Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is a summary of a current article from Third Eyesight's blog.
Despite the wealth of information available today, far too many bad business decisions are being made in the absence of good information, either because the executives have not bothered to carry out research, or have not had the capability or the time to question the research which is being presented to them.
Worse - perhaps because of the abundant data and the ease of access to it - today many business decisions that turn bad are taken on the basis of information that is presented by someone else ("secondary research" in research language), without questioning the validity of the conclusions, the structure of the study, the context in which the data was analyzed. It's almost as if we couldn't be bothered to think, because someone has apparently already done the thinking for us - especially if it comes from a "reputable source."
Sometimes the problem lies in the perception of research as an impenetrable jungle in which it is easy to get lost but difficult to find something immediately useful. Researchers, like all other vocations, have their own jargon which they sometimes use to identify their own kind, and perhaps sometimes to exclude people who are not from the trade. Very often this jungle is created by "research-as-a-foreign-language", which many executives are just too apprehensive or too busy to tackle.
Also, research (especially the number-oriented kind) seems too dry for most people to take in. And I think that is one place market researchers could do themselves a huge benefit if they could tell the story - especially a story with a moral at the end. That is, create the picture for the user as to what all of that information means in simple language, and also show the user how to use the information in the context of his situation or problem. Bedtime stories during childhood and good movies in adulthood work well because there is a coherent narrative, a start, a middle that is interesting and an ending that stays in the mind. You can see the relationships between the characters, and the consequences of those relationships. A good research project report could be seen as something very similar.
Having said that, of course, there are also some researchers that go far beyond, who would never let boring facts get in the way of a good story. How many stores can you think of which are located at sites where their chances of success are exactly the same as that of a snowball in hell? How many products or brand launches come to mind, where you wondered, "what is this company thinking?!" Of course, there would have been pre-launch studies which would have shown just how successful these would be, where the stories were possibly based more on imagination than on facts.
For a decision-maker, the only way to tell the difference between bad statistics and the true story of the market is to make sure that he or she is equipped with multiple sources of information, and various tools with which to analyze them.
Numbers (quantitative research) and narrative (qualitative research) can tell us many wonderful stories about the market. Some of those stories are highly imaginative "fairy tales" because of a bad study - that shouldn't lead us to ignore all the others which can direct us to our objectives.
Discussion Questions: Do you find many corporations take a narrow view of research? What are the hurdles preventing decision-makers from fully utilizing all available research? In what ways can research providers improve on the ways they communicate their findings?