Brands that take steps to understand each market they serve have much better results when it comes to international insights activation. They can understand market issues that might make or break their product or service, and gain insights on CX issues and communications strategies that will help them succeed.
Watch a recording of the webinar, or read the transcript, below, to learn more about steps you can take to ensure brand leadership across your global footprint.
Paul Donagher:
Hi everybody. Welcome to our round table today. I’m Paul Donagher. I’m a Director of Client Services here at Radius and we’re delighted to have you all here with us today. The Roundtable topic today will be best practices in international activation of insights, and you can see our participants here in front of you today. They are Shari Aaron. Shari is an EVP of Innovation here at Radius, Glenn Staada, who is an SVP of Client Services and Paul Thomas. Paul is with a company called Strive who just merged with Radius at the end of last year. And Paul is a founder of Strive. So welcome all three of you. And the round table today will be moderated, as always by Bari Weinhausen.
And Bari’s the Director of Qualitative here at Radius. Just a reminder how we usually do things. The round table today will last for 45 minutes. Of that, I’ll do this brief introduction, then the team will chat for 30 minutes or so, and then that should leave us time for a Q&A at the end of about 10 minutes. If you have a question as we go through, please type those into the software as you see in front of you. I’ll be monitoring that as we go through. And at the end, if you have any questions, I’ll pick out the ones that we can ask the team and I’ll ask on your behalf for the team and they can answer at the end. So we’ll take about 45 minutes. So the key issues that we will address today, hopefully you will come away with enhanced understanding of activation and five particular areas that we’re thinking about.
That’s international activation across globally diverse teams, activation when you want to infuse some local context into insights that might be created globally or centrally, we’ll give you some case stories from EMEA and North America, and we’ll also tell you a little bit about how AI might enhance activation. And finally, we’ll also tell you about how to perhaps craft different outputs from activation sessions for different functional teams across the business.
So as a way of introduction to our three round table panel today, let’s start with Shari. Shari as I said is an EVP here at Radius and she’s known for focusing on driving growth and loyalty for her clients and she’s always looking to build upon changing cultural patterns and the latest technology to help transform the way that we do insights. Shari lives with her husband in Greenwich, Connecticut. Shari’s also a published author and you can often see her walking around Greenwich with her beautiful golden retriever, Gracie. Glenn is an SVP at Radius, as I mentioned, and Glenn is based out of Princeton, New Jersey. In addition to leading a client service team, Glenn is also head of the financial services unit here at Radius and brings his years of experience to clients in that sector predominantly. Glenn lives in New Jersey in Montgomery Township with his wife Joelle, and they love to try new restaurants in the local cuisine in any of the cities that they visit. Finally, Paul Thomas is a founder of Strive Insights.
As I mentioned, we merged with Strive late last year. Paul has driven to create opportunities from knowledge and has a passion to give clients the tools they need to make things happen. Paul has three kids. He’s a proud Welshman and he loves his rugby and his golf and something that I didn’t know until yesterday. Paul’s grandfather actually used to play drums for both Tom Jones and Shirley Bassey, two icons I think you’ll agree with in the music industry. So welcome all three of you and Bari, take it away please.
Bari Weinhausen:
Fantastic, thanks Paul. So let’s dive right in. To get us started, Glenn, will you kick us off and talk a little bit about when we refer to activation, what does that even mean? What are we talking about?
Glenn Staada:
Sure, yeah, thanks Bari. Activation is essentially the usage of insights from any project or data set to inform the strategic or tactical decisions that business decision makers will make to drive their business forward. That being said, it is important to recognize that when we talk about activation it isn’t just at the end of a project. Activation happens all the way through the research project from engagement at the front end to those that are going to be using the research all the way through execution and delivery.
Bari Weinhausen:
Fantastic. Thank you. Shari, why don’t you share with us some of the key reasons why an organization may participate in activation or ask for an activation session.
