The Best in Research Narratives: Let's Talk Football

I’ve written in the past about journalists who get data storytelling so, so wrong.  But every now and then, they get it so, so right. As we reflect back on the recent Super Bowl hoopla, from the Patriots’ Deflategate, to cries for Pete Carroll’s resignation, it seems a great time to  shed light on two sports pieces that caught my attention as brilliant pieces of data storytelling.

First up: that New England team with the deflated balls. Slate did a spectacular job of building a narrative that makes you think, “Dear lord, have they been doing this for 8 seasons? And is Tom Brady behind it, even if unwittingly so?”

You can click here to read the article. Here’s what works so nicely about it.

• It starts with a hypothesis – that if the Patriots cheated, we might see a difference in their fumble performance before vs. after 2006 rule change on which team provides the game ball. Yes, it’s fundamental hypothesis testing! In a sports news article!
• It builds the story around a clear metric – fumbles (turnovers) – and explains logically why this metric is the most valuable one to look at.
• It offers compelling data driven evidence,  that controls for potential covariates – including overall changes in league trends, the impact of individual players, and the confound of indoor stadium settings. It’s like this guy actually took a stats class, or five.
• It visualizes that data in a way that makes the pattern alarmingly obvious.
• It offers comparisons - actually educating readers by explaining probability, and what distribution we’d expect to see if there weren’t something fishy taking place.
• It explains the outlier data – in this case in a way that serves to support the thesis that, well, the Patriots may have cheated.
• It uses classic storytelling tactics: much like a movie, we have a hero (in this case, a champion quarterback) who might be a potential martyr and catalyst for this conflict. Thank you Tom Brady.

I’m not saying the Patriots cheated, and frankly, I’m not enough of an NFL fan to care. But I will say that whether or not they did, this analysis of the situation provides a compelling argument that they did something different that they’re not admitting. And that’s something investigators would be negligent to ignore. Bravo, Slate.

Next up is Pete Carroll’s 1 yard line call, AKA: the call that every Monday Morning Quarterback protested. Except my pal Rob Pait (read his clever take here) and FiveThirtyEight.com.

If you like data storytelling, you should probably just go ahead and bookmark FiveThirtyEight.com right now. Lots of people found it necessary to pontificate about the risk of Carroll’s pass play, without actually providing any data to back up that risk assessment. Five Thirty Eight actually bothered to do some math.  [insert slow clap here.]

Here’s what I love about this analysis, which concludes that the perceived risk of the ultimately wayward call is far greater than the actual risk.

1. It starts with a great, contentious, catchy headline. I know, clickbait, blah blah. But they actually come back to the headline and address it in the end. And even though questioning Belichick is really a secondary point, they do eventually make that point, while making an even better one along the way.
2. The article starts off by painting a gripping picture of that last minute in the game, making you feel the urgency and pressure of the situation. It’s great writing. And can we, for just a moment, congratulate statisticians on being capable writers? Thank you, data analysts of Five Thirty Eight, for taking the time to learn communication skills. And thank you, journalists, for learning how to analyze and interpret data. May others follow in your footsteps.
3. It provides a hilariously clever villain: Harvard. The article tees up two data tweets from Harvard Sports as darn compelling. And then slowly, meticulously, the author unravels how misguided the tweets really are when you don’t look at the entire context. I should confess that I went to Cornell, and thus embrace any chance to snort in the general direction of Harvard sports. But even if this had been my own alma mater, I would have been impressed by the way the writer set the stage and then tore it down.
4. It addresses what most other analyses did not, namely the actual success stats of running vs. passing, and the objective of not only scoring, but running down the clock. Yes, there’s some estimating that needs to be done here, but the estimations are better than just blissfully ignoring these contextual confounds.
5. It mixes qualitative and quantitative assessment, with a touch of game theory. In this world of data analytics, we sometimes forget that the most powerful research insights are often gleaned from combining methodological approaches.  What makes this article so powerful is that it doesn’t choose one type of method – it uses them all. It constructs an argument that thinks through the “if then” Boolean logic that a coach would utilize. It qualitatively assesses the pros and cons of those alternatives. And then it puts some data behind those arguments.

Back in college, my academic adviser talked me out of taking a media research class because it was “beneath me.” I thought it was terrible advice even at the time, so I took journalism instead, and then went on to roll my eyes as I started a company specializing precisely in the topic of media research . But that’s exactly why I love these examples of truly compelling data storytelling – it overcomes the “us vs. them” nonsense that many data-oriented academics will espouse to impressionable students who nobly want to learn to communicate.

So, thank you Slate and Five Thirty Eight. May thoughtful data storytelling and true research narratives become the way of the future.

