Marketing’s most overlooked asset

There is an amazing research methodology that’s available to all marketers but ignored by most. Although it is underused, it should not be underestimated. Revelatory, rich, multifaceted, it never fails to illuminate the consumer landscape and give guidance on where to focus brand efforts.

Yet the most remarkable aspect of this seemingly magical methodology is that it comes without cost. The dent it will make in your research budget amounts to precisely zero. It will take a fair chunk of your time, but in terms of external expenditure it is essentially free.

So, what is it? And how does it work?

It doesn’t help that it doesn’t have a name. If it were called something vaguely futuristic and sexy, perhaps many more marketers would pay heed to it. But hey, I can give it one now. I’ll call it multimethod meta 1 (MMM1) – because it’s the first step any sane marketer should take when they feel that a little data is sorely needed.

As for how it works, that is simple enough to explain but not the work of a moment to effect. It consists of trawling carefully through the research you already have. There, that’s it. Doesn’t sound exciting, does it? Not as thrilling as commissioning something new. And yet, in that treasure trove of data already in house, the enlightenment you seek can be found.

Sometimes, when I mention what I’m now breezily calling MMM1 to marketing teams, they tell me they don’t have that much relevant prior research kicking around. They are invariably wrong. Even with smaller brands, there is usually a vast trough of research that can be unpicked anew. With bigger brands, you’re talking about mountains of the stuff.

There’s that global ethnographic study that was watched and pored over once, then sort of forgotten since. There are umpteen quant-based usage and attitude decks. There are claims rankings, needs-and-drivers studies, search and digital analytics.

Somewhere in there will be a semiotics report commissioned by a prior team and blithely ignored by the current one. And at least one need-state segmentation, with the segments given jaunty names which are still bandied about by the team long after anyone has bothered to check back through the numbers that generated them. And of course, there will be qualitative consumer reports in their droves, the products of literally hundreds of focus groups.

We’re not talking about ancient brand history here. Just research completed in the last few years, safely beyond the pandemic, which tended to skew things a bit. You hold it, I promise you. And the cleverest thing you can do right now, this summer, while there’s a bit of a lull, is unlock it.

There are two basic ways you can approach this: structured, and not. For those who cleave to structure, I’d suggest organising the material chronologically, rather than by research technique. Work back from the latest study with a page of prompts to guide your quest for illumination: What are the commonalities? What are the underlying themes? What is the direction of travel? Where are the contradictions? Why are they there? And what actions seem suddenly self-evident, now that you’re looking with fresh eyes?

No cheating: you can’t just delegate this to a junior. Even worse is to pass it all over to your favourite research agency to dissect; they will simply bend everything to reflect their own original assumptions and conclusions. Instead, it pays to get your hands dirty yourself, taking care to note how the samples, questionnaire designs or discussion guides might have affected the findings.

For the unstructured approach – which tends to be more creative in its outcomes – I can do no better than repeat the advice given by Marc de Swaan Arons, then of Millward Brown, at a big US conference a few years back. He counselled the assembled 2,000 marketers to pin up all the brand data they held on to the walls of a big room, then walk around it asking, ‘What story is this telling us?’

I like the physicality of this: the finding, scaling, printing, hanging. I like the active element – getting up on your feet and moving, zooming in and out, letting newly-salient fragments of information hit you, which is so different from being on the passive receiving end of a cultured debrief.

And I like the question: big and open-ended. One that recognises that, while data might be hard, it always meets something more pliable and elastic when it gets back to people and the real, messy world. One that is apt to prompt different ‘stories’ from different teams, because there is never such a thing as the single right answer.

That’s a reality that is likely to leave many marketers running scared, as they pursue their quest for certainty. So, the inevitable call will be for more research, based on the fallacy that this next round of findings will settle things for good.

It never does, which is how brand teams end up with so much superfluous data in the first place. Why waste your time and your money commissioning yet more?

The knowledge you need you already have. And the beauty of MMM1 is that it puts it one place for you, to be probed and reassessed as you choose. But from that point it’s time to move on to steps 2 and 3 – to imagination and daring. And to put an active, creative, definitive end to that summer lull.