1. We think storytelling is only for big keynote gigs, not everyday presentations

Presenters often persuade themselves that the story form only works for high profile presentations, and cannot be adapted and applied to more prosaic, everyday business presentations.  Here, one has sympathy with the typical business presenter.  They read articles about the power of storytelling, then rush out to buy textbooks on how to be a fantastic storyteller, only to find the examples in these texts are about Steve Jobs launching the iPhone.  They do not find too many illustrations of more workaday projects being presented in story form.  They therefore come to the conclusion that storytelling is the preserve of high profile business gurus launching game-changing ideas, and is not for a Head of Customer Insight asked to explain how recent quality assurance improvements have enhanced the complaints handling division of an insurance company.

2. We get anxious because storytelling ‘exposes’ us as the presenter

A storyteller is expected to put some of their emotional self into a presentation.  Storytelling means that the presenter’s view becomes ‘admissible’ evidence. We should welcome this after years of being in the back room.  But stepping up to the plate is easier said than done.  Encouraging researchers to use ‘self-disclosure’ and other storytelling engagement techniques in order to breathe life into their presentations is not going to happen overnight.  Only a few years ago, using an anecdote to engage the audience would be dismissed as trivialising the core body of the evidence.  But today, with the rise of the storytelling form, the use of anecdotes is praised as personalising a story and bringing it alive.  But it represents a paradigm shift in presenting.

3. We are frightened of success

Another reason why business presenters do not tell stories when delivering their presentations is due to subconscious ‘self-sabotage’.  After years of being the supporting act – rustling up data – market researchers cannot now believe they really have the power to ‘own the room’.  You would have thought that market researchers would embrace this new opportunity with both hands.  But many individuals will subconsciously self-sabotage their potential.  Deep down they are nervous and frightened of being the 100% centre of attention.  They are frightened of the very success that they have craved for so many years.  This ‘self-sabotage’ explains why many market researchers do not seize the opportunity to become fantastic storytellers.

Getting over the resistance

Let us look at three ways of overcoming the resistance to storytelling

a. Build self-belief

The start point for being a fantastic storyteller lies in self-belief.  Martin Sorrell said, ‘Shedding the loser’s curse and gaining the winner’s advantage is at the heart of success’.  No amount of technical training on the art of storytelling will have any effect unless an individual believes that they can effortlessly command the attention of the audience.  Presenters need to build their confidence by recognising that storytelling is not going away.  Today, more people than ever are telling stories – on Facebook and Twitter.  Moreover, storytelling is going to be even more prominent into the future.  So, the start point for becoming a great storyteller is, not only to believe in the power of stories, but also in your own ability to master the storytelling craft.  This is something we can all do: it is not just for Steven Spielberg.

b. Stories do not drift down from the Muse: learn the storytelling craft

The next way of becoming a fantastic storyteller is to recognise that ideas for a story structure do not drift down from the muse in some magical way.  Some individuals are naturally better storytellers than others.  But we can all learn the techniques of becoming a storyteller.  Ask any novelist or dramatist and they will be able to explain the overarching structure they use in putting together a story.  Talk to improvisation comedians and they will explain the overall format they use in order to survive on stage.  Ultimately, of course, creative flair will come into play.  But everybody can start casting their evidence as a story.  It is just a matter of acquiring the knowledge and the techniques.

c. Practice makes perfect

Steve Jobs, who is now hailed as one of the world’s great presenters, has acquired, through hours of practice, the technique of being a winning presenter.  But he did not start with any particular natural advantage.  Even today he will spend 90 hours practising for a major keynote presentation.  The next pillar of being a great storyteller is being prepared to put in the hard yards of practice, believing in the Gary Player philosophy: ‘The harder I practise the luckier I get’.

How do you build self-belief, acquire storytelling techniques and cultivate a confident storytelling style?

Storytelling is here to stay.  But there are clearly resistances that get in the way of market researchers making maximum use of storytelling in their day-to-day presentations.  At DVL Smith we have a seven stage storytelling programme that helps individuals become great storytellers. We teach self-belief, outline simple techniques to construct compelling storylines, and help people become engaging presenters.  Get in touch to find out more.