Remembering the C in CES

Gayle Fuguitt, CEO and President of the ARF, pointed out to me last month that few market researchers have the opportunity to attend CES, the Consumer Electronics Show that takes over Las Vegas each January.  She’s quite right in this assessment; few companies seem to prioritize sending their consumer insights professionals to CES.

 

It seems to me an odd circumstance – after all, the C in CES stands for Consumer. In this modern world where technology touches nearly every business category, why wouldn’t a professional whose job it is to understand consumers be at CES?

I myself didn’t discover the wisdom of attending CES until last year, when it came to my attention that at $0 for an exhibition floor pass, I really had nothing to lose by checking it out. What I didn’t realize is how much I would gain.

There are an infinite number of reasons that I personally find CES valuable, from getting to see my firm’s clients showcase their technology, to hearing industry leaders speak about innovation, policy, and strategy, to anticipating what media technology changes are likely to impact my business over the next 1-2 years. But mostly, I find it valuable to form my own educated point of view on innovation, instead of relying on that of others. 

 

In the scheme of CES, I’m still a relative novice with only two shows under my belt. Still, it didn’t take me more than one day on the floor to realize that there is a noticeable delta between what you hear about CES, and what you witness when you’re there. That’s not to say you can’t learn from reading: four days after finishing my tour of CES 2015, I learned about this possibly awesome, possibly catastrophic brain-altering technology that I was blissfully unaware of 14 floors above me, as I enjoyed a Fat Tire in the Wynn Tower Bar last week. http://qz.com/325070/this-brain-altering-wearable-could-end-our-dependence-on-drugs/

But what’s different in person is the nuance, the interactions, and the opportunity to think critically about what you’re seeing. You get to try on the smart watch to see that it’s twice the size of your wrist, with spotty functionality in public spaces. You get to observe the color palates of 4K in person and wonder if 4K technology is going to change retail signage and billboards before it changes living rooms. You get to see how direct competitors showcase the same type of technology in their own unique ways, and field the same questions with varying levels of ease and accuracy.  

You get to experience, instead of observe, the world of consumer innovation.  And here’s what I’ve taken away from that experience.

 

1. In the best moments at CES, you get to feel and touch and really understand how new developments can change the world.  Sometimes those developments aren’t at the forefront of the media buzz or terribly glamorous at first glance. And that’s why I want to talk about Qualcomm and their IoT exhibit. 

 

Before I dive in, here’s a snapshot of how Qualcomm sees the IoT landscape.

Well this drives home the opportunity, doesn’t it?

Given that Qualcomm is a company rooted in communications and mobile technology, it’s not surprising that they’re focusing on IoT. What did surprise me is what I found most interesting in their entire booth: a multicast modem for multi-gigabit internet service.

This unit below is, in essence, how you’ll be able to effectively transmit that WiFi you’ll need for a true Internet of Things Smart Home that doesn’t hang up or buffer or time out at every turn. It’s not pretty or sexy. But it’s important. It makes all the imagination and application possible.

It also allows households to manage their WiFi more effectively. Below is a prototype interface demonstrating how internet performance improves using Qualcomm’s “multi-user” technology.  In the demo below, it’s showing speeds that are twice as fast, using their multi-user” modem, and the speeds are also broken down by where the WiFi is being transmitted in your home, so you can manage the capacity more efficiently.

So why did this stand out to me, you wonder?

Well, to begin, it’s so far advanced that it won’t be obsolete anytime soon. We don’t have multi-gigabit internet in the US, or anything close to it. Google Fiber, at 1 Gbps, is as close as we’re getting, and that’s only been rolled out thus far in a few neighborhoods in exactly one mid-sized city.

Second, it mitigates one of the more fundamental hurdles to IoT adoption, namely bandwidth constraints. Have you ever done a speed test on your modem, and wondered why you’re paying for 100Mbps and getting 20-30? This device can make that more optimized, and at higher broadband speeds even efficient enough to run a full smart home. It’s not as “cool” as a mobile app that allows you to set your thermostat from your phone. But it’s the engine that will allow you to do that, while you stream Netflix in one room, download an HD movie from iTunes in another, and communicate remotely with your dishwasher that it’s run time.

A quick Google search tells me this device escaped the attention of major media last week. But it didn’t escape mine.

2. It can be telling to see firsthand what the hype is all about – and if the hype is deserved. The most interesting example of this to me was DISH’s Sling service. As both a researcher and consultant in the OTT space, I’ve been anxiously awaiting DISH’s OTT bundle rollout and initially found it clever that they integrated their acquisition of Sling TV into their new OTT service.

