It’s not every day you run into a market researcher that has fundamentally disrupted their organizations. Or is it? The same week I was preparing to present Giustina Parisi’s story at The Quirk's Event, I had the great fortune of hearing the stories of two other disruptive researchers at the Insights Association CEO Summit. They shared their journey and provided some tips and recommendations for other client-side researchers about how you can do the same.

In this blog, you will learn about:

• How Tyler Kettle used what he termed the “freemium model” to entice the team at IBM to start investing more in consumer insights
• How Giustina Parisi at American Family Insurance helped her organization implement agile research methods and put consumer insights at the center of decision making
• How Lisa Courtade at Merck was able to overcome red tape from both regulatory and business risks to bring innovation to pharmaceutical research

I’ll also share some of their recommendations for you, including Lisa’s in-depth view at her recommendations on how to reproduce the results she had delivered at Merck.

IBM: Getting Teams to Invest more in Consumer Insights:

When Tyler came to IBM, internal teams weren’t too excited to spend money on research.  And, like many researchers, Tyler didn’t have his own research budget to spend. He had to get sponsors to buy into spending on research, when they didn’t really know how much they needed it. And as the result of Tyler’s approach, he was able to generate significant new demand for market research internally, turning the tide on declining research budgets.

So how did he do it? Tyler calls it the “Freemium” model. 

Give them a taste of what they can get with faster, low cost research approaches. Once they see the value, they will come back for more.

He took leveraged DIY technology to reduce the time and cost of entry to do research to a level where teams couldn’t say “no." He sold in quick research studies that helped guide immediate team decisions. With the low level of past research spending, the results of these quick studies were just what the team needed to identify gaps in their understanding, and wet their appetite for more in-depth and ongoing research initiatives. 

Tyler went on to build rate cards and retainers to speed internal deployment for a wide variety of methods. He also set up insight communities for his company, making access to rapid insights part of the company culture. Today, Tyler is working for Google, where he is helping reinvent global CX research.

American Family: Implementing a new company vision by reinventing research approaches

When Giustina started at American Family, she was faced with a research team that was losing relevance as the organization’s shifted to more agile decision-making. Business teams were running in 20-90 day sprints. How could her team provide insights in this new agile environment when it took them a minimum of 2 weeks to set up the research, a week to run the study and 1-2 weeks to provide a report? 

In order to truly shift her teams approach to research, she turned to new technology solutions looking to fit high quality research into the business teams sprint framework. She was introduced to Digsite Sprint capabilities as a way to generate quick wins and turn the tide on the team’s reputation. But finding the right tool wasn’t enough.

New research methods succeed when you find cross-functional business partners eager to get better and faster results and willing to evangelize a new approach.

After delivering a win for one business team, they became our advocates and others begin spinning up Digsite Sprints. The acceleration of market research involvement went at light speed, with the average research study being conducted in an average of 3-6 days rather than 3-6 weeks.

Merck: Facing into personal, regulatory and business risks associated with new technology

Lisa Courtade is always on the lookout for ways to do things better. She sees a new research approach or technology that might help her business and is quick to jump at the chance to try it. But in a highly regulated pharmaceutical environment, it isn’t easy to move forward and get things done. Rather than taking “no” by the legal department at face value, Lisa dove into their concerns and helped her research providers overcome concerns about privacy, security and compliance. She shared many examples of successful new technologies she had brought to the company, from online communities to facial coding. After her peers asked her why she got all of the “cool projects”, she reflected on her approach and identified the factors that she thought lead to her success.

First, Lisa said she just didn’t take internal roadblocks at face value. 

Sit down with your legal or security team and focus on understanding the specific risks with new research methods. You can't just take their responses at face value.

For example, on the legal side she needed to become much more familiar with what the specific organizational concerns were related to privacy, IT security, and informed consent. On the business risk side, she need to be clear on how the new method contributed to better business outcomes. And she needed to find advocates in the organization that believed the opportunity was worth their time. 

Finally, she needed to weigh the personal risk of success using existing methods vs. trying something new. While many believed it was easier to go with a proven method or agency, she believed the benefits of trying something new would outweigh the risks to her career as long as she felt confident it would succeed. And that meant she needed to understand the risks more clearly. Rather than take all of that on herself, she put pressure on her new vendors to help her explain and sell-in the new approach as well as to take ownership of the challenges and risks. She needed to partner with vendors who were transparent about their capabilities and were truly investing in technology, methods, training and resources to make it a success. She said some vendors came to her expecting her to try something new just for the sake of change. The ones she partnered with came with much more of a focus on building confidence in the reliability and accuracy of the results.

How do you change the fundamentals at your company?

All three of these stories highlight something I believe is critical to creating change. They looked beyond the needs of the project right in front of them, to look more strategically at what the organization needed. And, they didn’t just look to vendors for solutions, they looked internally at their processes and relationships needed to succeed. And most importantly, they didn’t go it alone. They found advocates internally and externally to help them champion something new, and share the risks and rewards of success. 

I believe now more than ever, we are being tasked with helping organizations innovate faster.  And if we don't respond to the challenge, our stakeholders will go elsewhere. While it may seem scary, creating change doesn’t require courage as much as it requires agility to break down the risk factors and make it easy for people to say yes. Ultimately, those who have the desire and the follow-through to create change are seen as courageous heroes in their organization.

Want to learn more about being a qualitative hero? Check out the
recording to our recent webinar, "How to Be a Qualitative Hero."