Integrated Insights for Today's Tough Questions: Designing Multi-Method Research Programs

All right. Hi everyone. Looks like we're at the top of the hour, so we're gonna get started here with our next speaker. My name is Erica. I'm a senior project manager at Accelerate, and I'll be introducing our next presenter. Uh, thank you so much for joining the quarantine virtual insights conference. Just before we get started, I'd like to go over the ground rules one more time. Um, just keep in mind you're at the mercy of the technology. bear with us through any interruptions or bumps we may have. Um, and just please be respectful to the presenter and to each other in the comments section. But please do take this time to network, engage, interact with one another. You can use our hashtag QVIC2020 on LinkedIn and Twitter. And please leave some questions if you have any throughout the presentation. We'll be doing a Q&A at the end. So you can use that um Q&A chat box to leave any questions you have. So with that, I'd like to introduce Jessica Lopez. She's the director of research and consumer insights at Viking Cruises and she's going to be talking to us today about integrated insights for today's tough questions. So Jessica, with that I will stop sharing and pass it over to you. Wonderful. Thank you so much Erica and thank you to Accelerant Research for hosting this conference. I love that you do it uh every month and have been doing it um since most of the pandemic. It's a great way for research and insights professionals to come together. So, thank you all and thank you for having me here today. Let me figure out how to share my screen. Oh, hold on. Let's see. There we go. Put it in presentation mode. All right. Let's see. Sorry, guys. Here we go. All right, everyone. We're going to be talking today about integrated insights for today's tough questions. I am the director of research and consumer insights for Viking Cruises. I've been with them for a little over a year and I lead our research in North America while also providing insights for our operations team in Switzerland. I bring uh over 15 years of experience to the table in the world of insights and market research. uh over five of those years were as a VP on the supplier side where I spent a lot of my time designing and building projects much like what we're going to be talking about today which I try to not necessarily call a project but I actually refer to it as a research program and uh some of these research programs that I designed were um really enjoyed and and impactful by many of the clients who chose to pursue them and some of the teams that worked on them ultimately ended up winning some awards from the company for the innov innovative and unique nature of the design. I'm a regular guest lecturer at the University of Southern California. I love giving back to the community um that helped me learn and grow. And so I think that that's kind of your your role once you get into a double-digit number of experiences in any in any category is to give back and help others learn. So I do that regularly. And I I have a background in actural science as well as public relations which is a bit of a strange background to have but a beautiful one in the world of of insights because I can really understand the the quantitative side of what we do as well as the softer side of what we do as well in terms of messaging. So I want to start off with a quick story uh about my father who um was a fire protection engineer. Um, for those of you who know me, my father really was my hero. And my father uh built many of these fire protection systems. And you know, I got to see and know what he did in uh his time. And these systems can oftenimes be really big and complex. And you know, when I first started talking to him about what he did, I I used to think it was really simple. Um, you know, the the fire happens, the sprinkler heads go off, and then the water puts out the fire. and and in many cases that's that's really true. That's exactly what happens. But as I talk to him more and more about it, there are some situations where that's actually not the case. Um, for example, IT server rooms where you have uh a lot of expensive technology that needs a waterless solution for putting out the fire. Or maybe you have a manufacturing plant that uses flammable gaseous materials and you need some other type of chemical compound in order to put out the fire. and water actually would would make the fire worse. So, as I was putting this presentation together today, I thought about that. And in many ways today, just like in some cases, water won't put out every single type of fire, sometimes our traditional one or even two-phase project approach to research isn't going to solve what you need. Sometimes you need a much more sophisticated design when it comes to research. And that's what we're here to talk about today. So, we're going to talk about using a robust non-traditional research program for major strategic initiatives or even long-term initiatives um where a single study or even a two-phaseed approach might not be the best solution. And when I think about these types of studies, the key to successful design is three components. The first of which is having a plan. These designs don't need to be expensive, but they do require really a detailed and thoughtful approach. They need a map. So, a successful approach is really going to use a tight yet robust list of questions that are then mapped to those various information sources. And I'll talk a lot more about what this mapping process looks like in a few minutes. And last but not least, the people. Really what I found from my experiences is that the best approach is going to involve a broad group of individuals who contribute at the right ways and in the right time. And I'll give you some examples of that as we go through things today. So as I was preparing for this presentation, I stumbled across this quote from Pablo Picasso that really matched how I feel about these types of of programs. You know, it reads your our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan in which we must fervently believe and upon which we must vigorously act. And this is so true. The the element of planning, especially in bigger initiatives and bigger projects, is really critical. And I think the ones that are most successful, are the ones that you really believe in and the ones that you're really passionate about from beginning to end, which isn't easy