Then I went to their exhibitor booth.

 

I looked around and saw partnerships with Amazon, Roku, and XBox (pictured below). That’s when the real headline hit me: a service is only as valuable as its distribution. In this case, if you have a Chromecast, Apple TV, Samsung BluRay player or SmartTV, PS3 or PS4, congratulations, you can’t get this new service. Sling’s OTT service is an interesting first move, and perhaps it will grow to include other distributors, but right now it looks a little closer to dipping a toe in the water than diving right in.

 

 

 

3.     On the flip side, there’s equal value in seeing what isn’t getting hyped and maybe should be. DISH Network is now introducing a slick IP set top box with a unified guide that includes Netflix, Pandora, and other internet apps. Everyone says they’re doing that. DISH actually is. And a tour of two different search and discovery technology exhibits tells me that cross-platform discovery is ready to roll, as soon as distributors actually put their content on IP set top boxes.  If DISH is making a splash, I’d say they’re making a bigger one on their traditional side than on their OTT one.

 

4.     There is no better place to imagine and understand how we can better integrate consumer insight into innovation. The CES floor is full of products that appear to have bypassed any sort of consumer testing, or outright ignored what it said. (I’m talking to you, 3D televisions.) It’s a petri dish of inspiration for how the consumer insights industry can do a better job of infusing our expertise into the innovations of tomorrow.

 

Let’s indulge in a few examples of this.

 

Example 1: The Shirt Camera. FirstV1sion is one of the cooler technologies I came across – basically it’s GoPro for clothing - a camera built into a compression-style shirt that athletes can wear on the field/court. It’s a clever idea, with immediately obvious applications not just to sports, but other types of documentary style production.

The coverage of FirstV1sion makes some lofty promises, such as “It´s completely imperceptible to the player” and “The player won’t be able to tell that he is wearing it.” (See the full description here: http://nxtinsight.com/10-upcoming-wearable-prototypes/)

Imperceptible on-field videography is a heck of a value proposition. Unfortunately, it’s probably only true if the player has no nerve endings, sweat glands, or breasts. This clothing was on display at CES, and for a spandex athletic shirt, it’s perceptively heavy and padded in the chest area, and undoubtedly sweat-inducing. Also, the camera was overheating to the point of being untouchable. (The guy at the booth responded to the last criticism with, “Well, it’s been on for hours.” To which I thought, “Have you been to a sporting event?”)

The product has clear promise, but it doesn’t appear ready for launch. And sometimes, understanding how a product doesn’t deliver upon its promise is exactly the type of insight that a startup team needs.

 

A heavily padded center with a piping hot camera.

 

Example 2: Wearables, in General. If I had to give CES 2014 a logline, it would have been “Wearables: A Story of Unwearable Accessories.”  To be fair, the wearables of 2015 are decidedly less unwearable than those of 2014. I might actually wear these Toshiba frames, for example, if I could put my own prescription in them. (Sidebar: can we stop pretending that bespectacled nerds are going to wear glasses over their glasses? Just because it started with Google doesn’t mean there’s a forthcoming fashion trend of “six eyes.”)

But we still have a long way to go in delivering wearables that people want to, well, wear. Take for example this fitness wearable from Sony, which apparently assessed that cheap bling is what women want to wear while working out. Or, ever.

Pink bling: I might have thought this was cool workout gear when I was 6.

Example 3: The Selfie Drone. While some products just aren’t there yet, others seem to misunderstand their customer value proposition altogether. Enter Zano, a drone that will take selfies for you. As I posted on my personal Facebook page, as a society we have bigger problems to address than arm length if we start buying drones to take selfies. A flying camera might actually have some uses – security coverage, for example. But I’m going to go out on a limb and say that vanity is not the right market position for this product.

My selfies don’t want to go to new heights.

Example 4: In-Dash Tablets. Then there are the times when there just seems to be a glaring societal danger at stake, for example having what is basically a WiFi connected tablet in your automobile dashboard. Setting aside the inevitable repair cost and outage issues, I couldn’t help but wonder how many automotive deaths we might cause by allowing people to surf the web while they drive. Even if it’s voice controlled, we humans have cognitive limits, and there’s a lot of science to back up our lackluster multitasking skills. It’s fun to look at this stuff, but there’s a certain sadness to the realization that some creative innovation arguably shouldn’t make it to market, even if consumers want it.

Indeed, what a researcher brings to the table in attending CES, is a certain wisdom for understanding why consumers buy-in, why they hesitate, and when they maybe don’t have their own best interests at stake.  Never underestimate the value of understanding the consumer psyche in evaluating which innovations will hit the mark – and which will not.

