Successful B2B research requires insight generation, not just data gathering

By Kieron Mathews | March 1, 2008

Reading time: 7 minutes

Abstract

Business-to-business research can often suffer from "death by bar chart." To really generate useful information and analysis, B2B researchers need to generate insights in addition to data, and take the time in reporting on the data to make outcomes and actions clear and understandable to their end clients.

Research Topics:: Bus.-To-Bus. Research | Bus.-To-Bus. Rsch. Consultation | Data Analysis
Industry/Market Focus:: Business-To-Business
Content Type: Research Methodology

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Going beyond the numbers

Editor’s note: Kieron Mathews is head of research in the London office of research firm Kadence.

The sole purpose of market research is to offer clients a competitive advantage. Researchers traditionally achieve this by producing data - simple numbers that assist a client in establishing the basic mechanics of a market, and therefore, the associated business opportunities in selling a product or service to the identified audience.

As markets have matured, however, a simple number isn’t enough. It no longer provides a sustainable competitive advantage or added value to a business. During the mid-1990s, the American market research industry witnessed this transition; clients began wanting much more from the data being provided and sought researchers who offered meaning to the numbers within a business context.

Figures alone are no longer the tools that assist a business in getting one step ahead of its competition; this can only be achieved with market insight.

Understanding how to interpret data to generate insight and how this, in turn, can be applied to a client’s business is extremely complex, and many market researchers fail to give themselves the opportunity to find insight and deliver it in an effective manner. Critically, many market research agencies fail to grasp that insight is no longer a value-added service. In today’s market, it is the reason that research is commissioned.

Extensively documented

Consumer preferences and trends have been extensively documented. Data is available in most mature markets on what consumers do, when and how, and their rationales behind such activity. As a result, delivering insight within this environment is a long-established practice and is essential in the fight to achieve a competitive advantage.

Within the business-to-business (B2B) sector, however, insight has not been adopted with the same urgency. This is ultimately due to the complexity of business activity in general and the cost of business research, resulting in fewer market research studies taking place and fewer questions being asked at a basic level to fully comprehend why companies behave in certain ways, purchase particular products and prefer specific suppliers. This has enabled simple, unadorned data to retain its market value throughout the last few years.

Additionally, the business relationship under investigation, between vendor and end user, is much more complicated, as there are often many people involved in the purchase decision-making process. For example, technicians in an organization’s IT department are responsible for ensuring that new technology is compatible with the existing IT infrastructure, yet it is the business professionals using the equipment that drive the need. Both parties are involved in the decision-making process to ensure that the technology helps achieve business objectives and is easy to implement and update with the latest software. Therefore, interpreting the motivation behind the choices of each company can lead to incomparable conclusions.

Regardless of these challenges, the advantages that insight can offer over data are now starting to be fully appreciated and expected by B2B clients. The sector appreciates that by asking the organizations why they purchase a product or service - for example, is it because the salesperson is particularly efficient, the company offers good incentives or because it hosts the best corporate hospitality? - much more meaningful information is generated, information that has obvious business actions associated, such as increasing training for salespeople or reviewing the company’s corporate hospitality offering.

One such tool to generate insight within the B2B marketplace is star brand analysis. This analyzes the channel (be that a retailer, an optician, a vet or an IT reseller) and identifies why a brand wins the battle to get stocked and, ultimately, recommended to a consumer. It does this by breaking down the levers that help determine which brands are stocked into six categories:

product - features and perceived quality of the product;
procurement - logistics of obtaining the product;
people - quality, knowledge and understanding of company representatives and customer services;
pricing options - pricing, available margin and pricing terms;
perception - brand image;
pull - consumer awareness and demand.

Sequential analysis of each category allows the researcher to fully explore and understand the factors that result in the observed performance, pinpointing each brand’s strengths and weaknesses within the category.

Complex process

Generating insight is a complex, laborious process that has to overcome many barriers before a project can be completed. Extracting meaning from numbers and translating this into a business context with understandable, easy-to-implement actions is no simple task. Any researcher will agree that it is far less work to decide on a set of questions with a client, ask the questions, populate tables and give the numbers to the client than to understand what the numbers represent.

Key to delivering insight is time. The process is exploratory, creative and almost organic. Finding the dead ends has to be viewed as part of the natural research life cycle and not a disruption. Researchers need lots of data and lots of questions as raw materials to start to find the story behind the numbers. It is the researcher’s job to “sweat the data” - drill it, cut it, to find out what is going on. The quality of the analysis can be defined by the cutting-room floor - the analysis that came up with nothing, which has forced the researcher to go deeper. Without undertaking this lengthy process, a researcher will be unable to achieve usable, interesting insight.

For some agencies, whose core business is to churn out numbers quickly and cost-effectively, a study can become costly if anyone queries the figures and what they mean. The strict timeline to which the researcher is working is interrupted. This slows down the output of data and completion of a project and is viewed as losing money. Many agencies solely producing research in this manner would argue that there is still a client desire for data, however, activity within the marketplace would indicate otherwise.

Unfortunately, generating insight is not something that a company can decide to offer overnight. It requires a different outlook into what research is and how it should be produced and requires everyone involved in a research study not to view insight as the “value add” at the end of a project. In essence, for large, number-producing organizations, a new culture must be adopted. There is also tough competition from smaller agencies, who have fought hard for new business and have invested heavily in the provision of insight. Aware of this opposition, some data companies are acquiring boutique insight agencies to offer such services, acknowledging that such a fundamental change in their organizational culture cannot happen in the short- to medium-term.

Drowning in data

Generating insight does mean more data, which does, of course, need to be shared with the client. However, this does not need to be shared during the initial debrief. Sitting through a quantitative research debrief can result in clients drowning in data and struggling to identify the key findings of the study - the insight. Known throughout the business as “death by bar chart,” this has been one of the most common by-products of the industry’s transition from data production to insight generation. So how do you cut down on the number of slides, save a few trees and make sure there is more insight and less data in a research debrief?

The trick is to be very focused on what bits of the analysis actually make it into the debrief presentation. The best insights are clean and simple, with distinguishable business actions that can be implemented. The time spent with a client is often limited, so researchers need to ensure that their presentations are kept short to allow for an extended question-and-answer session. This enables those attending the debrief meeting a chance to discuss the findings of interest to them and extract the required knowledge from the researcher. To achieve debrief success, researchers should:

Start thinking about the presentation at the beginning of the research project. This gives the team a structure to work toward and gets them pondering how certain elements of their findings may eventually be communicated to their audiences.
Invest time. It takes a lot longer to write a short presentation. An organization must develop a culture that allows researchers time to conclude a project and create a powerful presentation, and not rush the vital final stages of the activity.
Ask “so what?” This is a very effective way of culling redundant slides. Ideally this is undertaken by a colleague who is not close to the data. If the researcher can’t answer this simple question there are two choices: go back and do further analysis or delete the slide.
Think visually. Making a presentation engaging and easy to understand will demonstrate to a client that the company has gone that extra step to produce an informative document and will also allow them to share the presentation and communicate the key findings with others in the company.

Important role

Insight is no longer an added-value offering but a researcher’s core product. Data still plays an important role in understanding business opportunities within developing countries. The reams and reams of demographic data, taken for granted in mature consumer markets, have not yet been established, and the statistics on business behavior have yet to be documented.

Data on these activities is being generated and shared at an astonishing pace, but once these figures have been established, they will become worthless to businesses striving to achieve a competitive advantage. Therefore, the move from data to insight, which we have seen in North America and Europe, will inevitably happen in Asia and South America , and forward-thinking research agencies are already aligning their culture to this certainty.