because they're often really complicated and they're often very long in terms of duration. They don't have to be, but really having that passion from the beginning all the way through to the end is really hard, but it ultimately really makes it very successful at the end of the day. So, let's dive in and I want to dive in with an example um to help kind of bring this to life and make it a little bit more real. Uh this one comes from a few years ago when I was back on the supplier side. One of my clients came to me and this client was um a provider of child care in the industry and it was their CMO and he came to me and he said, "Jessica, we just finished some analysis. We've identified 10 key markets where we think we really have a strong opportunity to grow over the next three years. I really want your help figuring out how we grow in each of these markets over the next uh 10 three years." So, I chose this example for a couple of reasons. Um, one is because this market level or uh city level approach is actually quite common in the world of strategic planning and many of my clients actually came to me for similar type approaches. Maybe it was at a country level or something like that. Um, but these approaches are fairly common. And so this is a great use case for this type of a research program design. Um, there's certainly others. I I'm guessing many of you uh may have had to be involved in uh health and safety planning initiatives whether it's researching what your employees or your guests or your customers are interested in. That type of an initiative is quite a large one to undertake and so that's another situation where I'd recommend using a research program design rather than a single one or two-phase study approach to the design. So anyways coming back to this particular example you know I easily could have said okay let's go one by one you know we'll do a qualan approach in each market but that would take a long time it would take a lot of money a lot of effort from a various individuals and analysts and I just really didn't feel like that was the right approach maybe another approach that you could consider with this type of a question is a a design where you just have augments and quotas at the at the market level and you do everything all at once and that also to me really doesn't doesn't speak to the depth that you need in order to truly succeed in this type of an analysis. So, we're going to walk through this as an example today to really bring it to life. Again, the geographic approach is just one example of the way that you can use these research programs. So, that's why I chose to uh use it today throughout the conversation. Before we get into the next step of that particular example, the first part of developing this research program is the planning. Developing a list of key questions and then documenting them as you go through uh learning more about what needs to be achieved. But when I talk about this list of key questions, this really translates to the research objectives that you're trying to achieve. So for those of you who've been in the industry for a while, you can often talk about research objectives that are often in a very st uh stated form. Identify the barriers to growth or you can talk about them as key questions. What are the barriers to growth in this market? So however you like to um approach it or put it together. I tend to use the the phrase um and anchor myself towards key questions because then it's a little easier to be looking for the answers to those questions. As you're talking to people in some of these initial beginning stages of designing the project, um maybe you're talking to the CMO or the marketing director or the head of social or something like that. As you're asking them about what they think it'll take for the company to be able to grow, convert those hypotheses that might come up in your conversations into questions. So maybe someone will say, you know, I I really think that our lack of technology in the classrooms is a barrier to growth or I really think our um outdated website is a barrier to growth. Put those into your list of questions and just write them down. And when you feel like you have a good list of questions, you can then take a few moments to organize and consolidate them into a way that really allows it makes it easier for you to review those questions. Then another thing I recommend doing in this planning period is identifying the information that you might already have access to. So this could be an industry publication. It could be syndicated research. Many of us have trackers that are running in the background. Um there's a lot of things out there that I think when we do start a study sometimes we don't always think about you know how could we pull this in to make the story stronger. And then the other component that I don't always see pulled into the planning phase is identifying knowledgeable people who might also be able to provide insight. So maybe in this example that I gave you, um, beyond just the obvious of the CMO or the head of social, maybe we reach out to the regional directors of these child care centers and maybe we get them involved to help us in developing the questions and hypotheses and things like that that might be associated with their market and growth. So, how do we develop this list of questions? What I would say is try to talk to as many people as you can in this early stage of planning. Regardless of whether you're on the client side or you're on the supplier side, you need to talk to a robust group of individuals if you're dealing with questions like how can my company grow in the next three years uh in these particular markets. And so for me, when I think about the types of questions that you can ask, there's certainly a myriad of questions that can allow you to develop a list, but for me, it really comes down to two key questions. And that's starting conversations with what do you need to know about a market in order to help your company grow? And I I have you underlined here because this really should be an individualspecific question. What do you as the head of social need to know? What do you as the head of digital need to know in order to help your company grow? And that's really going to give you a very expansive list of questions. And what you'll probably find is many of these people might be asking very similar things, but they might be saying it in subtly different ways. And those subtle differences