Shari Aaron:
So the most compelling reason is that activation puts our insights to work much faster in an organization. We know that clients engage in marketing research because they have a business issue to solve. That’s our start point. We conduct research, we share the results with the research team and internal clients. From there the implications must be socialized internally throughout the client’s organization, maybe with agency partners because you need to ensure buy-in and proper implementation of the action items from the research.
So that activation session, the way to think about it, it’s that opportunity to help with those socialization efforts, establish priorities, and create clear action items to move forward with. Activation helps teams with taking that internalizing of the “so what” and the “now what” and it really gets your teams engaged and energized and excited to move forward. Teams that activate together have more ownership of the implementation steps to the desired outcome. So it’s even more critical in today’s fast-paced hybrid working environment that teams take the time to collaboratively work together, determine how the research learning impacts their business, the changes they need to make or the evolutions they need to make to drive the efficiency and activation really helps to make sure your research investment is driving ROI for you.
Bari Weinhausen:
Excellent, thank you. So before we dive into international activation approaches, which we will do shortly, let’s start off by talking about best practices in a single country or market. And that may be different in EMEA versus the United States. So let’s talk about that a little bit. Paul, please tell us what some of the best practices are for EMEA and then we’ll discuss North America as well.
Paul Thomas:
No worries. I don’t know if these are specific to EMEA, but I think there are certainly a number of things that make for successful activation. I think as Glenn, pointed out firstly stakeholder engagement. Bringing the stakeholders on the journey with us so that activation is seen actually as a key end game and vital to finishing that journey. I think there was a very interesting study done a few years ago by McKinsey that highlighted that 50% of segmentations stay on the shelf. And the key reason for that being not bringing the company on the journey with you so they feel like they own it.
And we all know how important activation is to a successful segmentation. Another key element is clear goals for activation as well. What’s the desired outcome or goal that you want to achieve? I think too many times activation workshops really just end up being glorified presentations of the findings because there’s no ownership of action plans or clear plan for next steps. The next thing is we’ve talked about activation being about stakeholder engagement upfront and at the end in my view, activation can and should be occurring throughout the program and not just at the end. As soon as we start a study, we’re gathering insight. So why can’t we be acting on that as we gather it? And so there’s often quick wins that can present themselves. We should be compelling our clients to act upon immediately rather than waiting to the very, very end where we might have missed an opportunity.
Finally, inspiring outputs. From both the research and the activation itself, making our clients really want to use the material and share it wide and far. Providing that real carrot for clients to make them really want to be part of an activation session and be part of activating an insight. It’s like a good advert for activation, if you like. So using techniques like narrative design, journalistic storytelling, using the frameworks like the pyramid principle and so on to communicate really clear compelling opportunities that our clients are really itching to follow through on.
Bari Weinhausen:
Fantastic. That’s a great perspective. Glenn, why don’t you speak to some of the best practices for activation in North America?
Glenn Staada:
Sure, yeah. Similar to what Paul mentioned, maybe they end up getting delivered or executed differently in North America. Definitely at the start of a project some of the best practices we see is actually building in activation in that research plan. So don’t just write an RFP, a proposal, a schedule that takes you through the presentation that doesn’t have activation built in and steps for activation along the way. Some other things I think Paul mentioned but building engagement and buzz, I think we do pretty good marketing ourselves, marketing the results from our studies in terms of externally, but not internally.
So within client organizations I’ve seen PR campaigns set up around certain studies, around brand tracking studies, around segmentations where we create a logo attached to that study. We brand the study. As Paul mentioned, it doesn’t have to be waiting until the end to share results. We’ve come up with drip campaigns where every two to three weeks we’re sending out emails at a really high level about an interesting fact or finding, getting excitement and buzz about the research.
Going back to the front, the stakeholder interviews that I think we all believe are a critical part of activation. What we have seen work well is actually ask the stakeholders to come into those sessions with some hypotheses that they have about what we’re going to learn, essentially articulate what they want us to prove or disprove, and then also answer questions that we may have in terms of what would you like to do with this research?