All creativity is simply a reworking of existing ideas. In the art world this process is called influence. Matisse influenced Picasso; Marlowe influenced Shakespeare. As Aaron Sorkin once put it – ‘good writers borrow from other writers, great writers steal from them outright.’ This, in itself, was influenced by T.S. Elliot (‘immature poets imitate, mature poets steal’).

Such influencing is not confined to the art world. Many successful businesses simply improve upon existing ideas in the market place. Apple’s groundbreaking Lisa computer was influenced by work on graphic user interfaces at Xerox. Lou Gerstner implemented successful strategies from his time at American Express to turn round the fortunes of IBM in the ‘90’s. Google – a company many credit as being a cauldron of creativity – was founded through a re-combination of Alta Vista’s search engine and the long-standing process of academic referencing. Even their P-P-C business model was taken wholesale from Overture Inc.

In the words of Steve Jobs: ‘creativity is just connecting things.’

Why is it then that researchers seem set on reinventing the wheel at every opportunity? Rather than building, learning and enriching the existing information which lies unused and unnoticed on a company’s hard drive or reference shelf, fresh projects are commissioned. Many of which produce the same findings already harboured within the bowels of the organisation.

There seems to be a resistance to using existing information for new purposes, an underlying feeling that the real solution lies outside the company if only it could be found by the right agency – that maximising the existing knowledge is inadequate.

Such thinking is faulty. Fresh insights comes through creative combination, by bringing past research together in a new and useful way. This does not diminish the power of the new finding, the new combination is unique because the insight is unique. But the elements that make up the combination are not unique at all.

As an industry we should be less focussed on naively and dogmatically commissioning ream upon ream of data. Instead we should take the time to realise the power of the existing data in our possession. This is an approach reflected in William Duggan’s recent book Strategic Intuition. Duggan highlights the benefits of reflecting on the past to achieve that ‘coup d’oeil’ – literally ‘the stroke of the eye’; the knowing insight – into what will work in the current situation. Gaining such insight is relatively simple, but it requires the right presence of mind, and a willingness to reflect on existing information, as opposed to largely ignoring what went before.

Of course, this demands that companies already have an existing reservoir of research on which to build; but in many cases this is true. So, before breaking the bank on the next big project, it may be better, on occasions, for companies to look within first.

Patrick Young

It’s telling that RSM’s recent State of the Market Research industry report highlights a key factor, which in my mind has made the effects of the recession much worse for some agencies. This is a failure to provide innovative research solutions. Not only has this exacerbated the credit crunch, I think it has also contributed to a tarnishing of research’s reputation in the eyes of decision-makers.

Larger agencies have fallen into a ‘process trap’ of using generic methodologies for disparate problems. While this has helped them cut costs in the past, it also means that the quality of the research declines. One of the easiest ‘process’ methods is online research; which has been held up as almost a scapegoat for the recession. But as the RSM’s report suggests, the problem actually stems from how online research is implemented. Not enough consideration goes into core issues such as correct sampling, low response rates and research design. These are factors that shape any methodology and must be given due care and attention.

Resolving issues such as low response rate or sampling error can result in the creation of a bespoke, tailored research solution. But this does not necessarily fit within the ‘process’ business model of larger agencies. Smaller agencies are better disposed to select the most appropriate methodology and approach for each project. Indeed in the last six months DVL Smith has embraced mixed-mode research, landscape analyses and competitor communication audits as methodologies and outputs have ranged from customer choice funnels and interactive DVD commentaries to creative workshop discussions and traditional presentations.

Smaller agencies can offer added value consultative input on key business issues whilst side stepping the now crippling overheads brought on by having big fieldwork machines to feed and a costly infrastructure to maintain. Thus from the smaller agency standpoint there remains a demand for our services which do more than simply report the data.

At its core research agencies in the credit crunch, large and small, are trying to cope with increasing client expectations against a backdrop of falling relative revenue. This has resulted in a preoccupation with online due to its comparatively cheap cost. However research agencies need to have the flexibility to look outside traditional methods to solve the problem of the credit crunch. However perhaps the most important area for clients and agencies to focus on is training and skills development, in order to learn and advance more holistic and solution-driven, rather than process-driven, approaches to research.