are really important. So I recommend during this phase as you are creating your list of questions, remembering who's asking what. Another question that can be really helpful is what do you think will be the barriers to growth? Now, these two questions are probably going to give you a short list of answers, but for those of you who have um maybe some moderating experience, I recommend using a bit of a lading approach. Uh asking, you know, why do you think this is going to be a barrier to growth? How do you think your team might be able to overcome it? Things like that that might be able to pull and keep the conversation going and go a little deeper into what's behind some of their initial responses. You're never going to be able to capture all of the questions at this phase. Just do your best to capture what you feel like is a representative and robust list of questions. One thing that I I want everyone to be able to take away from this is that this successful approach is really going to involve a broad group of individuals who contribute at the right ways and at the right time. And if you miss someone at the beginning conversations and then you talk to them while you're in field, you can add questions to your list of questions later. You may or may not be able to actually uh get answers to those questions, but it never hurts to have them built into the plan just in case you are indeed able to answer them later. So remember that uh the individuals are really key and important. So let's say we've gone through and we've had all these conversations and we now have a laundry list of questions. I just put an example list up here. This is probably not a long enough list of questions, but it's a starter one for purposes of the example only. So, as I think through these questions, what I want to do is I want to take a moment and stop after I feel like I have a good list of questions, and I want to give myself a break from them. You've probably been having these conversations over and over. It's probably been an intensive week of conversations or maybe a back-to-back day where you've gathered these conversations and questions from individuals. give yourself a moment to stop and um you know take a 30 minute walk or have lunch with a friend or maybe check on your son out in the kitchen or something like that who's uh doing classes from home. Do something to allow yourself to take a mental break from what you're working on. And I I don't recommend switching over to another survey and writing that or or going back to email and working on your email for 30 minutes. I really recommend giving your yourself um a good um fresh mental break so that when you do come back to the list, you can take one more pass at refining your list. Um for example, when I look at this list here and I read through these questions, if I were to come back to this with a fresh mind, I might read through this list of questions and see this last one here. What if anything do we need to change to grow in this market? And I think about this and I think, well, this is actually quite quite similar to our overarching question. And this sounds like something that probably shouldn't be in my list because it's actually just a different way of stating the overarching question. So, this is an example of one that I'd remove. Whereas, there might be others you might want to add. Maybe you want to tweak or tighten how you're saying some of these. But, whatever you want to do, just sit with your questions a little bit longer um until you feel really good about that list. And then what I recommend you do at that time is go ahead and number them. And the numbering of your questions is going to be really important and critical in our next step, which is that mapping phase that I talked about earlier. So, as I mentioned at the beginning, these designs, even though they're called research programs and they're quite robust, they don't have to be expensive, but they do require a really detailed and thoughtful approach. So when we look at our list of questions here, what we what I start to do is I start to to think about the the pieces of information that we already have access to. And one of the things that I'm seeing in here are who are the competitors, how are they perceived, what are their brand funnels look like. Most of us would have this information in a tracker somewhere. So I might start there at the tracker. And maybe the tracker that I have up and running has this information, but it doesn't have it at the market level. And maybe I don't want to aggregate years because the data is outdated or what have you. Um, but what you can do if that tracker is in place and running at a regular basis is in the next wave essentially set some quotas at the market level to give you a readable base of information on the particular market of interest. And that way it's a really efficient way of getting some of these questions answered without fully launching a new study. So that's one thing I do is think about what you already have access to and how you might be efficiently able to leverage that in order to get answers to these questions. Another thing I like to do when I'm starting to think about design and and how we use these questions um and get them answered through the research studies that we build into this is what are those questions that are really hard to answer. The questions that don't have clear responses or maybe a little bit more subjective. So in this list of questions for example I might say number one what matters to parents in this market is a bit of a subjective thing. It's something that, you know, we probably don't have information on at this point and this is something I'd really want to dive into qualitatively. So, identify I identify what are the things we'd really want to address in qualitative research. And when it comes to these research programs for qualitative research, I really like to lean into digital ethnographies. Digital ethnographies are really great because they allow you to capture a really expansive geographic footprint. You can set quotas at the market or the city level. You can run everything all at one time. Um, you can cover a wide variety of information because oftentimes they're a bit longitudinal in nature where respondents will be with you over the course of a couple of weeks answering the different questions and exercises that you'll be taking them through. Um, and it's also pandemic proof. Digital ethnographies are something that we