Ultimately, how do you see this research impacting your business, your brand? By having a clear articulation of that, we can build those elements into the activation on the back end. And then just real quick the back end workshops, using templates, as Paul mentioned, Pyramid principle, just don’t have them be a half day workshop of presenting results and talk about the results, but actually have some activities for the stakeholders to do. Last thing that we find very helpful or we’ve seen it be successful for our clients is they set and name an internal research champion at the research organization. So it’s their job to be checking in with their colleagues six months, nine months, a year out to get a sense of what the research has been doing for them and how they’re using it. So all those things have been best practices for North America.
Bari Weinhausen:
Excellent. Now let’s bring all of that together. So we’ve heard a little bit about North America, we’ve heard a little bit about EMEA, but when it comes actually to an international scale, Paul, can you tell us what are some of the best practices when you are working with multiple countries across time zones, across locations?
Paul Thomas:
Absolutely. One of the first things about being able to balance the needs of global versus local, and ensuring that each gets what it wants. So making sure we’re serving all of our masters whether they be at the overall brand level versus the individual market level. Another thing is about engaging each of the regions as well, especially, and we’ve all been there where there might be a them versus us feeling towards a global view.
And that really means spending time understanding the specific needs of each market or the issues that they have either in person and directly with each of the markets or region or through some sort of remote mechanism if a client is reluctant to bring the regions indirectly. The third thing I think it is about demonstrating a clear understanding of the different markets, their dynamics, their cultures, their oddities. Ideally through things like local immersion, but really what I call tasting the market and living in the environment. So any activation we know is really grounded in the understanding of the implications of that in each market. The markets are very, very different.
The final thing for me is about ensuring that your activation approach and resulting sessions or exercises or whatever are geared to deliver the global strategy, but as I said, is also tailored to answer the key issues that each market has as well. That for me is where you get buy-in then true buy-in and true adoption of activation at both the, the overall and the individual market level.
Bari Weinhausen:
And let me dig in a little bit further on that with you, Paul. What does it look like when you’re activating insights across multiple geographies, the geographically dispersed teams? So we’ve talked a little bit about different regions, different locations, but what does that actually come out looking like?
Paul Thomas:
As I said, it’s often involving different market dynamics, different cultures, most importantly, probably different communication styles as well. So tailoring is really vital. I don’t think it’s a one size fits all in terms of individual regions or geographies. Like how you’d run an activation session, for example, in the US versus somewhere like South Korea would be very, very different because they demand very different communication styles because of culture.
In one you can start top down from the answer and work backwards and in the other you’ve gotta drive, for example, bottom up and almost lead them to the answer. So again, tailoring is really key. Second thing is it’s really vital to know your audience, their backgrounds, hierarchies that may exist in the room especially that are culturally driven. And that’s really, really important in how you need to adapt exercises because of that as well, because culturally the dynamics in an activation session can be very different across markets.
And the final thing is you can be dealing with cultures where English is not the first language. So again, you need to tailor your outputs, your visual communications, your materials, and indeed even your activation exercises to be sensitive to this. So making sure that everything is clearly understood and nothing gets lost in translation. So I suppose overall it’s all about tailoring, tailoring, tailoring for me.
Bari Weinhausen:
Great, thank you. One thing I I heard from you all as we kicked off was about the importance of getting buy-in. And it sounds like it is key to success. I wonder how easy or difficult it is to get that buy-in Glenn. What are some of your approaches for getting that international buy-in across teams?
Glenn Staada:
Yes, it could definitely be difficult for those local market folks that may be disconnected from the central globally managed office or the buying center for the research. What we have found that works best is really leveraging a very senior person within the client’s organization to set that expectation that buy-in centrally and within the markets is critical. It will help them to grow their business. There’s a benefit for them to participate and there’s an expectation that they’re going to participate.
Often we will help to craft an email or a letter that gets then sent by the executive to the markets that essentially helps to tee up that participation. Then a lot of the stuff that Paul mentioned, make the local market folks feel that we are understanding their local situation, their local culture. Ask them upfront some of the questions that were talking about earlier about what you’re looking to get out of this, what should we know about your business? Make sure they see us asking those questions.
