Bringing people together: How research can build human-centric businesses

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Data capture, data science, datapoints, data crunching, analytics. Data is at the heart of corporate life, of what we do at work. Often a sea of data. But what about, to use Professor Brené Brown’s famous phrase, ‘data with a soul’? What about the human dimension? Shouldn’t people and their stories be at the heart of the matter?

The lines are blurring in life – there is less of a distinction between our roles as employees, friends, partners or parents. On top of that, individuals are not only consumers of brands and products, but also of culture, media, trends and natural resources. Meanwhile, business leaders cannot afford to operate in silos, or take a blinkered approach, given the many challenges they face, from market-disrupting competitors to shifting customer demands and wider geopolitical pressures.

Many organisations recognise the need to be consumer-centric, but it is another leap to actually become human-centred in their approach. It’s hard to capture a much fuller picture that goes beyond the label of ‘consumer’ – and, in the main, the research industry is overly reliant on old ways of thinking. Vital insights are missed through a failure to get a 360-degree view of the person behind the data.

There is growing awareness of this problem, both within agencies and client-side. Yet there are obvious impediments to building a ‘human-centric’ approach (see boxout below on defining a human-centred organisation) when clients face an array of short-term pressures. In that light, humanisation is perhaps at risk of becoming a fad or just another buzzword. So, what is going on?

“It is interesting that, as categories dissolve a little bit, or at least soften, clients are becoming more conscious of being people-centric,” says Paul Child, global client partner at InSites Consulting. “A live example of this intersectionality is electric vehicles. Who owns those? Is it automotive or utilities companies? Both have a stake in it because it’s a new category. But if we think about it in pure category terms, we don’t really get anywhere.

“In a highly fragmented society, we are all people. As Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has said, when anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. If we think of qualitative research and human-centric research as anecdote and story building, that’s your route to activating insight. It’s the stories people remember and why they make change.”

Regulatory drivers

Child does a lot of work in financial services, a sector that, over the years, has attracted considerable criticism around customer service and fairness to consumers. However, regulatory change led by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), which committed in 2021 to becoming ‘more assertive’, has ramped up pressure on firms by setting higher and clearer standards of consumer protection across financial services, and requiring them to put their customers’ needs first. These changes are known as the consumer duty. The FCA published finalised guidance on the consumer duty in July 2022 and its expectations make for interesting reading, including that firms should:

• Put consumers at the heart of their business and focus on delivering good outcomes for customers; provide products and services that are designed to meet customers’ needs, that they know provide fair value, that help customers achieve their financial objectives, and that do not cause them harm
• Communicate and engage with customers so they can make effective, timely and properly informed decisions about financial products and services, and can take responsibility for their actions and decisions
• Not seek to exploit customers’ behavioural biases, lack of knowledge or characteristics of vulnerability; consistently consider the needs of their customers, and how they behave, at every stage of the product/service life-cycle
• Continuously learn from their growing focus and awareness of real customer outcomes
• Ensure that the interests of their customers are central to their culture and purpose, and embedded throughout the organisation
• Monitor and regularly review the outcomes that their customers are experiencing in practice, and take action to address any risks to good customer outcomes.

The onus is on firms to gain a deeper understanding of people and ensure human insights, rather than just data, inform product development. Nationwide Building Society, an InSites Consulting client, is seeking to do just that. “As a member-led organisation, bringing our members’ experiences to life and putting them at the centre of how we create our products and services is key,” says Livvy Gill, research manager at the building society. “The stories from our research add to our data to provide a more colourful and engaging picture. While we continue to use primary and internal data to inform and evidence our decisions, the stories we tell about real people bring that data to life and inspire colleagues to take action.”

Nationwide runs a number of regular pieces through its Member Connect community, combining a survey approach with deep dives, to help stakeholders feel closer to the experiences of its members, and ongoing diary studies to help build “understanding and empathy” over time, according to Gill.

Increasingly, the role for the research team, she notes, is to help activate insight within the society and to inspire stakeholders to become more “member-centric in their approach”. She adds: “The focus on real people, real lives and real experiences helps us solve real problems for our members.”