5.     CES is a useful reminder that evolution happens gradually. During my inaugural visit to CES last year, I found that to my surprise, most of the innovations didn’t seem all that innovative, inasmuch as they weren’t breaking news to me. This year, the developments again weren’t about “wow!” surprise, but rather about a step in the right direction. 3D printing is actually printing useful items (I witnessed the printing of a prosthetic hand, which is a dramatic improvement from the bevy of plastic figurines of 2014), curved screens now seem to have a purpose if you’re setting up a control room, and I can see the value in 4K for production editing and digital billboards, until prices come down enough for it to take off in the living room. So was I blown away by anything? Not really, but half the insight lies in seeing how questionable products from last year can evolve into potentially useful ones this year.

6.     There is a curious amount of “me too” copycatting at CES. And nothing provides a better lesson in the value of thoughtful brand differentiation than a lap around the accessories sections of the show. As one article I read noted, “How many selfie sticks does a person need?” I wondered the same thing about headphones and speakers, two other themes of this year’s accessory onslaught. While most of the booths were bathed in an indistinguishable repetition of neatly organized headsets and handheld speakers, a few stood out from the crowd…for all the wrong reasons.

We’ll start with the booth that assumed consumers really want different sets of headphones for every device in their household.  Alas, this doesn’t really dovetail with the “please make my life easier” theme that we hear in all media tech research with consumers who are not early adopters.

So if I have both an XBox and a PS3, I need different headphones?

Then there’s the headphone booth with personnel who spoke extensively about quality and Bluetooth integration, without the ability to demo product sound. Let’s contrast that with my trip to Costco a week earlier, during which a store rep was able to connect his mobile phone to a sound bar via Bluetooth to showcase the sound quality for me before I purchased the product. I’m not saying it’s a bad idea to differentiate your brand and booth design on high-end quality. I am saying it’s a questionable differentiation when your product demonstration capabilities are weaker than a wholesale club that sells toilet paper in packages of 64.

 

Next we have the standout strategy of, “we’re colorful!” Unfortunately this was about half of the headphone booths.

Some credit goes to this dinosaur-sized pair for standing out, though the lack of 360 degree branding kind of misses an opportunity. Whoops.

 

And finally there's the selfie stick barrage – rows and rows of indistinguishable booths that look like this. The city of Shenzhen is very invested in selfie stick manufacturing, and on some level the “me too” nature of accessories at CES is a fascinating insight into Chinese culture, and its predilection for efficiently mass-producing sameness.

On the flight home I sat next to a fellow attendee from Shenzhen who manufactures mobile accessories. Last year he had a booth. I asked him how that went, and why he didn’t have one again. His response was, and I quote, “It was a waste, I only got 30 cards and half weren’t [in my field].”  It drove home the reality that investing in a booth at CES requires an equal investment in brand differentiation.

7.     You can nonetheless learn something about brand strategy by paying attention to who does differentiate themselves cleverly, and how they go about it. Two big surprises stood out to me:

I need an LG Signature Kitchen.

LG: I expected IoT greatness from Samsung and Sony, but it was LG who conceived one of the best smart home exhibits I’ve seen, with a cohesive and interconnected layout. New products were not only built to talk to each other (the very nature of IoT), they were exhibited as such so that you could imagine the end result. I found myself fantasizing about walking into an LG factory store, replacing every appliance and system in my house all at once, and then sitting on the couch while my LG vacuum cleaner empties itself and my LG refrigerator notifies Amazon Fresh that I need more Lactaid. Might it be time for an investment in direct-to-consumer sales, smart home appliance manufacturers?

 

Panasonic: It would appear to me that Panasonic is trying to be the adventure brand of electronics. I don’t know if it’ll work, or if consumer research supports this approach from a strategic standpoint, but I do know that at least their booth looked different enough for me to stop and check it out. And in a sea of uniformity, that matters.

 

Panasonic also had some great sports applications that caught my attention, not the least of which was a partnership with SAP for an analytics platform that tracked sports stats and performance. Talk about a cool, transparently beneficial application.  As I commented on how valuable this would be as an enterprise tool for professional and college sports, the guy standing next to me retorted, “And then before you know it, it’ll be in Little League.”  I laughed out loud, and then realized it was probably the truest statement I’d heard all week.

8.     You can also learn some clever ways of thinking about customer segmentation. Credit goes to Panasonic again, this time for an intriguing use of transparent customer segmentation with a headphone product suite tailored to distinct psychographic customer segments. The display almost demands that you find yourself among the segments, without being too heavy handed or analytical about it. (Although I think they’re missing a segment I like to call, “the headset misplacer.” I’m not saying I’m in it, but do any of these headphones come with GPS locators for the multitasking professional?)
 