Sometimes we’ll offer, and we have to be careful about this so we don’t go too far field from the specs of the study, but sometimes we’ll offer, once we have a survey written to have one person in each market review it to make sure we’ve got the languaging right, we’ve got the competitive brands right. We’re not asking questions in a way that are culturally insensitive. So just asking them to participate upfront and helping us to get the survey instrument in place will help get that buy-in and that participation on the back end when we’ve got results ready to walk through.
Bari Weinhausen:
All right. So let me continue with you Glenn, if I may. So once you get that buy-in, when it comes to the actual activation workshops, what client dynamics need to be considered to help ensure success?
Glenn Staada:
Sure, yeah. It’s really important to know which of the internal departments have a stake in the research, could be impacted by the results, could benefit by actions that will be taken. So knowing on a certain project, if it’s segmentation, you may want marketing strategy people involved, you may want line of business people involved, you may want communications or messaging people involved.
Maybe R&D if we think there may be a need to develop new products around certain segments. So really understanding who should have a seat at the table, that’s critical. And then also as you’re thinking about what that activation session should look like, to get the most out of it, you really need to think about your company culture. Is it a culture where people share easily and we know we’re going to have a lot of participation.
Is it a culture where sometimes it’s harder to get people to speak up and there may be a way to then build exercises that address that barrier. Is it a culture that loves lunch and learns? Build it around a lunch and learn. So really just understanding the dynamics of your culture, how people interact with each other and build those in so the activation experience is comfortable.
Bari Weinhausen:
That all makes good sense. Thanks Glenn. So Shari, how might that differ for different strategic issues or needs? So in other words, when you think about Radius’s brand growth navigator, are there specific strategic issues or needs that would prompt a different design or approach to activation?
Shari Aaron:
So when we talk about the brand growth navigator, we’re referring to those key areas that drive business growth. That could include communications or targeting strategies. It could be around innovation or customer journey. So as you think about determining how to build the best activation program across these key growth areas, it’s important to realize that you should be thinking about building these around a variety of activities and experiences. Don’t think about activation as a one size fits all approach rather, and as Paul and as Glenn has been saying, tailor the activation program.
So I’ll give you a for instance, if you’re looking to build the right communication strategy, then the activation plan should be built around collaboration on developing the most actionable and impactful creative brief and maybe include your agency partners in that process. Let’s say your work is focused on the consumer journey or on the shopper or shopper’s side of the business. You want the activation plan to include building those retailer sell stories as the outcome or the retailer playbooks. You may even want to consider adding a retailer partner in with your activation. So you need to start with the goal in mind and what you want to implement and then work backwards and build out the activation program that’s going to more quickly enable your team to reach their goals.
Bari Weinhausen:
Got it. And then the other side of the coin, of course, there are some times when folks choose not to do an activation phase to a research initiative. Paul, what have you been finding in terms of reasons why a client might choose to skip an activation?
Paul Thomas:
Well, look, Ajit is obviously an obvious one. And actually I’d argue that the activation is vital to get the insights pushed through in the business. So I’d flip that around and say the onus is on us. So we need to be thinking about how we can cost effectively deliver some form of activation without it being the sort of Ferrari model that we’d all love to do but not all clients can afford. So can we create simple engaging tools that clients can use for internal activation, whether that be simple frameworks, short impactful videos, a collaboration forum that can be used for asynchronous activation and so on, rather than these huge in-person workshop programs across multiple countries. So as I said, it’s about us understanding what budget is available and tailoring effectively towards that because as I said, activation is not vital.
Bari Weinhausen:
So with that all said, how do you speak to clients? How do you suggest that clients think about their research budget and maybe allocating a certain percentage of that towards activation?
Paul Thomas:
A certain percentage? I don’t think that’s necessarily the right question. I think if budget is a problem, then we need to work out some simple tools that can be used where the budget restricts a full monty. So, again, I just reiterate it’s about being creative to make sure the client can achieve activation. Not saying that we can’t do it because they can only devote, for example, 10% of a small budget to it. I think the other thing could be said of time. We’ve had clients say, “well, we can’t do activation because of the time involved in getting everybody together” and so on. In that instance we need to create some form of FOMO to make them fear of missing out if they’re not involved in activation. Like Glenn said, creating so much buzz about it, really engaging the stakeholders in it so that they can’t wait to get through that door in terms of activation. Because if you do that, you’d be surprised how many clients will free up time in their diaries for it.
