Why you should never cut your research budget in a recession

Let’s face it, most people under the age of 40 probably haven’t had to make tough decisions about budgets in a recession during their career yet.

Those of us who do have a recession or two under our belts know there’s plenty of real world evidence proving the brands who continue to invest in marketing during a recession emerge stronger and grow faster when things improve.

But what about market research? The latest IPA Bellwether report suggests that, on the cusp of recession, whilst marketing budgets are holding up well overall (+11%), market research is looking like an early and significant loser (-8%).

So what should you be doing? Here’s what I think.

1. Don’t cut your budgets – adapt them

When recessions loom, businesses adjust their short term plans accordingly. So it follows that research plans should also be reviewed to reflect any pivots and challenges.

But whatever question is asked of you as a team, don’t let it be how can we do what we’re doing now but for less. Changing circumstances demands new thinking.

2. Start by protecting the big projects that will shape the business’s future

Peoples’ first instinct is often to scrap those big, often expensive, strategic projects that won’t deliver their real impact for a few years. But it’s unlikely that your business’s long term goals will change anytime soon. If you lose momentum now, your competitors who didn’t stop spending on research might get there first.

3. Find new and cost effective ways to monitor how consumers are feeling right now

This doesn’t mean investing in an expensive new tracking programme: there will be plenty of data in the public domain you can tap into for free.

• Collaborate with your competitors: after all, you’ll all be asking the same questions. Take inspiration from the cinema industry which did just that and formed Cinema First, a joint industry research collaboration, in response to the pandemic

• Start your own informal customer closeness programme: if you’re B2B go and spend the day with a customer once a month or so. If you’re B2C go visit them in their homes. Walk in thir shoes, listen to their stories and share them back to the office.

• And, if you have a small amount to spend, a syndicated study like The Score from Kokoro will help you measure the mood of the nation on a weekly basis.

4. Squeeze more value out of what you already have

Most research teams are sitting on a wealth of research, little of which gets used much beyond the debrief. Synthesise what you already know before making a decision to invest in anything new. Whilst it may only be an 70-80% solution, what you have may be good enough to keep the business moving forward so you’re ready for the upturn when it comes (and it will come)

5. Be honest with yourself about the value you get from your continuous research programme - and divert some money into value creating research

Frankly unless your NPS programme is closely tracking your most important business metrics you should have dumped it years ago. But if it is a lead/lagging indicator consider cutting back on the frequency so you can reinvest in research that will support the business’s short term needs.

The same goes for brand tracking: it’s crucially important to track your brand but peoples’ feelings about brands don’t change overnight and the world won’t end if you move your tracking to once a year

6. Don’t make the fatal error of moving research in house to save money

This is probably the single worst thing you can ever do, recession or no recession.

Doing so will merely devalue what you do and risk turning you and your team into a survey sausage factory. Sure, you’ll get lots of brownie points from your CFO for “saving the company some money”. But research teams don’t exist to save money: they are a part of the business that creates value.

Trust me, every minute you spend scripting surveys or moderating online communities is time you’re not spending influencing stakeholders, shaping strategy and raising the profile of your team as a valuable investment in the business.

If you look 2-3 years from now at your skills atrophied team and all you have to show for it are some NPS reports, polls from a customer panel and a happy former CFO, you may find it hard to justify your job let alone your budget when the next recession hits

Further reading

https://ipa.co.uk/news/peter-field-s-seven-lessons-for-advertising-during-a-recession

https://ipa.co.uk/initiatives/effworks/effworks-ft-reports/invest-in-recession-profit-in-recovery

https://hbr.org/2009/04/how-to-market-in-a-downturn-2

https://www.icaew.com/insights/viewpoints-on-the-news/2022/aug-2022/why-marketing-is-essential-in-a-recession

In praise of the humble data table (or how to get your late night number crunching on the front page

I've been working with the travel industry to help them influence government policy during the pandemic

Communicating insight is as big a challenge as collecting it. It requires a razor sharp focus on the insight or message you need to get across and an innate understanding of the audience you’re communicating with. Get either of those things wrong and you’ll see eyes glazing over and all your hard work come to nothing.