I *am* a trendsetter! I’ll buy that set!

 

9.    Sometimes, the biggest hurdle between a company and its customers… is the company itself. One of the things that has baffled me on both of my CES journeys is the degree to which companies spend huge sums of money to be entirely unprepared or off the mark at CES.  These are just a few of the curious strikeouts I came across this year:



Language Barriers – Hisense is a really cool Chinese electronics company that you probably haven’t heard of because it’s about to roll out in the U.S. And I’m not just saying they’re cool because last year they hired the Jabbawockeez to perform in their booth, although that is the reason I discovered them in the first place. (I won’t go as far as to say it made sense, but it was markedly less weird than the Marilyn Monroe impersonator or Go Go dancer I saw this year in other booths.) They have intriguing products like Roku TVs and kitchen lights that can project down touch sensitive internet onto the counter. I was completely sold on the awesomeness of this company, and wanted to learn more. Unfortunately, nobody working the connected home portion of this booth spoke English. Not the wisest idea when you’re exhibiting at a trade show in America.

 



Products That Don’t Work – If you are exhibiting at an electronics show, it seems a reasonable expectation that your electronics should work. Take this touch screen in-flight entertainment system for example. I touched the screen. Nothing happened. I tapped it a few times. Nothing. I looked around for someone to help me. Nobody. I left.

 

 



Products That Make You Cringe - This year, Toshiba won my award for the most awkwardly disturbing showcase with its “Communication Android” exhibit. With a physicality that is roughly as human as a crash test dummy, and a robotic voice that lacks Siri’s sense of humor or Teddy Ruxpin’s warmth, Android lady offers a certain je ne sais quoi. And I mean that literally, I really don’t know what she offers, other than the distinct feeling of discomfort that comes from wondering what on earth Toshiba was thinking. “I. Can. Smile.” she assures bystanders with a Stepford Wife inflection and clothing ensemble. And then her lips move ever so slightly into a position of a grimace usually reserved for that moment in a long car ride when we regret having downed a cup of coffee before hitting the stretch of road with no rest stops. The sign says it’s the robot of tomorrow for the service industry. So it’s creepy and designed to put more people out of work? And now I find myself questioning both the judgment and quality of Toshiba. I imagine that’s not the message they were trying to send.





Pretty in Pink or just Weird Science?



10.  Lots of smart, interesting, successful professionals go to CES. For my first 36 hours in Las Vegas, I didn’t go to a single exhibit. I attended a tech entrepreneur networking event, and was introduced to a number of clever startups. I had drinks with a group of other media researchers, and plotted our collaborative empires. I listened to the CTO of the United States captivate a room full of female executives with stories about influential female engineers and code breakers. I chatted with an Israeli entrepreneur about mobile technology and visiting Tel Aviv. I listened to the head of the FCC discuss net neutrality, navigating Title II regulation, and being called a Dingo by John Oliver. I learned more from others in 36 hours than I probably will the rest of the year in my office.

Of course, there’s nothing quite like CES to remind you of the human essentials. As I left town, fatigued from head to toe from miles of walking and hours of standing, it struck me that maybe this woman I noticed in the Qualcomm booth was onto something even more profound than the Internet of Things and 3D printable prosthetics: sometimes you just need a break from technology.

 

Now there’s an insight.

Kerry

The Implication of Disruption

As Research Narrative settles into our new office digs in the entrepreneurial community known as “Silicon Beach,” it seems a good time to bring up a buzz word that is all the rage at beachside networking events and startup pitchfests. Disruption. With a capital D.

In this part of town, it’s near about impossible to go half an hour without hearing someone speak excitedly of Disruption. Even among companies whose technology solution is precisely innovative without being disruptive, startups that brilliantly address a marketplace pain point that no existing technology has yet to address, credit is taken for being Disruptive. There seems to be a romantic notion that being a Disruptor is the iconic beacon of success for an entrepreneur.

But is it? And should it be?

I can’t help but wonder: why exactly have we collectively embraced the word “Disruption” as the embodiment of technology progress? Why is it so stylish to be a Disruptive Innovator rather than simply an Innovator? Even my own field has gotten so hung up on Disruption that we have an award for it: the Next Gen Market Research Disruptive Innovator Award. (We’ll set aside, for a moment, my perspective that most of the past nominees weren’t disrupting much of anything, but were in fact growing the research pie with incremental services that offer incremental insight. But that’s another blog, for another day.)