Bari Weinhausen:
Got it. Thank you. So despite best efforts, Shari, what happens if a client does decide to forego activation? Maybe they say that they’re going to do it themselves. What are some of the pitfalls that they might encounter if they should go that route?
Shari Aaron:
Yeah, I think, the bottom line is they’re not going to feel the same impact. You don’t get that collective team to contribute their thinking within the larger group. And honestly, clients have said to us, they feel remorse. They have expressed to us, “we’re sorry we didn’t bake it in.” What happens is people go back to old habits. So the company hasn’t gained alignment or understanding from the work that they invested in. So you get backsliding, you’re spending more time rehashing, you have more meetings, you go around in circles. These are those time wasters and they drive down the efficiency and they cause frustration for doing the work.
So, getting back to what Paul was talking about, it’s important to think about the cost of not doing activation. When you’re looking at the full cost of the research and the smaller component that activation provides, you weigh that against the inefficiencies of not getting everybody together on the same page. Each person brings their point of view, their unique hat, their diversity of thinking, their skill set, and you collectively come up with implementation and you make people commit to actions. And if that doesn’t happen in your activation session, because you don’t have budget for it, then you could be spending more time socializing and more meetings and not making the progress you need to make.
Bari Weinhausen:
Right. Well, this all sounds great and helpful and informative, but what really might bring it to life is an actual case study. So Shari, will you share an example of an international activation session that you’ve been a part of? We’d love to hear how it went, what the outcomes were, the various stakeholders and how it all came together.
Shari Aaron:
Yeah, so I’ll give a particular example. This one had four countries, different time zones, and the project involved global innovation and strategic growth for the company. So what we did is we had teams develop based on where they were located on their time zones, and we provided these teams with themes and activities to complete on their own and we, named this the climbing of Mount Everest. So everybody had this goal of, “we’re going to climb Mount Everest and within our teams we’re going to make it all the way to the top of Mount Everest.”
So everybody started at base camp, they understood the goals of working together to ensure that all the climbers made it up to the top of Mount Everest together. We created challenges building upon the learning of the research that needed to be accomplished at each level, including getting to the top where those final goals had to reach their final goals and shared collectively as they reached the top. So each country worked at their own pace and within their own cultural norms. And then we as Radius compiled the learning across those four different countries and showed where there were similarities, where there were differences and the nuances by country.
So this enabled the team in each of the countries to really stay engaged. It had deep collaboration throughout the process. It enabled us to move from the learnings to the implementation and to efficiently accomplish them. And each country’s needs were met as well as us providing a global roll up.
Bari Weinhausen:
Perfect. Thank you. That makes good sense. So let’s talk a little bit about AI and the role that AI might play in activation. So Paul, tell me a little bit about how you see AI enhancing the activation of research findings. I’m actually going to go around to everybody, so everybody put on your thinking cap. We’re just going to start with Paul up here.
Paul Thomas:
I think one enhancement we’re seeing is AI allowing us to activate across a greater breadth of sources of insight. That’s not new for AI but it’s bringing what we think are richer and deeper insights. And so giving us richer and deeper activation directions. I’ll give an example. We’re currently using AI to reactivate a huge raft of a big UK telecoms client’s existing research and their internal data, public social data and so on.
And it’s all about delivering forward-thinking, future trend identification. So trying to identify things almost 6, 9, 12 months in advance. So, our clients can act on them and develop and build for them now. So AI for us is doing the assisted learning across all these sources of insights to predict the consumer insights and the consumer issues that they need to be tackling and thinking about in the next six months. The value in AI in this context is it can allow us to collide so much, and that means, as I said, the trends are richer, deeper, more actionable than before. So that means we’re delivering clearer, more tangible opportunities onto the radar of these senior commercial business decision makers so they can pre-plan accordingly and be ahead of the game. So it’s allowing us to bring more to the table, make it richer, make it more predictive, and so put our clients on the front foot.
