area I have strong opinions on, starting with focus groups.  I’ve seen great moderators run them, I’ve run them myself, and I find them almost worthless and sometimes dangerous to share with clients who have pre-conceived ideas.  I prefer “hall interviews” the quaintly European term for interrupt interviews of people as the shop, exit from a store, of browse a convention hotel lobby.   I’ve also spent time working with ethnographic video teams, trying to capture in-house or in-office video of people in their natural environments.  This is a practice that can be done very well and can be done poorly.  I know of two good firms that we use regularly.  (and they are especially effective on pitches, we’ve found)  The video can often reveal details that we can hang on to for real insights—concert tickets on the kitchen bulletin board, how the kids are playing, what’s for dinner, what the post-work routine is, and so on.
5. Finally, the very best research comes from one on one interviews, once the other research is completed.  I do these myself, sometimes with a CD in the room with me, but I’m in charge of the questions and direction of the interview.  We try to land 3-5 people in each of our proposed behavioral segments and push for contradictions or points of unease with where we think the combined strategic / creative strategy is going.
6. We cut the ethnographic and one on one interviews into chunks for the client and our internal team to serve as strong, clear, vivid demonstrations of the strategy/creative direction and strategy.

Some people have questioned the role of  academic-trained researchers, particularly those who drive research programs within corporations.   I find that having a trained MS or PhD research director collaborating on the research is great, and I’ve been blessed to work with several great ones.

But one challenge today it’s hard to find clients willing to put up with $300,000 “discovery” phases, so it’s critical that these research skills are developed in the strategic planning group and that we know how to get the best possible insights, language and creative concepts for smaller budgets.  I think the biggest single improvement we can make is this idea of tying creative immediately into the strategic planning process, and getting them sketching and writing memos, shooting ideas and questions and paper prototypes, card exercise ideas, right into the research process itself.

I also believe the client needs to be an equal partner in this.  I’ve worked with clients where we’ve pulled appropriate people from their marketing department and trained them to do hall interviews—anything to drive more engagement.

The central purposes of research are to discover understandings about the customer to drive business strategy, and working iteratively with that, sketch, inspire, test, discard, create, question, edit and deliver brilliant creative thinking.

My $.02  Thoughts?

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