can be doing uh today because we we can't really be in people's homes anymore like we used to be able to do. And then you're also going to want to have your city specific questions on this list. And we'll get to those in a little bit too, but it's important to make sure you have those documented and numbered. So from here we can move into the mapping phase. Again, the tight yet robust list of questions is going to be really important when it comes to mapping. So once you've started to put your map together, one of the things that's important to do is kind of share that overall design map with your key stakeholders. You want to be creating buyin along the way. And you also want to be sure that after you've spent so much time thinking through these questions, your map is still accurate and aligned with what they feel like they need to learn and achieve in order to grow. When they look at them the list one more time, you want to make sure everything's represented. Are there new things that have popped up? Maybe there are things that have changed since the last time you talked. Maybe they would tweak the way that you worded the questions because they feel it doesn't appropriately capture what they were trying to communicate in the original original conversation you were having with them. This is a really good opportunity for you to um relatively lightly engage them in the research in a very key and critical fashion. So, I want to give you an example of what one of these maps could look like. Um, this is something that I start out with as like a sketch. Um, it's how I I tend to like to work. So, what you see in the dark black are the the study methodology, the approach. And, uh, we have the digital ethnographies here that I mentioned. We have the brand tracker here that I mentioned with the market level augments. Uh, I felt like some shopalongs would really help bring this to life at the market level. I'll speak to that in a few moments. I've found that desk research in these re in these research programs really can play an important role in rounding out the research that you put together. And then one thing that's not on here yet are the people and those individuals are clearly an important component. So this is great. This allows you to get your thoughts down on paper, start mapping things out, what have you. What you'll see is that you'll you'll notice some of these apply to multiple approaches. So question number one, we're actually going to address in all three different um approaches and methodologies. Uh question question two is also going to have that coming up as well. Uh so is I would imagine se section uh number four would also come up in all three here too. So they don't have to necessarily be unique um because each of the different approaches is going to give you a slightly different perspective on that type of information. So, you honestly don't want to share that handwritten map uh with your colleagues. You probably want to formalize it a little bit more. At least I do. And I tend to like to then put it into a table format. Maybe that's boring or vague, but it works for me. So, whatever works for you. The format really isn't important as long as it really clearly communicates to the um individuals that you're working with on the project. And so, the first ones we've kind of already talked about. You see the digital ethnographies, the brand tracker, the shop alongs. You'll notice question seven has been removed from the list because it was kind of too high level if you will. Um because we are moving this a little bit for forward in terms of the design, I've elaborated on desk research to include Yelp reviews, competitor websites, market statistics and trends. I think it's really great at this stage to start giving some examples of the things you could be looking into when it comes to desk research because as you then share this with your colleagues, especially somebody from the digital or social team might also have some really great suggestions of where else you could be looking in your desk research. And uh I'm going to give you an example of the competitor websites that ended up being really helpful to us when we were doing this on that uh child care study that I mentioned. There was one particular market in the US that based on my knowledge of that market, I thought was a pretty safe market. What we found in the brand tracker was that the number one driver of consideration for parents in that market was the safety of the um child care provider. And I thought, well, that's really strange because it's such a safe market. And um so as we were diving in and trying to figure out like what is it with safety in this market? And we started to look at the competitor websites. We looked at the top four or five competitors. On the very front landing page of many of these competitors, they talked about safety, whether it was the locks on their doors, the pickup process, um the uh practicing for fire drills or tornado drills, the sick policies. So safety was very front and center on the websites for many of the competitors. And when I looked at our client's website, that was not anywhere on even the first one or two clicks into their website. And so it's interesting because you wonder did they did they identify the safety uh driver first or are they part of what's driving this perceptive need for safety among parents in the market? sometimes particularly in um that that industry the child care industry um you know what people are saying and telling people to look at can then ultimately drive you know what goes into their consideration set. So those competitor websites can really be important whether it's at the market city specific level or maybe it's even at the country level too. The market statistics and trend I want to give you another example on that one. those are harder to find and you never know what you're actually going to come up with and and see. Uh but something something we found here as we were looking at market statistics and trends for one of our markets is that we were reading about how parents when they were in their very early stages of being a parent, they were very often likely to live in one of the city centers. And as they had more children, as the children grew up, they often moved out to the suburbs. I don't know if many of you can relate to that, but I'm sure it's not specific to just that market. But anyways, it was an interesting trend that was called out and highlighted there. Now, in