Sparking corporate imagination

A recent report from Kantar, The imperative of imagination, argues that while imagination may sound like reaching for the stars, it is actually a core competency for success. In our post-big data, post-pandemic world, the report says that insights are the spark of corporate imagination – and finding them means putting humans at the centre of things.

One business leader interviewed for the report described data as “people in disguise”. Another said: “80% of our data is commercial; 20% is consumer. We lose sight of the people buying our products on a regular basis.”

Insights must develop a richer diversity of data, resources and skills about the human experience, beyond the label of ‘consumer’.

“The next step in customer centricity is really putting the human back at the centre, not the consumer,” says J Walker Smith, knowledge lead at Kantar’s consulting division. “The human-centric view encompasses the consumer-centric view; that’s part of people’s lives – we do consume; we need products; we like ads, frankly, and we don’t really dislike digital – but there is more to it than that.”

Smith says that marketers needed better analytics 15 years ago. Today, however, he feels marketers need greater empathy about the human situation and the lived experience of people as they go through their day-to-day lives. He cites Colgate-Palmolive’s work in North America as an illustration of a brand pivoting to become more human-centric. Lifestyle research showed how difficult people were finding it to remain upbeat in a world that seems to be lurching from one crisis to another. On the back of this insight, Colgate introduced its ‘Smile’ campaign on the power of optimism – allying the brand with a lifestyle idea rather than a traditional category one, with the underlying message that Colgate is on people’s side.

Wellbeing leapt up the corporate agenda during the pandemic and, together with regulatory and environmental, social and governance pressures, has meant that the C-suite is more inclined to consider the human dimension than was arguably the case four or five years ago, even when introducing business model changes in response to volatility and new opportunities. Those who do are steering a smart course. A report from the University of Oxford and EY, The future of transformation is human, found organisations that put humans at the centre of their transformation journey are 2.6 times more likely to be successful than those that do not ( 73% chance of success versus only 28%). Conversely, underperforming transformations don’t invest enough up front in the rationale and/or emotional elements of design.

This move to new business models could result in storytelling being given its rightful prominence in the context of insights, says Graeme Lawrence, global managing partner at InSites Consulting. In discussions with global clients about what they are trying to achieve, Lawrence says he has heard aspirations such as ‘70% of the time should be spent on socialising the insights, 30% of the time should be finding them’.

In general, he sees the client side increasingly picking up on the need to be more human-centric, and feeling “a lot more empowered to do that by being closer to the analytics and making some of the data aspects their own, so that they can tell those stories”. Success, he asserts, will depend on empathy. Ways of achieving that will vary.

“Let’s not get hung up on the methodology per se; let’s get hung up on making sure we can get to those stories for those datapoints and helping the client socialise that,” says Lawrence. “As an industry, we can be a bit academic and talk about the methods quite a lot – yes, they are relevant; yes, it’s down to the client-agency dynamic to try to choose the best ones. We must make sure we have recruited participation in the right way. Do we need to do some social listening and other cultural cues first?”

Getting to the stories

The desire for a better understanding of people’s lived experiences has led some to question the effectiveness of tools such as brand trackers, asking whether they are capturing enough of the right information. It has also resulted in some brands taking a fresh approach to audience segmentation.

That was certainly the case for Virgin Media O2 (VMO2 ) which wanted to go beyond segmenting on the basis of factors such as how much data people wanted, as segments such as this could be equally well served by any of the other providers in the mobile/broadband category.
“Segmentations often fail because stakeholders don’t believe in them or know how to use them,” says David Watts, consumer insight lead in VMO2’s insight, strategy and planning team. “If we were to succeed, we would need a framework that could help us target audiences effectively, innovate meaningfully and, ultimately, be something that the business would look to for inspiration, direction and confidence.”

Human-centric design was paramount, and VMO2 worked with Incite (not to be confused with InSites Consulting) to create psychological safety for stakeholders. As Watts explains, this gave them “licence to speak candidly and express their needs, hopes and fears, allowing us to determine how the segmentation could be plugged into the practices, processes and culture of the teams”.