Let’s take a moment to address the semantics of what the word “disrupt” actually means. To disrupt is to create disorder, to interrupt, to impede, to break. The word itself is fundamentally rooted in negative connotation, in being an impediment to progress. 

dis·rupt  

tr.v. dis·rupt·ed, dis·rupt·ing, dis·rupts

1. To throw into confusion or disorder: Protesters disrupted the candidate's speech.

2. To interrupt or impede the progress, movement, or procedure of: Our efforts in the garden were disrupted by an early frost.

3. To break or burst; rupture.

That doesn’t really seem a noble goal, much less a practical one. And it becomes a setback to business progress when we confuse Disruption as an outcome with Disruption as a purpose. There is a world of difference between these two scenarios. 

A recent article on the website ReadWrite, “Steve Jobs: The Least Disruptive Entrepreneur Ever,” touches upon this distinction in discussing the upcoming Steve Jobs biopic. In his review of the movie, the reviewer reflects on the realization that Apple’s greatest successes were far more about problem solving than Disruption.

 “There is a vogue in Silicon Valley today for disruption—the eruptive flood of change, washing away the old and leaving in place the new…But the message of "Jobs" is quite different. What we learn by watching Jobs over the decades, from the '70s to the earliest years of the present millennium, is that he was at his best not when he disrupted but when he took what was broken and fixed it. Disruption is facile. Disruption is easy. Disruption is ineffective. It's the technological equivalent of a temper tantrum—nothing more. What Jobs did at Apple is the exact opposite.” 

One could reasonably argue that Steve Jobs actually was highly Disruptive: iTunes certainly did no favors for the profitability of the music business. But Apple also didn’t de-bundle albums and accustom listeners to free music. The now defunct Napster did that. With iTunes and iPods, Apple then came in with a solution to monetize that already disrupted market. So did Jobs set out to Disrupt? Or did he set out to conquer and solve an inevitable disruption, and in doing so, change the world? I’d argue the latter. Apple wasn’t afraid to change the status quo, but Steve Jobs didn’t digitize music or invent portable music players or de-wire your phone line.  He simply took all those things and did a better job than everyone else in understanding consumer behavior and building a sustainable business of it. Disruption was the result of smart business, but it wasn’t the business plan itself.

The entrepreneurial community’s hyper-focus on Disruption perhaps fascinates me because I was an early and avid champion for what turned out to be the most disruptive technology of market research in my adult lifetime – the online survey. But back in the 1990s, I wasn’t excited about online surveying because it was going to obliterate the gold standard of phone surveys, which it did. I was excited about it because online surveys took what a phone survey could do and blew the capabilities out of the water. The online interface opened up a whole new world of audiovisual assessment and integrated new tools like copy testing and card sorting. It had lower overhead and faster turnaround. The shift from phone to web increased value while decreasing overhead: it wasn’t innovation for innovation’s sake, but for progress’s sake.

Today, it seems that new developments often lack such business implication and implicit value. Joy is taken in crushing existing technologies almost for sport, rather than in deriving solutions that offer practical business solutions that solve a problem or introduce a viable new opportunity.  

I’ll come back to a company I’ve mentioned before to illustrate my point: Aereo. In basic principle, Aereo’s business model relies on charging for copyrighted content it doesn’t own or license. In laymen’s terms, it effectively relies on theft, and in doing so devalues the very content creators it relies on to exist. (Did we learn nothing from Napster?) It’s also a business that fundamentally decreases consumer value - broadcast TV is already free to us on-air and online; Aereo charges a fee. The technology may be clever and elegant from an engineering perspective, but it sets out to demolish an ecosystem using a business model that will keep it in court for years, without benefitting society in any meaningful way.  

Have we so lost sight of basic economic principles, nevermind social ethics, that we can no longer identify when Disruption is simply corrupt or flawed business? Might we even be subjecting ourselves to increasing government regulation precisely because we’re so busy scrambling to change the game that we’re not regulating ourselves with a touch of common sense?

To Disrupt simply for the sake of Disruption is to focus on the wrong thing – on change over value creation. It causes us to mistake “innovation” for “progress” and confuse “new” with “valuable.” Change can be amazing, fruitful, and industrious. But sometimes it can merely be an economic black hole, destroying value and recklessly putting people out of work, without benefitting consumers. As I setup anchor in the inspirational surroundings of Silicon Beach, it occurs to me that perhaps my greatest goal as a business owner and entrepreneur is to recognize and remember the difference.

-KE

Read the review of the Steve Jobs biopic here: 

http://readwrite.com/2013/07/26/steve-jobs-jobs-movie-disruption-versus-improvement#awesm=~odHo7I7aq2kiSL

Re:think Reflections: Part 3

“I would in essence start a business consultancy with market research as differentiation.”