Bari Weinhausen:
Perfect. Thank you. Shari, what do you have to add?
Shari Aaron:
So I would add that you could incorporate tools like MidJourney or DALL-E right into your activation session, and these would allow you to inspire and deepen the learning. And you could use it, for instance, “pamper yourself”, that was a big theme that we were trying to have everybody understand played a role in the activation. And when you put into DALL-E this idea of pampering yourself, it brings something to life that shows an image. So we’re not saying go forward with that image, that’s your communication image. But it gave us a tagline, it gave us a look and a feel. It helped deepen our understanding of what pampering yourself actually meant, which I don’t think we would’ve gotten to without some form of illustration collective building in the group. So it’s a lot about inspiring and using these tools to add on rather than replacing the work that we’re doing in that session.
Bari Weinhausen:
Got it. And Glenn, what do you have in terms of last thoughts on AI as far as activation goes?
Glenn Staada:
Yeah, I agree with Paul and Shari in terms of the uses of AI bringing in just more breadth of additional insights and learnings to apply along with what we’ve learned maybe from a survey, what we know in other places. The one thing I do want to caution and where I see AI not being used is in that, “okay, so what do we do?” Essentially the stakeholders in the activation session are the ones that know their business the best. They’re the ones that should be making the decision. It should be the humans that are driving the activation, but leveraging AI to help with the breadth of insights that we have to be able to support those decisions.
Bari Weinhausen:
Great. And so as we begin to wrap up, Glenn, I’m hoping that you can give us a summary as we start to conclude our conversation in terms of how you frame all of this in a meaningful and compelling way for your clients.
Glenn Staada:
Yeah, I essentially link it to return on research investments. So activation essentially means a better return on the research investment for the organization because it’s a tool and a really useful and proven tool to help them optimally use the results that they’re getting from the research to drive those business results. So, again, I link it to return on research investment and it tends to make a lot of sense when we talk about it in those terms.
Bari Weinhausen:
Makes sense to me. Thank you so much. Thank you all of you. I’m actually going to open this up to Paul. He may have some questions from our observers today.
Paul Donagher:
I do. Lots of questions, folks. Thank you for those good insights and for those good comments. A lot of questions coming into the software. As usual, I’ll try and get to all of them, but I might combine a few. Lots of questions about creativity. We loved your Mount Everest example Shari, but, I think what’s coming through is having fun exercises make this fun for people to be part of. Do you have a favorite fun exercise that you have used in the past? One that you could recommend that we as a group think about in the future? I’ll throw that open to anybody who happens to have a fun one top of mind.
Glenn Staada:
Yeah, I forgot something as it relates to segmentation studies where the activation is about understanding the segment, bringing them to life, and then thinking about a strategy to put against them. We’ve hired actors to assume the personas of each segment and act out and create a character based on the personification. Essentially answer questions from the stakeholders as that persona. Another fun thing is if it is a segment and a category that lends to physical products, buy the products and bring them to the work session in terms of these are the products that this person uses. So really just bringing that person, that persona to life and that’s typically something that stakeholders love.
Paul Thomas:
You go ahead Shari.
Shari Aaron:
So I would just add on to what Glenn was saying, that you can also bring in not only actors, but also bring in consumers. Like if you want to pick the right consumers and have them do pre-work, but there’s nothing more inspirational than when your clients are talking directly to your end consumer in the activation session. So bringing them in for a small part or bringing the actors in, I think really livens up the ability to internalize. It’s about internalizing the learning in a collective environment.