The team looked at how people make decisions, using qualitative research underpinned by behavioural economics. This included looking at individuals’ relationship with technology and the home, the context in which a device and data connection becomes an important part of their lives.

On top of this personal dimension, the team explored a social dimension, delving into how tech-savvy people consider themselves to be and the extent to which they are seen as an authority in the area by friends, family and colleagues. “These factors play more into our decisions than we in research have historically recognised,” says Jonathan Stone, director at Incite. “We’ll survey people, speak to them one on one or in a group environment, but what gets played back is the rational ‘this is what I want, this is what I need’. But, actually, nobody recognises in themselves how much of an impact other people have on their decision-making.”

Additionally, the research looked at people’s situations – for example, family relationships and spending priorities, including the way the product would be used and how people would be perceived for spending that money. The segmentation is now guiding VMO2’s three-year strategy and, says Watts, feeding every planning decision the business makes.

Health with humanity

Consumer healthcare company Haleon (formerly the consumer healthcare arm of GSK) has recently positioned itself as a business that brings together human understanding and trusted science, with the tagline ‘For Health. With Humanity.’ In line with this, it needs to engage with healthcare professionals (HCPs) – pharmacists, dentists and GPs – to find the best way to connect with them on a personal and professional level.

Haleon asked Ipsos to run a digital ethnography project with pharmacists (and later dentists, with GPs set to come next) to look at how they operate on a day-to-day basis – how they run their pharmacy, the patients they see, and the products they sell. But it also had a more personal side, looking at the strain the pandemic put them under, their role in the community, and how they dealt with Covid-19 at home.

Research was conducted across India, the US, the UK and Germany, and involved pharmacists filming themselves, plus online interviews, to get real insight into the practitioners’ lives – for example, the pharmacists filmed not just their pharmacies, but also their local community and family life.

“We ran through tons of footage of pharmacists’ experiences, collated it, and showed all of this over a day to lots of different people at Haleon so they could feel what was going on in each market,” says Oliver Sweet, head of ethnography at Ipsos. The work informed the creation of the company’s ‘HCP pledge’, designed to be a human way to connect with HCPs. This includes seeing the person, not just the white coat, and helping to foster powerful moments between experts and patients.

More organisations need to undertake such exercises. There’s a need to raise self-awareness of insight gaps, to ensure people are at the heart of the process.

Empathy gaps need to be overcome, says InSites Consulting’s Child. “Part of it is still that age-old problem that the people designing products, services and experiences don’t look a lot like their customer base. How do we burst that bubble for them?”

The answer, according to Child, lies in techniques that bring about closeness, which equates to time spent with real people in real-world scenarios. That may span from self-recorded video and audio ethnography to live chats and face-to-face meetings. “Finding ways of bringing humans into direct contact with the teams will be really important,” he continues. “As agencies, we could also get a lot better at seeing our role as championing the human condition to organisations. We need to be ambassadors of what the human condition is.”

This means using techniques that highlight where some of those disparities are and call for “more triangulation”, more talking to client teams about their expectations, attitudes and behaviours, and making direct comparisons between these and what the customer does. InSites has done work along these lines with the Co-op, which has businesses spanning grocery, funeral care, insurance and legal services.

“Within insight and research, it’s our job to bring real people into the business to inspire and challenge stakeholder thinking – enabling them to understand our customers, members and colleagues deeply, beyond simply seeing them as a sales prospect, a number on a spreadsheet or in a chart,” says Sarah De Caux, lead analytics and insights manager (customer, member and colleague research), Co-op.

“We spend loads of time engaging with stakeholders to bring these human insights to life and we’re immensely proud of how we are influencing our culture and nurturing a customer, member and colleague-centric mindset. This is particularly important now, during a period of transformation for us, against a backdrop of challenging trading conditions and when so many of our customers, members and colleagues are facing a cost-of-living crisis.”