addition to that um analysis or the piece of research that we found online, we had access to the store hierarchy files because we were using it uh as to to help us define the footprint for the brand tracker. And so we pulled up that store hierarchy file and we looked at where our clients um daycare centers were in that particular market. And what we found was that there weren't enough daycare centers with infant rooms downtown in the city center. And there were too many um daycarees out in the suburban areas with uh not enough room for the toddlers and uh a lot of vacancies in the infant room. So, that was a really interesting one where we put those two pieces of information together and were able to identify the need to rightsize their real estate strategy. Uh, another thing that might come up as you're talking to people about the the program design and the pieces of information that you have access to is going to be pieces of information that you as a as a supplier or perhaps um even you on the client side, maybe you didn't run the research. maybe another team within the company um conducted some research for some reason. In this particular instance, there was an annual employee and guest satisfaction survey that had been running for a while and we were able to get access to the results of that. And so we can build that in here. Like I mentioned before, the regional directors were also really important in this particular example. And so you'll notice that in this first upper level um grid that we have here, there are no market specific questions. And so they what I would say with that market specific questions is save those until you kick off the actual market itself for your overall map. Just stay focused on the macrolevel question of how do we grow in any given market and then when you start working on that first market you can layer in the additional questions. We're going to move on to the last part of this approach, which is the people. And again, use them to gather that robust list of questions from the very beginning. Make sure you're getting buyin along the way um and input from people throughout um the the research lifespan. Make sure you're thinking about people as information sources and not just at the back end when you're doing the analysis, but also during survey development and bringing the findings to life. And that kind of leads me then to this topic of who really can create these types of research programs. Can it be someone on the supplier side? Can it be someone on the client side? I feel like honestly if you can really envision a solution, if this quote here I thought really embodied this. If you can dream it, you can do it. Um it really was quite telling. So from the client side, what I'd recommend is that you if you're the one creating the map, share it with all your partners who are going to be involved in the research. And even if maybe they're not involved in the research, you might want to share it with them anyways in case they have ideas or suggestions. In addition to sharing the map, make sure you share the big picture of what you're trying you're trying to accomplish because that also might help them have give you some additional ideas and suggestions in terms of what to be adding to this. See if they have any suggestions for enhancements. I mean, the one of the benefits of sharing it with your suppliers is that they're going to come to the table with a fresh perspective. They're really going to ask questions that you might not have thought of. um they will uh maybe maybe ask you why you're doing things that might seem obvious on the client side, but because they're not on your side, it's not as obvious. And that really is a good pressure test of making sure that you have your design really locked down and make sure it's clear how their research fits into the plan. Now, if you're on the supplier side, you can also be the creator of the map. I showed you this example with the child care provider where I was on the supplier side and was indeed the creator of the map. So that's certainly not something that anyone should think of as a barrier. And the size of your firm should also not be a barrier. You don't have to be a firm that is a um you know one-stop shop. If your firm specializes in qualitative, you can still put this type of a plan together. You'll just need to bring in another partner for the quantitative component. Now, I would say if you're the creator of um the map and the program design, you should really take the lead on those conversations with as many end client stakeholders as possible. And this can be really difficult. Sometimes people don't really want to let you into the organization when you're on the supplier side. Uh so the key to this step is really having good relationships and really demonstrating a knowledge of their company and you know the importance of the growth initiative. and really use an honest assessment of what your team can and can't do. I I use that example of, you know, a qualitative firm can absolutely design the overarching research program map, but they may not want to be the one that actually issues the quantitative survey. They may want to have a partner that they work with on that. And so being honest about what your team's capabilities are and aren't is really important. And I think another component of that too is being honest about the volume of work that your team can handle. Uh that's really important because these types of studies really do require a lot of effort. Especially if you're going to do the analysis uh at every market for 10 markets, you know, you can't spend a year doing all of those analyses. You have to be able to move very quickly through them. So talk speaking of analysis I want to talk a little bit about the end phase of a of research design programs and that is that analysis um is a little bit different than on a traditional one or even two-phase study approach because instead of doing the digital ethnographies and then putting out a report about the digital ethnographies or doing the brand tracker and then putting out a report about the brand tracker, you need to have the research done for all of pretty much all of the markets before you can then even dive into analysis. And um there are some exceptions to that. You can start to look at the brand tracker and the digital ethnographies results for market one and then you can move into some of the more um peace meal things like the desk research and talking to the