Editor's note: Edward Appleton is a client-side European consumer insights manager. He can be reached at eappleton90@googlemail.com. This article appeared in the February 24, 2014, edition of Quirk's e-newsletter.

Earlier this month at the MAFO 2014 conference in Germany, I presented a paper (conceived jointly with Jonathan Gable) on how researchers can become more influential. Some conversations at the event made it even clearer that upping our MR game is essential:

  • Client-side MR staffing is decreasing.
  • MR budgets are flat, at best.
  • Analytics are taking insights' funding.
  • MR is often a two-to-three-year career pit stop.

This is a sobering picture but one that pervades. If we don't access client-side consumer insights funding, both for people and projects, insights functions will suffer. So what are we to do?

  

Here are some thoughts on how to win the budget battle.

  

1. Beef up your insights abilities.

  

I really do wonder to what extent we are still more marketing researchers than insights specialists - delivering data narrowly, without broad impact. Here's what I think all next-gen insights deliverables should do:

 

  • Hit the objectives and indicate potential actions - short term, medium term and long term.
  • Deliver contextual insights and make these part of the brief. Aha moments are often unplannable; they're not necessarily in the original brief.
  • Build business knowledge and reference broadly. Consultants reference other categories all the time and MR should do the same, citing case studies and linking them back to the business problem at hand. If you are executing a packaging design test, for example, look for similar examples in related categories and access top line knowledge on how that may have impacted market performance. Even talking this sort of language will help you be taken more seriously.

2. Work on influence skills.

  

Nobody I know would willingly raise their hand and admit they are poor influencers - myself included. No need to fess up publicly; we just need to acknowledge to ourselves that we can improve our marketing, communication and yes, our selling skills and start putting our cross-boundary interactions into practice. At the very least, we'll create higher visibility (i.e., salience), which is often more than half the battle.

  

3. Find VOC champions.

  

If the highest-ups at a company don't buy into a true VOC culture, insights departments are likely to be starved of influence and budget. We need to identify stakeholders who are operating at board level and engage in viral insights marketing. This means putting consumer insights case studies in their minds, including key facts and figures about what insights is doing. Plant the seeds.

 

4. Bring in consumers.

 

Interacting with end-users invariably excites marketing and operational staff. It can be an online community, internal workshops, immersion-style visits, mobile self-ethnographies - whatever suits your needs. The key here is for MR to take the lead. No initiative present? Suggest one. Start small and emphasize that there's no real need for a big budget for a pilot-style project. 

 

Plenty more

 

There's plenty more we can do to help win budget battles, such as developing our strategic skill sets, raising our voices and documenting the ROI of research. If we're active in managing our own destiny, then we can become central to VOC programs - ideally leading them - and not be bypassed by data rivers that flow directly from data warehouse, Internet marketing and customer service to decision makers. We need to become part of the flow - not sitting on an island, watching the waters rising and wondering why.

 

Curious, as ever, as to others' views.