The way to survive the downturn, and brush off any blemishes to the industry’s image, is to invest in both training and flexibility. More than ever we need Skills Development programmes in place to help newcomers to the industry make sense of the plethora of information sources now available and the flexibility to foster creative research solutions in the face of budget cuts and increasing client demand for innovative results.

Patrick Young

Perhaps this maltreatment of language is acceptable in everyday conversations; when we have to make commentary off-the-cuff. Perhaps not: Barack Obama, just last week, came under fire for his choice of words when he said that the “Cambridge police acted stupidly for arresting Henry Louis Gate, Jr.” On reflection Obama admitted that he “could have calibrated those words differently.” Did he mean to say ‘stupidly’? Perhaps he was really searching for ‘foolishly’, ‘idiotically’, or ‘naively’. All of which are synonyms of ‘stupidly’, but all of which have slightly different meanings.

If even off-the-cuff comments are met with scrutiny, surely when we do have a chance to think exactly and precisely about what we are trying to say we do so carefully? Not so if we are to focus on the world of advertising. Adverts, in general, are a team effort; the result of numerous people, both client and agency, working together to create something. The main objective of which is to quickly and effectively influence the audience.

Given this it does seem bizarre that some adverts seem not to have been passed through the filters of meaning. Phileas Fogg Crisps provide an excellent example of where only a passing thought has been give to the semantics of the copy. Phileas Fogg, and his journey, is a very engaging but nonetheless fictional creation. To use the semiotic technique of ‘notness’, Fogg and his journey are bogus: they are not ‘authentic’. How egregious an error, then, for Phileas Fogg Crisps themselves to use the strap line ‘a world of authentic ingredients’! Surely the very use of this word undermines the entire advert; the use of the fictional character Fogg subverts and mocks the meaning of ‘authentic’.

It is easy to gloss over such errors as insignificant or trivial, but in a very real sense there are times when ignoring the cultural and social associations we have with words can lead to problems.

In 2002, Royal Mail Group rebranded as Consignia. This was chosen to summarise what all three organisations (Post Office, Royal Mail and Parcelforce) did, i.e. they consigned parcels, packages and letters. What this failed to take into account was the semiotic analysis of ‘consign’. To a semiotician ‘consign’ has comparatively negative associations i.e. he is consigned to history, or consign that to the rubbish bin. Unwittingly Royal Mail was setting itself up for a fall. The importance of semiotic analysis had been overlooked and so, at extra cost to the taxpayer, the original Royal Mail Group branding was restored.

What are the implications of this for research? We must not get complacent at only focusing on what is tangible and recorded in our own data. Instead we must always pay attention to the hidden meaning and codes that sit behind our language. We must give more attention to the importance of semiotics and its associated branches of semantics, syntactics and pragmatics. For in the words of Samuel Beckett, ‘Words are all we have’: we must not waste them.

Patrick Young

It’s true that these new online platforms are changing the landscape of data collection – possibly forever – and certainly offer an alluringly cheap alternative to traditional market research during the recession. Plus the article rightly raises the concern that these online tools can only be offered free as they ignore the reassuring checks and balances built into traditional research, such as correct survey sampling, questionnaire and research design.

But increasingly it is becoming difficult to bemoan the use of these alternatives as we as an industry are moving into an era of imperfect data. It is time to realise that gone are the days of the Gold Standard market research project – too often the industry must accept trade-offs between budgetary constraints and ever shortening timetables against the need for robust results.

This does not necessarily mean, however, that we are on an inevitable decline into extinction, outmoded against free online services. Rather, perhaps, these new upstarts are offering just the right change agent for Market Research to evolve. If, as appears to be the case, we are increasingly unable to compete  effectively then we must adapt; offering something better. And this, we most certainly can do.

As this blog has already suggested, we must become more effective at going beyond the data, of truly offering added value. What clients, free online tools and services lack, is an understanding of how to put research together, how to assimilate survey data with qualitative evidence and existing information to create a clear, accurate picture of the market and the consumer. This, at the end of the day, is what the client truly wants from data. Not the numbers, but advice on the way forward for the business.