regional director. So it doesn't all fully need to be done, but I would say a majority of it needs to be done before you really move into the market level analysis. And the way you're doing that is essentially by um pulling apart little pieces of each project. You're pulling out the findings from this market from the digital ethnographies and comparing it to the other project. So in a way you're kind of deconstructing the p the the approaches that you've used to get to this particular point. And I think this phase is not linear. I think this this phase um of the project really does kind of meander a bit. And uh I'll I'll show you a little bit about what I mean in a moment. Uh I don't I don't think it's an easy phase by any stretch of the imagination because there are so many different pieces of information you're trying to pull together and and create a story out of it. I think using the deconstruction-like approach to analyze the data really makes it a lot easier to to develop a successful story. And I think it requires a team approach to the story refinement. you're going to find yourself kind of uh in a heap of data and oftentimes you spend so much time with that data it's hard to kind of bring yourself back out and see the big picture and that's where a teammate can really come in and be helpful to refine the story as well as um your your client or your suppliers can also help you with that. So let me show you a little bit about what I what I mean when I talk about the process not being linear. You're obviously going to start with the initial analysis and you're going to start discuss your results with a small group of individuals. From there, people are probably going to give you feedback. Maybe they'll give you emerging hypotheses as to why this or why that. They might give you other recommendations for analysis. Maybe they want to look into different life stages for people. Maybe they want to look into different, you know, educational levels. Who knows? But you're going to get a lot of feedback at that stage. and you'll go want to go back and revisit the analysis. And in that next step then of revisiting the analysis, this is a great time to start pulling in the additional information sources, the desk research, the people, things like that. And you can bring in new people and new information sources that weren't on your original plan. That's perfectly fine at this step. Um the important thing is you start pushing on the wise between why is this happening? And if you can't find it in some of those core anchor approaches like the brand tracker or like the digital ethnographies, then you start to think, well, where else might I be able to find this answer? Maybe I call the regional director and I chat with her a little bit about it. Maybe I call the customer care team and I talk to them to see what kind of issues they've had in this particular market. There's a lot of different options here. So, here's where it starts to get creative. And then you go back and you you repeat the process of discussing your results with the small group. And the um experience of the lead analyst and the complicated nature of the analysis or perhaps not complicated nature of it will really determine how many times you need to go back and do this loop in the circle. I mean I've had situations where I've gone through this process of discuss revisit discuss revisit almost up to 10 times. So it can happen and that's fine. It's just something to be aware of. It's certainly not something that's common. Usually, it'll take two or three iterations from my experience. And from there, you can then move forward with discussing the final results with maybe your initial stakeholder team. And at this stage, I would say pull in people with knowledge of the market and the issues for the conversation. So an example from again that child care um study that that I was talking about I would say um in one of our markets we found that uh technology in the classroom was really really important to parents. It was something that was seen as a differentiator in that market. So that was the only market in which we pulled the chief technology officer of that particular company into the conversation because he was going to play a critical part in making helping with the growth of that market. Because the analysis section can be really hard, I wanted to give folks a tip, some tips on this part of the project. Let your original questions be your guide. These are those original six or seven questions that we saw. Oftentimes, what I recommend is take your first question and then go through each of your um approaches and write down what you found in that approach related to that question. And so the first one was what matters to parents in this particular market. You look at the digital ethnographies, look at what mattered to parents in that market, how that compares to all the other individuals that you spoke with and see if there's anything unique about that particular market. And then you can move on to the brand tracker and do the same. You can then start to look at some of the competitor websites, see what they're starting to talk about, things like that. You can talk to the regional director. And then you can move on to question two and you can start kind of creating and compiling your story that way. Like I mentioned, the people and the online sources of information can really be helpful in developing that story. And I would say, you know, enjoy those first couple of of steps of going through all the questions and then as you think about how do I tell this overarching story, try to use the rule of three, which is, you know, that it's easiest for people to remember things in groups of threes. So maybe you have 10 different points or 10 different recommendations for how the company could grow in this market. No one's going to recom remember 10 different recommendations. So see if there is a way that you can take those 10 different recommendations and group them into a set of three. Maybe you have a set of recommendations related to website enhancements or maybe you have a set of recommendations that are related to marketing initiatives. something that enables you to fairly succinctly tell them three overarching things that need to be done in order to succeed and grow in the each market and then you can have subcomponents of each. So let's say one of the items is um you know website improvement you know then you can put within the website improvement you