Quant Data Is Only Half The Story: Write Better Consumer And Market Insights Reports With These Top 3 Tried And True Tools
The ability to tell a story through data is table stakes in business today. Data visualization elevates these stories taking them from base line expectation to strategic advantage. As my colleague, Robin Algaze, recently posted here, visualization helps your audience more easily process and remember information. Partnering data with visuals packs a powerful punch of persuasiveness. But data alone – no matter how brilliantly visualized and displayed – is only half the story.
You can offer up the most incredible, graphically rich, and visually imaginative presentation and still miss the mark on impact if your story is not sound. The secret sauce to getting to a strong and compelling story goes beyond the data. It lives outside the well-placed visual. It comes down to identifying the insight … that ah-ha spark where a human truth or circumstance is identified to reveal a tension just waiting to be loosened and set free. It’s a conflict or a missing piece …. a gap between the reality of the now and the aspiration for the future.
Maybe you can relate to my occasional struggle to find the four-leaf clover of story among fields and fields of data. I find the insight challenge compounded when the data I’m working with is predominately transactional data, survey data or similar information. This data is useful in an assessment or measurement of behavior—telling us what is up and what is down, where gaps between expectations and performance might exist or helping to size opportunities, audiences, or markets. But it can fall short in providing insight into the why of it all. What motivates, inspires, or challenges? What prompts certain beliefs, actions, or decisions? And, quite often, it is these ‘why’ questions that lead to the most powerful insights and, in turn, the strongest stories.
So, although necessary to narrow in on the enrichment of story via great visual communication, we can’t just heave the responsibility all on great graphics to carry the burden of telling the story. We must look to our modes of data-gathering and our research applications themselves and find ways to infuse more of the ‘why’ inquiry and meaning-making into them. As Ignite 360 expands quantitative services and capabilities, this is one area we continue to reflect on and experiment with. We are exploring ways to integrate elements of qualitative learning into our survey instruments to further illuminate and go beyond the ‘what’ of stated behavior. Here are just a handful of ideas on how to write better consumer and market data insights reports:
1. Rethink the survey open end
Bring a human component, a more high-touch aspect, into the equation by turning typical survey open end questions into video question and answer activities. Record someone asking the question and embed this as a reel into your next survey. This pre-recorded and ‘click to watch’ video then requires the participant to record their own response. Shape your questions with an invitation to share more description and detail. This makes it more possible to glean the emotion via facial gestures and responses. Not only can this help with insight identification, but videos can be pulled into your insight reports to help illustrate key points in the voice (and faces) of your target audience.
2. Integrate AI learning tools
The power of AI to learn and get smarter through exposure to data sets has been well-documented. There are several AI applications that can be leveraged within surveys to review responses for pattern-recognition and thematic analysis. Consider how AI technology might query the survey participant by sharing previous responses to the same question and asking the participant to pick the one that most closely matches their own sentiment. Think about the advantage this provides to narrow in on the most salient themes and take some of the guesswork out of consumers’ underlying motivations or meaning. Plus, it can help to jump start the data analysis process thereby speeding up the back end of your story development.
3. Mix things up with qualitative techniques
Oftentimes, we can go beyond the surface by applying some deceptively simple qualitative exercises within our depth one-on-ones, focus groups, and online journaling approaches. In your next survey, borrow some of these tools to dive more deeply with your consumers. Projective techniques, word or imagery association, and “fill-in-the-blank” styled questions can serve a dual-purpose of building a richer understanding while also increasing participant engagement in the survey. The next time you are developing a survey, ask your favorite qualitative research expert for some ideas on ways to integrate these probing techniques into your set of questions.
These are just some of the ways that we are marrying the strengths of qualitative discovery with the assessment precision of quantitative research. I’m curious if you have tried any of these or if there are other tools or techniques you have seen and used? What has worked well and what hasn’t? Drop me a line at lisa@ignite-360.com and share your thoughts, questions, and examples.
If you are interested in bringing together the power of qual and quant in your next research project, let me know. We are always looking for partners who want to experiment and learn together.
Let’s chat about the possibilites! lisa@ignite-360.com
And remember, data without insight is only half the story!