We, as an industry, must become proficient at conducting research as an investigative journey, supported by conceptual frameworks, rather than remaining a dinosaur of the data dump, periodically offering up survey tables at the foot of the client’s door adrift from their business objectives – a dearer, more protracted substitute for the temptations of online.

This, surely, will be the real challenge for the industry: upskilling newcomers to research on how to piece together disparate pieces of imperfect data to create an holistic understanding and, most importantly, know how to deliver this with impact, framing the choices for the client going forward. This, you’ll agree, is a world apart from the survey monkey.

Patrick Young

Gladwell opened the evening by offering to explain his perspective on the causes of the credit crunch – not perhaps the most illuminating or exciting of prospects, and one which, judging by the collective sigh across the  stalls, certainly did not captivate the audience. What did grab the attention of the audience was his next line: ‘I’m going to try to tell the story of the credit crunch, without saying one word about finance or banking. Instead, I’m going to talk about the American Civil War.’

By using the story of the Civil War as a metaphor for the banking crisis, Gladwell was able to expose and explain some of the key causes of the credit crunch without losing his audience in the minutiae and tedium of financial particulars. This, perhaps, is the skill of great speakers: knowing how to engage both the emotions and the thoughts of the audience. Or as Daniel Goleman put it: great teachers have always ‘touched their disciples’ hearts by speaking in the language of emotion, teaching in parables, fables and stories.’

And so instead of a laborious sermon about sub-prime mortgages, double entry book keeping, and Wall Street, we were treated to a re-telling of the Battle of Chancellorsville; the battle of wits between the Confederate hero Robert E. Lee and the Yankee General Joseph Hooker, and the struggle for either side to capture the vital Rappahannock River. Only towards his closing was our story wrapped up with an insightful conclusion that a perfect storm of over-confidence, erroneous expert knowledge, and cognitive mis-calibration led to the defeat of Hooker and – this is where the stories converged – the collapse of the American, and soon after global, banking system.

This skill of analogy and metaphor – of seeing one thing in terms of another – is a powerful tool, and one that researchers should add to their presenting repertoire. Clearly ours is a different speech to that of Gladwell’s: we are commissioned to deliver insights, present findings, and offer grounded solutions to problems. Yet what Gladwell brought home was the fact that ‘we know more than we can tell’.

At some point we will need to reach for something more powerful and impactful than a statistic or vox pop or quote. We will need to find an emotional hook to our presentation, and tell the story of the evidence through its lens. As Goleman suggested, ‘what something reminds us of can be far more important than what it ‘is’.’

This does not mean throwing away the data, but rather being aware of the value of metaphors and the power they can play in gaining audience ‘buy-in’ to the point you want to make, before descending into statistical differences and grounded theory. Nor does this mean searching aimlessly for similes and parallels.  There are a number of ways to think creatively and develop your own metaphors, not least a flick the excellent book The Magic of Metaphor.

So before we prepare any presentation, we should think like Gladwell, and remember that human thought processes are largely metaphorical. In the words of Daniel Pink, ‘if a picture is worth a thousand words, then a metaphor is worth a thousand pictures.’

Patrick Young

But to me the somewhat evangelical reverence with which co-creation is sometimes revered is slightly worrying. Mainly because, let’s be honest, there is no such thing as co­-creation. Rather, there is only a refinement of one person’s idea. As Steinbeck suggested, ‘the group can build and extend something, but the group never invents anything.’ This is exemplified by Wikipedia, Linux and Firefox. Erroneously heralded as products of co-creation, each had a single inventor who built them into impressive, but nonetheless, ordered communities, where each individual conforms to an underlying structure of the creator.

At the heart of co-creation there is a hope that if enough minds come together then success will result. This begs the question: is co-creation successful? Quite probably not. In the sphere of Market Research, at least, co-creation is bounded by the demands of the client. The emphasis is less on co-creating something original or brilliant, but rather co-refining: developing an updated or altered product that still fits within the business model. So it becomes difficult to champion the liberating power of co-creation when one has to temper the potential productivity of the group in line with the demands of the client.