know bring safety to the forefront of the website or something along those lines. But creating those groups of three will really make it easy for anybody who's going to be touching and using this research to remember what those key three things are. I would also say be mindful of who the results are being communicated to, especially in something that's like a market approach or something where you might be taking an operational lens to the analysis. Um, it's important that as you're sharing out the suggested improvements or changes that the people who are receiving the feedback, don't take it in a way such that they feel like they've been doing something wrong. Um, you want it to be um really positive, proactive advice that is about helping grow for the future, not about things that have been done wrong in the past. And finally, making sure the recommendations are clear and practical. This is really important um when you're on the supplier side. I think sometimes re determining what's practical can be really hard because it varies from one organization to another. So here's where having some conversations with one or two people from the client side who know what the company's bounds are, what would fit for the company culture and what wouldn't fit from a recommendation and accessibility perspective is really important. And then making sure the the recommendations are really clear and trying to avoid vague recommendations like um use social media to promote your brand. That recommendation is way too vague for a team to really be able to act on it. Now, with any good piece of research or set of research pieces, um you're going to want to put some kind of a report together so that people have your learnings documented. I would say as you think about putting these reports together, consider what you can cover in a single report or whether or not there should be multiple separate reports. Um, for example, in this market study, you know, the the information on market one is irrelevant to people who are going to be working on the other markets, whereas you might need somebody at a senior level who needs a higher level deck that kind of gives an overview on all 10 markets. Um, so think about that. Or maybe there is an operational component where you need to create a deck for the marketing team and a different deck for the operations team. Something like that. Think about how you might want to be setting that report up. I find that using icons or something really subtle but clear um to indicate where the findings are from is really helpful when you stitch them together because oftentimes, you know, after the report has been sent out or distributed, maybe it's six months later or what have you, somebody comes back and they say, "Oh, I want to learn more about this particular point." And if you don't have it clearly referenced or sourced, it can really become a bit of a um a distraction and a difficult point for you as you're trying to look into more information. This can be really easy, just a small icon in the upper left or right of a page, or it can be using the source notes at the bottom of the page. Somehow find a way to make sure that you include um where the results are coming from when you're stitching these different pieces of research together. I always like to recommend, and I think this almost goes with any type of research, a single piece of research or one of these bigger research programs, to set up the report flow to really clearly align with the executive summary. what are the three things you told them to do? And then maybe there's a chapter supporting each of those three things. Or better yet, maybe there's like one or two pages that supports each of those two things. So you have a really tight um condensed uh upfront deck. I think for these because you don't want them to just go sit on a shelf, you really want them to be embraced and utilized right away. creating or delivering worksheets with the report where the um team members who are going to need to act on the research can brainstorm their potential action steps. Just giving them that initial, you know, scratch piece of paper where there's a an inspiring prompt of, you know, what could you do in order to, you know, promote safety in this market or whatever the example might be. You know, kind of help give them a springboard to start thinking about what they could pro possibly do from an actionability standpoint. And then finally, don't stop with the report. Make sure you create some kind of shareout session that's highly interactive to bring these types of research programs to life because they are really big in nature. They're often um tied to a really important initiative. So you while you might get some push back on, you know, taking a big chunk of time out of individual's days, it really is an investment in the initiative itself. And at this point, uh, it's it's very helpful to make sure that the results really live on past just the issuance of the report. So, what we used to do in some of these is we'd take maybe a 4hour session, half day, something like that, and take the first 30 or 45 minutes to walk through the report, take questions, talk about it, and then we'd have activities designed for each of the things and areas where we felt it would be key to growth. and we would bring in different people for the different sections to really help um drive that section home. For example, um one of my one of my most interesting situations that we had is we had a market where um we found that conflict resolution was really an area of weakness for our particular client and it was something that that many of the other um providers in the area weren't particularly struggling with. So, we brought in an individual from the customer care team and we um were going through an exercise to join us for that session. We were going through an exercise that was reading Yelp reviews and um people were crafting responses. What could you say in response to this negative Yelp review that's been posted on your site about some conflict that's come up um with the um particular center? And you know, we went around the room and everyone kind of wrote something down and they shared it out with the team and they were good suggestions and things like that. When we got to the individual who was the customer care representative, she said, "You know, in this market there are so many families that come from different cultural backgrounds. Many of them are first generation here in