How to avoid wasting research

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When the financial crisis started to bite in 2007/08, I was working on a project focused on the future of environmentalism. Just a year before – and for the first time – the environment had overtaken the economy as the most important issue facing the UK in regular polling.

At the time, a significant number of consumers were happily paying more for products that didn’t harm the environment, but many commentators expected the green movement to subside in the face of financial pressures. Instead, green behaviours became even more widespread because of the desire to minimise waste and so save money.

I was just a couple of years into my career, so minimising waste was drilled into me – but when we talk about how our industry is changing, we often default to how studies must be run faster and cheaper. We rarely put the same effort into thinking about minimising waste, and this misses a huge opportunity.

Numerous studies have shown that most advertising – possibly up to 89% – is not recalled. In the research industry, the most recent Grit GreenBook report found that half of businesses don’t promote market research to broader audiences beyond the commissioning client. Even in individual research studies, large sections of surveys and data sets will often go under-analysed and under-used.

Here are three ways that we encourage our teams to avoid waste when it comes to research and insights:

Up-cycle your data: most research studies are focused on a single topic or problem, but almost all of them will carry the same demographic questions each time. That gives researchers a significant opportunity to combine and re-use existing studies to identify entirely new insights about demographic groups (within GDPR guidelines).

At a previous company, in the depths of the recession, our CMO asked us to evaluate a potential new target demographic, but with a budget of precisely zero to commission new research. We gathered all of our recent studies and, rather than look at them ‘vertically’ – through the lenses of their individual objectives – we looked at them ‘horizontally’.

We took that audience definition, recreated it from the demographic questions attached to all our surveys, and looked to see what we could understand, more broadly, about that audience across our different studies. Say you have a survey about how video consumption is changing over time and another about shopping habits. They’ll tell you a lot about each individual topic, but why not just look at 45- to 65-year-olds across both data sets and see what you can learn about their lives more broadly?

Learn to ‘question storm’: I’ve talked about how data-heavy companies will often have all the answers but that researchers need to have the right questions to fully realise the benefit of that ocean of information. Asking great questions is a core skill for writing effective surveys – but building on that to consistently think of theories and questions to explore outside of the original scope of a data set is a very valuable capability in which any research team should invest.

Broaden access to research: so many of the best questions and hypotheses will come from people outside of a study’s original stakeholder set. Invest in or build a process for allowing anyone to access research whenever they like, and promote it across your business. By ensuring that anyone in your organisation can find, browse and comment on research, you maximise your chances of finding new questions and angles through which you can interrogate past data.