Furthermore, while Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds and Leadbeater’s We Think have helped to endorse the idea of co-creation, these efforts seem to ignore its ‘darker side’: the psychological and sociological biases that creep into any form of group work – group think, social loafing, and group polarisation to name but a few. In short, groups are rarely that successful. In the words of Ralph Cordiner, the former chairman of General Electric, ‘if you can name for me one great discovery or decision made by a committee, I will find you the one man in that committee who had the lonely insight…that solved the problem that was the basis for the decision.’

The chief concern with co-creation is that it creates a false dichotomy that because groups are the bright future, the efforts of the individual are clearly inferior. Increasingly, it seems, the worth of the individual is being devalued. No longer is Steinbeck’s ‘lonely mind of a man’ considered all that precious. Worse, this thought is slowly and erroneously permeating market research – perhaps best exemplified with the growing endorsement of online discussion groups in which, purportedly, respondents can collectively create something new.

Not only does this trend undermine the individual, but it also undermines the researcher. Traditional research techniques of focus groups and in-depth interviews, in which the role of the researcher is key, are increasingly seen as outmoded and ineffective.  This, however, removes the rigour and experience of the researcher, meaning balanced and accurate insights are less likely – something I’m sure all parties want to avoid.

This is not to say that group work and collaborative efforts do not have a place in research, but this should not be at the detriment of individual creativity. In the words of Dr. Ester Buchholz, the late psychoanalyst and author of The Call of Solitude, ‘creative solutions require alone time. Solitude is required for the unconscious to process and unravel problems and to unearth original answers.’ Surely now, in the heat of the current recession when out-of-the-box, creative thinking is so clearly in demand, we shouldn’t be so quick to leave this behind.

Patrick Young

The aim of the tour is to help spread the word about the new ways of understanding, analysing and making sense of the myriad of disparate types of quantitative, qualitative and existing corporate data that researchers now face and how best to weave these threads of evidence together to communicate a story to decision-makers.

The talks will touch on the work currently conducted by DVL Smith Ltd in the UK, Europe and internationally, and reference our Seven Frames approach to data integration and analysis. This Seven Frames approach lies at the heart of our consultancy work and is the subject of one our many skills develop modules.

David will be starting this lecture tour in Thailand on the 29^th June, before arriving in India on the 1^st of July. There may still be time to attend one of David’s lectures.

So to find out more about the tour, our Seven Frames approach or to register to receive a copy of David’s Lecture Notes, which will be available free after the tour, click here.

Of course there is a time and a place to administer a questionnaire or analyse data, but this doesn’t represent the whole of a researcher’s responsibilities. Nothing is heard about the brighter sides of research. When do we shout about the potential for international travel, the chance to present to CEOs, Boards of Directors and company Chairmen, or having a direct influence on how almost any new product or service is shaped? The answer, it seems, is rarely.

Management Consultants, for example, have developed an image of empowerment and sophistication, yet they spend just as much time – if not more – in back offices, reading reports and playing with numbers; the same could be said for marketing professionals, branding experts, or ad men.

What, then, can be done to rectify this situation? Well, there are any number of ways in which we could revive the image of market research, but perhaps the easiest and most successful strategy would be to write a research book. This is not to say that researchers don’t already have access to a plethora of industry paperbacks. We do, and these have been excellent at helping to train, guide, and inform researchers themselves – but only once they have joined the industry. What they have not done is appealed to the general public, or gotten to the top of bestseller lists. In short, they have not had popular appeal.

At this point, a potential spanner in the works is the overriding problem of how to appeal to the masses while discussing statistical significance, interviewer effects, or sampling errors. And I agree, this is a challenge.  Though not necessarily an insurmountable one. Just look at economics – the dismal science – which has been brought alive by books like Freakonomics. Mathematics has received a makeover thanks to the popular Radio 4 programme More or Less, and Malcolm Gladwell has come close to breathing life into Market Research with his books that pull together sociology, research, and psychology to produce a bestseller.