the US and oftentimes English isn't their first language." And when I read this post on the Yelp review, I notice that the person posting this has some um typos and mistakes with her English, which indicates to me that English probably isn't her first language. And I know from this particular region that the individual running this center also doesn't have English as a first language. And often that creates a lot of conflicts for us in this market. And I just thought that was so insightful and fascinating to bring that to the room. Now, how you work through that as an organization is another um question. It's quite difficult, but really goes to show the importance of bringing in key people that are a bit non-traditional at this stage of figuring out how you might grow in a particular market. All right, guys. So, we're close to the end. Um so, I want to go through just some final success tips. Um like I mentioned, bring the research to life. These are really big, really encompassing, and they're meant to help the company grow very often. So, make sure you find a way to bring them to life for the team. Um, think about the implications for the enduser groups. When you give your recommendations, make sure it's clear. This is a marketing recommendation. This is an uh operational recommendation, a um communications recommendation, or something for the digital team. really make sure it's clear who's going to be using it and kind of group those recommendations that way if you can. Make sure to not lose sight of the questions that you spent so much time going through and organizing and refining at the very beginning. And when you get to the analysis phase, go back to those questions. Use those as your guide as you are building the story. And last but not least, try to avoid sharing results study by study. Try to avoid sharing results at the end of the digital ethnographies or at the end of the quarter of the brand tracker. If you need to share them out um especially for the brand tracker obviously fine but hold on to um addressing these particular questions related to growth until uh you have your full story assembled. And that's it. Um thank you everyone for joining me for this session today. I'm happy to take your questions at this time. Hey Jessica, thank you so much. That was a great presentation. I learned a lot of interesting things about the research process that I just hadn't really considered before. So, thank you. We do have one question um in the Q&A from Brian. He says um what was the total time frame for this market assessment project? It seems like to do it right, the time would have to been longer rather than shorter, and which part took the longest? That's a great question. Um so I would say the overall program for the 10 markets um spanned the course of almost two years. Um now the idea the thing to keep in mind is that the team on the client side can only operate and act so fast on the results that we're putting out. So what you need to think about in creating the timeline is how fast can the team act on these results. But the very first market we were able to have um results up and ready on those within um the first two months. And when you comes to these bigger strategic initiatives, you can't expect to have results um immediately. So two to three months seems like a very reasonable time frame. And then the team can start getting to to the team on the client side can start getting to work on the operator opera operational components of putting the actions in place in market one while you then go and you work on analyzing for market two and that creates this really nice flow of information where they're constantly um acting on the results as they are being rolled out. So we rolled out um results for a new market every quarter and then the team was able to quickly and easily pivot on that. So, we covered eight of the markets. Um, and we didn't we didn't end up completing the last two. Those were handled by another team. Um, but it doesn't always have to take that long. I mentioned the health and safety um idea of using this type of a research program to refine what your health and safety policies might be. We did something like that recently in my current position and we were able to complete it in six weeks. So, it doesn't have to take that long. Got it. So, we have another question. This would be too long of a time frame for many of the clients I've worked with. Would you consider simultaneous digital quality or multiple markets at once, if not all? Yep. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's no reason that the the research can't run simultaneously. I think the um really what the barrier from my experience has been is oftentimes on the client side teams aren't nimble enough to act upon more than one market at a time. So I think especially when you work at a larger firm like where I was at LRW, we could have put out those um reports faster. In fact, we could have issued one every month after the first one was issued or we could have issued them in batches. But the the problem is you want to make sure that the client is acting on the results and really bringing them to life. And putting that many um things in front of them is like putting them in front of a fire hose and asking them to drink from the fire hose. Like they will get lost. they will they will not be unless they do truly have a very nimble organization where they have teams dedicated to the different markets which could be possible especially in international situations where you have a team dedicated to growth in Germany and a team dedicated to growth in Japan. So that's definitely a situation where you could roll those out and I did actually have another client where we were doing um global results and we did roll those out all at a single given time and that was a much shorter project. So, the timeline will be a little bit contingent on it. Um, and it's something you can keep in mind when you put your design together. Great. Thank you. Oh, and they said, "Fair point and great context. Thank you for your thoughtful response and great presentation." You're very welcome. All right. I think those are all the questions we have. Um, so thank you so much, Jessica. It was a great presentation. Thanks so much for joining us and contributing to our conference. Thank you, Erica. Thank you for having It was great experience. Great. Thank you. And everyone else, stick around. We have about nine more minutes until our next presentation.