Paul Thomas:
I think I’ll add to that a couple of things. Glenn, you talked about bringing actors into play segments. What we’ve done in the past is tasked our clients to go out and play those segments in retail which is eye opening for us because, do they understand the segment? Can they be the segment? And also eye opening for them in terms of how they get treated as the segment when they’re in retail. Another thing, we take our clients on safaris as well. So if we’re working with a client potentially, say in a premium category or so, we might take them into other categories, in the store. So we’ll take them into Fortnum and Mason in London and get them involved. Looking at how premium is displayed there in terms of the products. And this might be a cell phone manufacturer for example, but taking them into these different environments to generate ideas and create learning and so on. Some of the other techniques are similar that we would use.
Paul Donagher:
Excellent. Good ideas there. Appreciate it. This one comes in, they ask me not to mention their name, and you’ll see why in a second. And this isn’t quite international, but it’s activation in general, and I think we’ll all appreciate the question. So this business has a disconnect between the marketing team and the market research team and they’re always trying to be involved in activation, but don’t necessarily have a seat at the table. And so it’s the idea that they’re trying to elevate themselves and make sure market research is involved not just in the generation of insights and then giving them out to the organization, but then being involved in how the organization activates against them. Any best practices or tips and tricks to try and bridge that gap where there might be something that market research could do to bridge that gap to marketing?
Paul Thomas:
I’ll start. We’ve all been there where you’re working in organizations where things are siloed and I’ve got my data and you’ve got your data. One of the things is there’s culture and there needs to be a directive from the top in terms of how important the voice of the consumer is in the success of the organization. Coming in completely an opposite direction is how can we help the research or insight division demonstrate things like little quick wins. That can just be little examples of what can happen and what things market research can help answer and activate against rather than trying to muscle in and try and be everything to everybody. Just demonstrate those little benefits that market research can deliver.
Shari Aaron:
Yeah, and I’ll add on to that. It’s crystallizing the insight. We as market researchers sometimes devalue how much that insight matters. So we can help the market researcher crystallize the insight and how that drives the action in marketing and either find examples from other companies that we could share or help them really drive that connection so that they’re seen as valuable. And this takes time. It takes time to break down silos, it takes time to work in new ways. We’re all busy. The hybrid environment makes it more challenging. So I think you have to work at it from many different angles. There’s not going to be one easy answer to life’s biggest challenge of getting two groups to work together. But the value of not having the right insight, a lot of times we see marketing now wanting to do more consumer closeness going home, get closer to the consumer because they want to be more actionable. And I think that’s where the researcher could really step it up and find ways to add value to the process.
Paul Donagher:
Good. Let me ask one last one that I have here, and this is around when to check back in on the activation. So you’ve run your activation session, action plans are created, outputs are created. Is it incumbent upon the research team and their partners like Radius to go back after a period of time and check in to make sure that the action plans are still true to the insights? And if so, do we have a best practices around what the cadence for that might be?
Glenn Staada:
I think it depends on the category and the business and how fast moving that business is. I definitely think the researcher helps themselves by staying in communication and potentially it answers that previous question. Stay involved, keep in front of your stakeholders, your marketing team. Checking in on a three month cadence could make sense. Also that idea of setting one stakeholder who’s going to be that internal champion. Create an ongoing dialogue between research and that one research champion as the conduit to what the team is doing. That could be helpful as well.
Paul Thomas:
I think also we talked about stakeholder engagement and bringing them along in the journey. Hopefully through that you develop a deep relationship with the client. And it’s natural to carry on that relationship. So for me it’s not necessarily, well, how long do I wait until I pick up the phone? It’s like, well, I’m engaged in their organization. So it’s almost keeping a constant understanding of what’s happening because they might develop as they start activating it against an insight and developing a proposition or a program they might need some extra answers from the research. Might need to cut the data a different way too because they’re going to come up against challenges again. So it’s almost making sure that we are constantly helping them feed the activation as it is developed into the opportunity and into the proposition. So I feel it needs to be ongoing.
Paul Donagher:
Good stuff. Folks, that’s all the questions. Thanks everybody for attending. Thanks for your questions. Also, thank you team here for your time and your input here. We’ll be back with another webinar or round table in three months or so. In the meantime, thanks everybody for your contributions and for your questions and for your attendance today. Thank you.
Paul Thomas:
Thanks everybody.
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