– Kathy McGettrick, VP, Market Development, S&D, IBM – talking about the future research firm

When I first launched Research Narrative in 2011, I built it around three fundamental beliefs that I often still espouse to anyone close enough to listen.

• Research is storytelling. In today’s world, it has to be.
• The research firm I want to run must be known for strategy and wisdom; we must be a trusted adviser whether we’re working with a showrunner, a CEO, or a fellow researcher. 
• Research service today is research mixology – it requires selecting and packaging innovative methods into a strategic research plan, and remaining nimble enough to introduce new innovations. Although I personally have methodology specialties, my business can’t afford to be limited to them.

I was pleased to discover that this year’s Re:think conference actually kicked off by perpetuating these beliefs. In particular, the opening session panel on “Embracing Change Before it Embraces You” reinforced these pillars, with panelists cleverly articulating many of the principles upon which I’ve built Research Narrative. Two ideas espoused by the panel especially caught my attention: curtailing naked research and embracing the research alchemist.

        Not what we mean by naked research.

No more naked research, please.

One of my favorite panelists, Kathy McGettrick of IBM, broached the idea that the world has moved away from “naked research” - research results relayed without context. And she’s exactly right; naked research is an artifact of a bygone research era. Today’s research needs to find meaning, and tie back to the business questions, challenges, or objectives at stake. In fact, such was the key learning of our RAABT forum: if you’re not involving key stakeholders, and putting research in their context, you’re falling short of the business impact you could (and should) have. I said it in Part 2 and I’ll say it again here: research is a means to an end. It is not, in and of itself, the end.

The future researcher is an insights alchemist, storyteller, and consultant.

In with the generalist, out with the specialist. The session’s panelists pointed out that the researcher of today – and indeed tomorrow – is an expert alchemist. (Credit again goes to Kathy for genius application of the word “alchemy”.)  As researchers, we now must bring tools together, bring information together, and ultimately concoct the exact right blend to find the business meaning in that mix. Then we must convey that, taking ownership and telling a (research) story to key stakeholders. Or, as a panelist later in the morning explained, “we need to make them smart.”

Mind you, without methodology specialists, generalists have no tools to which we can apply our research alchemy talents. Someone has to create those innovative tools and specialized methods. But in this brave new world of storytelling, business strategy, and insights alchemy, being a generalist is itself a specialty. One on which I'd bet my business.

-Kerry

Re:think Reflections: Part 2

This week at Re:think, I had the good fortune to present (along with David Rabjohns of MotiveQuest and the “home sick but attending in spirit” Phil Herr of Millward Brown) the findings from our ARF Forum – Research as a Business Tool. (“RAABT” as we call it.)

Our 18-month research initiative set out to answer the question, “Why does some research have a remarkable business impact, and other research fail to achieve its intended impact, or have no impact at all?”

The difference between impactful and not impactful boils down to two key characteristics:

1. Understanding of the business context
2. Effective communication

I’m going to focus on the 2^nd item here, because it’s one that happens to have been broached many times in my career, and the theme surfaced repeatedly at this year’s conference.

I once received some amusingly misguided advice from my college adviser, who curiously suggested that I not take a communications research class because, as he implied, it was beneath me. (Fast forward two decades to the irony that I own a company specializing in media research, and blog about it.)

Fortunately for me, I was lucky that my first manager after I graduated from college disagreed with the sentiment that communication was a soft skill unworthy of the attention of an esteemed statistician. Indeed, he sent me packing to an AMA seminar on communication styles, noting that anyone working in client service needed to know that discipline. It was one of the best things I’ve ever done.

In today’s day and age, researchers need to be effective communicators. Certainly, we also need innovative methodologists, and skilled analysts. But all of that work is only as useful as we’re able to communicate it to the end-users of the information.

I noticed two things that struck my attention this year at Re:think.

• Many researchers still spend way too much time talking about process, and way too little time discussing insights and action steps.
• Even more lack basic presentation skills.

In work, and in life, we deal with people all day. And some of them don’t communicate the way we do. Effective communicators pay attention to how others communicate, and adjust their own styles.

Researchers, unfortunately, often aren’t so good at this. A trend I noticed this week: presentations that largely amounted to a staged reading of bullets on a slide, sometimes complemented by charts populated with 12 pt font data that couldn’t be seen past the 2^nd row. As I joked with a fellow conference attendee, it begs for a drinking game. (Drink once for a slide with only text, drink twice for a slide with all data and no discernible takeaways.) Had I actually played this game, my colleagues would have been dragging me out of the room in a blistering state of inebriation, within about half an hour of my arriving at the conference.

