Center for Strategy Research

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• Vol. 11, Issue 8, November 2016

Hello!

From The Market Research Event in Boca Raton to the vicissitudes of Election Day in the U.S., the past 6 weeks have been notable, to say the least. Read this month’s edition of Research with a Twist, “Make Research Great Again (MRGA),” for CSR’s point of view on the role of research in the 2016 election.

— Jennifer

Make Research Great Again (MRGA)

CSR attended The Market Research Event (TMRE) in Boca Raton in October. As always, it was great to see many of you there, and to hear about “what’s hot and what’s not” in the market research industry. For research geeks like us, it was a little slice of heaven!

Fast forward three weeks, to the Wednesday after Election Day, when the results of the election surprised many people. All of the sudden, research in the form of political polling is taking a beating. What a difference 21 days makes! Here’s our take on the intersection of these two significant research-related events:

1. Content analysis is a hot topic

Much more than at past TMRE events, session themes and exhibitors this year focused on content analysis of qualitative source material. For example, I attended one session, led by AON Hewitt, titled, “Harnessing the power of words: Transforming text to insight with text analytics.” The room was quite full, and the audience was attentive and engaged. Content analysis of qualitative feedback is what CSR has been doing for 30 years, so, you could say the topic is of some interest to us.

After seeing what other vendors are doing in this area, we have greater conviction than ever about the value of our approach to content analysis. Unlike other techniques, ours allows analysis of far, far more dense qualitative feedback. While others are coding the equivalent to open-ended responses to questions in online surveys, our solution can be used to code hundreds of full transcripts from in-depth interviews as long as an hour each. We take a great deal of pride in making complex consumer feedback manageable. More on this in our next newsletter!

2. Why is not an afterthought

As we have been saying for decades, in understanding what people really think, the why should not be an afterthought: For example, adding open-ended questions to online surveys and then NOT coding or analyzing them is disrespectful to those who took the survey. Given the timing of this newsletter, of course we wonder how the rise of content analysis might have relevance to the art and science of political polling. Clearly political research missed something important this year, given how unexpected the results were to so many.

Why is this the case? There was a ton of research conducted during the interminably long election cycle: Daily polls, aggregated polls, meta-analyses of the aggregated polls, focus groups discussing the poll results, focus groups of undecided voters, and on and on and on. And still no clarity. What was the value of all of that research?

Think about this: If research had been done to assess and track the “why” instead of just the “how many,” things might be very different right now.

The one-dimensional polling of the past 18 months of this election cycle didn’t capture the complexity of the decision-making process of American voters. It was inadequate in gauging the various flavors of apathy or rebellion of people who didn’t vote, the strength of the opinions of those who were sure which candidate they would vote for all along, or the reasons for picking the Democratic, Republican, or third party candidate.

The closed-ended, binary characterization of voting as yes/no, who wins/who loses is really not the story of this year; it’s why people didn’t vote, or voted the way they did. Focus groups might have teased out some of these issues, but many commentators have suggested that in this vitriolic and highly charged election, voters were particularly hesitant to discuss who they planned to vote for in front of others, so CSR’s preferred investigative method, one-on-one in-depth interviews, might have elicited more insight. Moreover, no one tracked what was discovered in qualitative interactions with voters; nobody does qualitative tracking, right? Wrong.

3. The “why” is especially critical in our businesses

If it’s wrong to see a vote as a simple binary decision, then purchase (or membership, or distributor) decisions are even less accurately described that way. Most companies don’t have just one product, nor do they have “take it or leave it” offerings. We work with many insurance companies, for example, that offer dozens of insurance products and a variety of service levels, while also extending customized products and services, and options for bundling. In theory, customers and prospects exist on a continuum of brand affinity, and with regard to each combination of products and services.

While the desire to make decision-making processes seem simple is strong, delving into the complexity of customer perception is critical. At CSR, we believe that the best way to comprehend the complexity of consumers is through qualitative research. With a powerful tool to help manage qualitative input from customers and prospects, interviewing large numbers of respondents (even as many as 500) is possible, as is tracking the results. Armed with accurate information about not just what consumers are doing, but the reasons for it, could make your non-customer today into your loyal customer tomorrow.

That’s why our slogan this month is, Make Research Great Again! (We really need some hats to express this properly…)

Here’s the Twist: At TMRE in October, we noticed an increase of attention being paid to tools that enable quantitative analysis of qualitative content, which is our specialty. In the wake of the election results in November, we hypothesize the outcome would have been less surprising, or even different, if the reasons associated with voting decisions had been tracked. Simple, closed-ended polling didn’t explain enough of the political landscape, nor do we think it captures the purchase-decision either. Vive Complexite! We’re with Qual!

— Jennifer