Researcher, research thyself

Researchers spend their days finding out what customers want, need and expect of the companies they do business with or buy products from. “But as an industry we don’t do research for ourselves nearly enough,” says Hetta Bramley.

Bramley is a director of Relish Research, the agency that used to be called Drummond Madell. When co-founder Monique Drummond decided to rebrand the firm (after her business partner John Madell left) she thought it best to ask her customers what they want from a research agency.

Ten clients were interviewed, among them Gillian Hurley, Vodafone UK’s market research manager. She explained: “Our overriding needs are for good, solid, basic research – and always for a great, clear debrief. At the same time, we always like to hear about different things, and I feel a real need to keep up with new developments and trends in the research world. However, the reality is most of our work uses tried and trusted approaches which we know work well for us.”

That hardly sounds like the “unreasonable demands” decried in late-night, post-conference drinks discussions with agency types. Indeed, Bramley says, the key take-home from all the client interviews was that agencies need to make their insight clients “look good” and do things that validate “their choice of you as the agency”.

Insight managers have clients themselves, she explains – internal stakeholders who have tasked their research teams with answering a commercially important question. They may want that answer delivered in a certain way and within a certain time, neither of which may be conducive to producing the best research. But Bramley insists it is up to the research agency to question the brief, to make it clear that there are trade-offs between things like time, cost and quality.

“We need to give our insight clients the ammunition to argue for a better methodology internally if that is what is required,” she says. Drummond adds: “That push back is necessary.”

It may seem trite, but research agencies are there to make their clients’ lives easier – otherwise what’s the point in hiring them. Part of this involves developing an understanding of the client’s business. “They don’t need us to understand every single aspect,” says Bramley, “but they want us to know enough that when they pick up the phone, we know what they are talking about and can pick up the conversation straight away”.

Arguably, this level of relationship is easier for smaller agencies to maintain, where each researcher has maybe a handful of clients to work with, rather than in large agencies with hundreds of customers on the books and where relationships are managed via account handling teams rather than the research practitioner.

Indeed in one interview a client (who declined to be named for this piece) expressed dissatisfaction with their experience of larger agencies, which could be best summed up as ‘impersonal’. “They never bother to find out about me and what we do and what we want,” the client said. “They are 30% more expensive for a poorer job, and worse, they force their tools on us whether we need it or not.”

“Agencies with proprietary methodologies can be too prescriptive when a bespoke response is needed,” says another interviewee, Liz Parker, insight manager for print and web publisher A&N Media, home of the Daily Mail.

“It’s important for us to explore new ways of doing things,” she says, “but it’s also important that as an industry we don’t lose skills such as effective questionnaire design and insightful analysis. These core skill areas are often where we experience quality issues.”

Bramley sees a common theme emerging from the interviews – that is, for agencies to dispense with the gimmicks and concentrate on delivering “lateral thinking within a robust framework”.

Research buyers are also looking for robustness in the recommendations arising from the research. “Ultimately, I want an agency to challenge us and tell us what they would do as if they were spending their own money,” says another anonymous interviewee.

Meanwhile, A&N’s Parker says: “No one should be able to walk away from a debrief saying, ‘So what?’ They should be in no doubt about what the commercial implications of a piece of work are.”

So what are we to take from Relish’s research? The conclusion drawn internally, says Drummond, is that clients are looking to be “surprised and delighted by every piece of research”.

Unlike the advertising industry, where account wins dominate the trade news and agency outputs are there for all to see, the research world largely goes on behind closed doors. “You have to make a positive impression on a few consumer insight managers, who do move around and hopefully, when they do, they’ll take you with them,” says Drummond.

And remember, she says: “You’re only ever as good as your last project.”