Why these books are successful is that they write about the topic rather than for the topic’s industry. Outliers is about statistics, but the focus is on the interesting anomalies found within it. Gladwell took the area of statistics, focussed on the most arresting areas, and made it successful. Freakonomics provides a peculiar and very readable account of data trends. Perhaps the most impressive book, though, is The Undercover Economist. Tim Harford manages to provide an overview of economic theory and practice – including a chapter all about economic externalities! – while at the same time creating an entertaining book which secured a place on The Sunday Times Bestsellers List.

This, then, is the challenge for Market Research. We have to believe that we are sitting on a gold mine of fantastically interesting theories, stories, anecdotes, and case studies. And we are. All we need to do is find an angle, a point of interest that the public can relate to, and write about it. Three ideas come to mind immediately.

What about how opinions are formed? We are living through a massive revolution in the way the opinion culture in unfolding (something I have discussed previously on this blog). This whole area urgently needs to be revisited. What we may have written 20 years ago about the way opinions and attitudes were formed and informed upon is now completely different. So why don’t we, as purveyors of attitudinal data and opinion research, write the book on it?

Or, how about the changing role of Market Research itself? Books documenting the rise and revolution of internet marketing seem to fly off the shelves.  A similar change is taking place in the field of Market Research but little or nothing is heard about this. Surely many small businesses and entrepreneurs would be interested in the latest techniques to size their market, shape their offering, and appeal to their target audience? We know how to do this, so why not write a bestseller about it?

A final thought could be that we take a more whimsical look at research. Many years ago James Herriot brought veterinary science to life. Couldn’t Market Research do the same? I’m sure most researchers have got a  cluster of entertaining anecdotes: staying in that Fawlty Towers-esque hotel in Scotland; running a focus group on prophylactics, and trying to convince Chinese immigration that being a market researcher does not mean you are involved in espionage…

Patrick Young

Yet this is not always the case. If a sentence is poorly written, or a presentation is badly constructed, it changes the nature of the artifact from an Experiential one to a Reflective one. Reflective artifacts require time and effort to understand and interpret. They become, as it were, visible – interrupting the transfer of information. Not what is needed when presenting information. Poor construction turns presentations into Reflective challenges, limiting the audience to simply trying to decipher the slides. It can convert what should be an easy Experiential task into a Reflective challenge.

Market research seems to have developed a particularly bad reputation for producing Reflective presentations, and draining the energy of the audience by forcing them to constantly grapple with complex data sets and confusing graphs. The reason for such a high incidence of ‘death by PowerPoint’ is that, in general, researchers are guilty of presenting raw survey numbers to an audience, thereby turning the presentation into a problem-solving exercise. This causes needless mental effort, taking needless time. Worse still, the attention of the audience suffers, as focused concentration is easiest to sustain when in an Experiential, rather than in a Reflective, mode.

In this sense, many Market Research presentations serve as a ‘data dump’, overloading the audience with mindless minutiae. To avoid this trap, we must think about the fundamental aim of a presentation: to persuade and inform. Therefore, it is essential for the information to be understood quickly and effortlessly by the audience. We must instead decide on a different type of representation than pure numbers, substituting them for a representation more easily understood by a business audience: frameworks.

Thus rather than copying and pasting Excel spreadsheets and data tables into a presentation, we must represent the same meaning contained in the numbers but within a business framework. Norman suggests the reason people produce Reflective presentations is, to some extent, due to technology. Less time than is necessary is spent on trying to make the information simple for the audience to understand. ‘The problem is it is easiest to present people with the same representations as used by computers: numbers. But this is not the easiest way for people to understand the information.’

The BCG Matrix, the Change Model, or the Profit Pool Analysis, are all fairly common frameworks which can be substituted in the place of pure numbers, thus presenting the audience with the information in the format most appropriate for their needs. Frameworks transform the information being delivered from a Reflective problem into an Experiential task, and so release the audience from trying to interpret a spread of numbers, and instead allowing them to think beyond the presentation and see how this new information connects with their business.

Knowing how to place data into frameworks in a presentation requires a particular skill, and takes time and thought to complete. It is a process that involves Slow, Reflective thinking, in order to take the mental pressure off the audience. Edwin Schlossberg, the international author and designer, once said, ‘the skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.’ Perhaps this is also the skill of a good presentation, and one that Market Research needs to learn.

Patrick Young