My clients are like carnivores at a vegetarian Thanksgiving. There’s no shortage of food, delicious dishes of every variety. But in the end they’re left with a fundamental need for a drumstick.
In the last quarter, I’ve been asked to review probably two dozen reports ranging from media analysis reports to brand tracking studies to internal employee surveys. What they all have in common is a startling lack of information from which the client can draw conclusions.
There’s plenty of data, and it comes in a variety of flavors, shapes, colors and sizes. But in the end, I have to ask “Where’s the beef—or drumstick?” There’s nothing wrong with the data itself, it’s just that there are too few conclusions that can be drawn from it. The answer isn’t more data, the answer is asking the right questions and getting the right cross sections of the data.
Here are 3 ways to gain new insights from your data:
1. Look at the world from a new perspective.
One of my most memorable moments of 2013 was standing in a conference room of a very large and well-known consumer products company that is renowned for its marketing prowess. The room was packed with marketing analysts and research pros. We were looking at results of a worldwide customer satisfaction study. There were literally thousands of data points. The results had been summarized in a color-coded table organized by geographic region. Imagine, for example, that it looked like this:
The discussion was focused on what was going wrong in Ireland and Spain, and they quickly concluded that the declining sales were due to the bad economic climate in both countries.
My analysis was different. I concluded that their biggest problem was that they were perceived as a company that was hard to do business with EVERYWHERE IN THE WORLD! I’ve added color coding illustrate the point:
While both conclusions might be accurate, there was little the marketing team could do about the state of the economy in those two countries. They could, however, do something about the overall perception of the company as hard to do business with.
They applauded my genius and wisdom. But, in fact, it was mostly that they were looking at the vertical columns, and I was looking at horizontal rows. This might seem like an incredibly simple difference, but too frequently that’s all it takes to reveal important insights.
2. Ask these vital questions about your data set—at least.
All the data in the world can’t deliver insight if you haven’t got the right cross tabs. Sometimes the problem is that the client doesn’t know which cross tabs he/she needs or what to ask for. Other times the provider of the data is trying too hard prove or disprove their own beliefs. The solution is to cure your Cross tab deficit disorder (CDD): Make sure that you get cross tabs by gender, media source/type, and anything that you think might have influenced a key data point.
Case in point: We were doing a study of attitudes and awareness among the populace in upstate New York. In general all the news was pretty good. So good that it was hard to figure out what recommendations I could possibly make to improve the program. But one of my standard questions is always, “Do women feel differently than men?” A quick look at our cross tabs turned up the startling fact that women were twice as negative about my client’s initiatives as were the men. Turns out their messages hadn’t reached women yet, and they had a lot of work to do with that demographic.
Here are the standard questions I always ask when looking at a data set, and you’d do well to ask them, too:
- Do women feel differently than men?
- Did seeing different types of media influence opinions differently?
- Did older people see things differently than younger?
- Does length of time with the company make a difference in the responses?
- Does physical location make a difference in the responses?
- Is there any seasonality to the data?
- Does the form/type of communication make a difference?
3. Connect your data to goals.
Most reports these days are very long on data points, but they are frequently the wrong data points. The research is generally driven by a specific question or problem that needs to be solved. So an ad agency is pleased to present data that shows their ads are effective, while meanwhile, buried in the data is proof that PR is actually more cost-effective. Or, in the internal survey to determine how effective a specific internal communications program is, the data shows that a specific department head has a problem, not the company newsletter.
The point here is to make sure you are addressing a business problem, not just claiming credit for a specific program. Research isn’t cheap, even if you’re not paying much for the survey tool. Whether you are surveying your customers or your employees, you always run the risk of trying their patience with too many questions.
So make sure you are either solving a problem or providing an opportunity with your conclusions. You’ll always get more “gold stars” with insight than you will with simple numbers. ∞
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