Center for Strategy Research

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• Vol. 12, Issue 2, February 2017

Hello!

If you’re like us, during these winter doldrums, you like to curl up with amusing reading material.

As you compile your “must-reads”, please enjoy this month’s issue of CSR’s newsletter, Research With a Twist, titled, Wile E. Anecdote, Persona Non Grata!

— Julie

Wile E. Anecdote, Persona Non Grata

Here in New England, it’s the time of year when once again we celebrate our Patriots’ championship season. It is also the time of year when we bask in the glow of envied resentment from all other football fans. And as the football season comes to a close, our team’s “water cooler” conversations revert, with renewed emphasis, to our other favorite topic — research.

Recently, in a conversation with one of our favorite clients, the topic of research naturally arose after we thoroughly dissected the Patriots’ epic come-from-behind win over the Falcons in the Super Bowl.

Our client said that she’s been noticing her colleagues “anecdotalize” some of the research we’d recently presented. Our jaws dropped. New word! Football, research and grammar all in one conversation! How wonderfully nerdy! As happens with an apt expression, we recognized “anecdotalization” immediately as a significant concept. Here, in our humble opinion, are three trends that contribute to making it notable:

1. Making too much out of one person’s story

One of the reasons marketers and other stakeholders love focus groups is that hearing and seeing people speak for themselves can be far more compelling than reading data in a research report. Often, focus group participants convey a story about their experience with a company or its product in a memorable way that’s easy to communicate to others. As CSR has observed many times over the years, this benefit, however, can easily become a drawback.

While it’s ideal to have entertaining material to support a research finding, the danger is that executives in the room will make business decisions based on the catchiest story, which isn’t always correlated to the research findings as a whole. This is the classic type of “anecdotalization;” making a business mountain out of an individual customer molehill.

2. Making too little of one person’s story

Another type of anecdotalization we’ve encountered lately is the “let’s solve the problem of this particular person” approach. During a recent presentation of research results, we included several illustrative examples from the 100 or so participants in the study.

While the examples were indicative of the trends we saw in the data, those attending the presentation were much more focused on the examples than on the trends. We fielded an hour’s worth of questions about the particular customers in the examples we provided, such as: Could they really have received the letter they said they received in the example? Would a company of this size really have what the customer called a “dedicated rep”? Is it possible that a customer with product types X, Y and Z could actually have experienced a service issue as described in the example?

At times, the meeting seemed more like an exercise in customer service (had we not maintained the confidentiality of our research participants) than a presentation of research results. We were missing the business forest for the individual customer trees.

3. Some say “persona”, some say “segment”

Researchers and non-researchers alike recognize that an organization can’t be “all things to all people”, leading to a natural tendency to group customers based on shared characteristics. This effort to segment customers, often based on demographics and similar, determinable features, usually results in strategies and tactics created to appeal most specifically to those customers that the organization wishes to attract and maintain. However, such dependence on demographic features often constrains the ability to incorporate the real drivers of customer choice: what customers need and want.

Over the years, research users have perceived that broad approaches to segmentation can limit employees’ ability to understand and connect such strategies with customers. Enter the persona: a fictional representation of a buyer segment that often incorporates research anecdotes in its creation. Personas can be particularly valuable in helping researchers convey the drivers of each customer segment’s behavior, and allow others within the organization to better visualize how needs differ from customer to customer.

In the drive to create such personas, the demand for individual stories that support them has increased exponentially. While the qualitative specialist in us applauds the use of individual research results to help bring customer segments “to life”, we also fear that the growing reliance on such anecdotes to spotlight individual customer encounters may deflect attention from the company-wide customer experience.

Here’s the issue. Researchers want to highlight individual stories so that research results become more meaningful within our organizations. But the meaning should be drawn from the pool of participants as a whole, not from any individual contributor. To do this, we have to strike a balance between sharing anecdotes and “anecdotalizing.”

To walk that line, perhaps think of Wile E. Coyote, that inventive cartoon character whose elaborate plans to catch the Road Runner always backfired. One reason he failed endlessly is that he spent all of his boundless energy on that one Road Runner, to the exclusion of all other tasty Road Runners in the desert. When presenting anecdotes to highlight research results, be mindful of the fact that this is a single individual among many research participants: There are many other “Road Runners” out there, too. As researchers, we advocate for the needs of all customers, not just the ones who make the best examples!

Here’s the Twist: Successfully using anecdotes requires striking a happy medium. We have to make sure we don’t either over-emphasize the importance of a particular customer, nor downplay the importance of the example by solving that individual’s problem. Try to avoid Wile E. Coyote’s obsession with a single Road Runner when telling stories — and all the personas in your customer base will be grata-ful.

— Julie