View from Silicon Valley

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Ask anyone what their favourite holiday activities are and you’ll soon hear how much they love people-watching. For me, the professional version of this has always been working on international research projects. Whether it’s meeting clients and colleagues in different countries, talking to consumers in qual groups or finding patterns in data that tie people together across whole continents, learning about people in different cultures and countries is surely one of the great joys of working in our industry.

I was lucky enough to transfer from London to San Francisco last summer for a new role at Twitter and every week I seem to bump into another cultural quirk that sets our two countries apart. Aside from battling spellcheck to stop it turning ‘s’ into ‘z’ or deleting ‘u’, life as a researcher here is similar enough to make it easy to settle in but different enough to make it surprisingly challenging.

I’ve been thinking about which of those differences would be useful to highlight for anyone in the UK research industry who might be working with US clients. Let’s start with three tips I’ve had to pick up quickly for presenting or pitching to US research or marketing teams:

1. Show your workings

In the UK our mantra was ‘simplify’. The challenge for agencies and client-side teams alike has always been to make the recommendations from a project as clear and actionable as possible. The technical side of market research is similar but it’s almost unspoken in the UK and taken as a given. In fact, I’d bet most agencies try to minimise the amount of time spent presenting back their methodology to a client in favour of focusing on their recommendations and demonstrating they understand the client’s problem in detail.

Out here, that’s not the case. You’ll still focus on the story when you present back, but the questions you get will be very different. For example, I’ve been asked to show the individual eigenvalues for each statement selected for use in a segmentation project. I’ve seen marketers debate the weighting used on simple quant studies, while questions at research conferences will default to first asking the technical ‘how’ of something being presented, rather than the commercial ‘why’. Be ready to show your workings in X-ray detail.

2. Start beyond data

The tools available to client-side researchers have never been better. Tech brands are drenched in data and you can assume that almost every team will have a minimum of a couple of people who are able to access at least basic behavioural insights whenever they are remotely curious about a problem or opportunity. On top of that, most of these brands will have their own survey platforms and/or research communities that they can tap into at any time. As a result, every research agency I’ve met in the US starts its pitch with what it can add to its client’s insight arsenal beyond just collecting more data. 

So, don’t leave the more innovative methodologies for the ‘we can also do x’ section of your pitch – lead with it; it’s insight that’s needed here – even more so than in the UK – not data, and those more left-field ideas might just be the ones to unlock that.

3. Zoom out

Partly as a result of the data washing around companies, a lot of insights that surface internally are both incredibly valuable and highly descriptive. Every week I see extraordinary presentations from PhD-wielding data scientists and engineers explaining how Twitter is being used. The job of the market researcher in data-heavy companies like this is not so much to measure what people are doing, but to explain why and to tell their story outside of the reach of internal data. Where does this product fit in their everyday life? What does the wider market look like? What’s next?

Relentlessly focusing on the bigger picture like this and answering ‘why’ rather than just ‘what’ or ‘how many’ is just as valuable for client-side research teams here as it is for the agencies working with them. 

Matt Taylor is consumer insight lead at Twitter