Fellow researchers, the potential for alcoholism aside, we need to do better. When we don’t communicate well, the people we’re talking to don’t listen.

But what really surprised me at this year’s conference was how many presenters lacked even the basic fundamentals. In one session, five different people took turns presenting. As each walked up to the podium, I was listening for two introductory pieces of information.

1. Tell me who you are.
2. Tell me why you’re standing up there. (i.e. What are the objectives that you were trying to understand in your research? Why should I care?)

Of five senior research executives, only one of them did both of these things. Four them didn’t state their objectives, and dove right into results (of what?). All five had several text-only slides. One actually had entire paragraphs on their slides.

In another session, I looked at my watch 25 minutes into the 30 minute session. At this point, the presenter was still discussing the research process (again, more bullets on a slide). I had yet to learn anything salient about what the research had accomplished, or what that meant for our industry. And in fact, I never did. I literally walked away with no understanding of what the presenter had learned from his research, and how his company (or clients) had turned the results into action steps.

Impactful research requires impactful communication. We have to know our audience; we have to communicate to them how they want to be communicated to. As I mentioned in Part 1 of this series, market researchers are the voice of the consumer. And if these last few days are an indication, we need to embrace communication skills as much as we embrace analytical skills if that voice is to be heard.

The RAABT forum will be working on action steps for implementing learning and training for researchers in areas of business and communication, based on our own research findings. In the meantime, I offer some practical tools that I’ve personally found to be useful in communicating research.

• If you’re going to give a live presentation, use the tools of “live”. Nothing sends people nose to mobile device to check email quite like a presentation that amounts to text slides and data dumps. A presentation is not a report, it’s a story. Prepare for that. Use visuals, be dynamic, and don’t make people read. If we wanted to read your results, we wouldn’t be there in person. And if you start reading your own slides, we reserve the right to walk out.
• Have a point of view. The traditional view of researchers is that we must be impartial third-parties. And indeed, in designing research and analyzing results, impartiality is critical. After that, it’s time to have an opinion. Research is a means to an end, it’s not the end itself. If you can’t tell someone what the results mean, what end-users can do with it, and what action steps might (note that I didn’t say “will” – there are boundaries) unfold from the results, then it’s not research, it’s just data. That is likely to be misinterpreted. Which in turn gives non-researchers the impression that our function is not all that valuable. And that benefits none of us.
• Tee things up, and then get to the headline. The Achilles Heel of researchers is that we often like to show people all the cool work we’re doing. “Look at all this amazing analysis, I’m so valuable!” It’s our job to be the wizard behind the curtain, and then it’s our job to make it look like magic. My general rule is this: show just enough data and analysis to inspire trust in your process and demonstrate that you didn’t make the results up, and then cut to what you learned and what the story is. Have a headline, and don’t bury the lead on page 22. Which brings me to….
• Tell a story. Have a beginning, a middle, and an end. “Here’s what we did, and then here’s what we did next” is not a story, it’s a process. The best presentation I saw at Re:think led with the headline, “Mobile use isn’t actually mobile.” (Those of us in media already knew that, but it was still a great headline.) Then it went into what they meant by that, how people actually use mobile devices, and what that could mean for advertising strategy on mobile devices. I put my phone down, took notes, and walked away with a clear understanding of the implications of the research for my own business. That is the sign of a good presentation.
• Don’t be afraid to be entertaining.  Research itself can be dry, but that doesn’t mean the delivery has to be. Tell war stories, give examples, tell jokes. During our RAABT presentation, David used a picture of a boxer after a knockout to demonstrate the concept of “impact.” He had the room enraptured within the first minute. Make it fun for the room to learn what you have to tell them.
• Pay attention to how others communicate. Effective research requires gaining buy-in from a wide range of stakeholders, and there is an art to doing this. I work with some people who are so busy, they defer to trusting my judgment and just want to be told the answer without frivolous exposition. Others are more receptive when they’re led to the well, but not actually handed the water; they want to be given the insights and then discuss possible outcomes. And then there are those who solicit your opinion and genuinely want to know what you think - but won’t actually follow through on it unless they come up with them idea themselves. I once had a colleague who would constantly ask my advice, and never act on it. And then one day, I answered his question with my own question. Normally, I find this behavior obnoxious, but damn if it didn’t work. He almost immediately got to my POV in his answer, and when he came up with the conclusion, he acted on it. Manipulative as this approach may sound, it made us more effective as a team. I equate it to teaching – sometimes your job is to provide the answer, and sometimes it’s to teach others how to get to the answer themselves.

For more information on our Research as a Business Tool forum or to read our report, email me at kerry@researchnarrative.com.

-Kerry