Too much insight is presented back in charts and graphics which leave you staring at them asking “What is this trying to tell me?” Even people who generally do this kind of stuff quite well get it very badly wrong sometimes. I mean, what ...?

When planning to present data ask yourself two things:

1. What's the message or insight that needs communicating?

Is there data that not pulling its weight or emphasising the message that should be excluded to give the insight room to breathe? I sense in the example above quite a lot. And I'm still unclear what I'm supposed to take out of this spaghetti mess

2. Who do I want to communicate this to?

The second point is crucially important. Let’s face it, numbers are a bit marmite.

Two decimal places are generally a no no in my book but if you’re reporting a clinical trial, they may have a place. But if you’re talking to people who make a living with words, it’s often better to keep it simple. It’s not dumbing down, it’s just making their life easy whilst ensuring you get your message across.

For example, I used to present some quite complex numbers assessing interest in 80-100 book concepts across 4-5 countries and multiple demographics back to book editors inform their publication roadmap. I recognised that the only thing they wanted to know was what global blockbuster to start work on next. I did it by removing all the significance testing and all the numbers and just colour coded the results. If it was green in all 5 markets, it was likely to be a global winner. A mix of colours, less so. It also reduced the report from 80 page to one, with a large appendix for those who cared about the numbers.

And so in celebration of the humble table, I give you a humble table. This is the original humble table that was pulled together close to midnight on Saturday 19th June when I discovered Test and Trace were actually publishing positivity rates of travellers coming from Red, Amber and Green countries.

It was a massive messy spreadsheet which I was keen to share with people who could get the message – that travellers from Amber countries were presenting minimal risk to the public health of the nation - into the mainstream media (so journalists, better at words than numbers). I used my data reduction skills to put 1400 rows of data covering countries, traffic light colour, tests, sequencing etc into a single table. Nothing else - certainly not a bar chart - would have been able to convey 24 bits of data so succinctly or impactfully in my view

It was subsequently picked up wholesale, including my rambling footnotes, by the Telegraph, Mail and many more, as well as by various MPs fighting the corner for the beleaguered travel and tourism industry. Hell, it even made the front page of the Times.

It may not have bells and whistles, but it told a story and that story got told. And maybe, just maybe, it made a bit of a difference. I do hope so. The travel and tourism have deserved better for a long time. So here’s to the humble data table.

And for anyone looking for a good read on this topic I can highly recommend Andrew Ehrenberg’s A Primer in Data Reduction. https://www.amazon.com/Primer-Data-Reduction-Introductory-Statistics/dp/0471101354

For instant insight, dump the NPS surveys, just walk the walk

As a research professional I’ve always been a bit cynical about NPS and CSAT surveys.

Rarely have I found a direct correlation between those scores and business performance. It can happen but it’s the exception not the rule. Companies invest considerable sums of money running them and then trying to squeeze some insight out of them, which is not always easy. Not least because the people who fill them in are usually either very happy customers or people who have something to get off their chests.

I want to use my recent airline experience to explain why there is a much better and faster way to find out what’s wrong and fix things.

We travelled with BA from T5 recently. It wasn’t great to be honest.

First, online check in is no longer allowed due to the vast amount of paperwork that needs checking.

So you arrive nice and early and stand in a cattle pen for an hour waiting to check in, until it gets too close to your flight time when they haul you out the queue and check you in anyway.

The member of staff who checked us in asked to see our PCR tests. We told him we didn’t need them for Greece as we had vax certification

On the four hour flight there was no food service whatsoever beyond a small bottle of water and a miniature breakfast bar, given to everyone for free. Because of all the queuing we didn’t have time to buy food before boarding so that was it.

The cabin crew huddled at the back out of sight once we’d been given our small bundle of sustenance

The flight left on time, arrived early, captain talked to us a few times. My husband gave him a good score on the landing.

Two days later BA send us a survey asking about our recent flight to Mykonos. Would we recommend BA to a friend or relative? Well we were very grateful to BA for taking us to Mykonos after EasyJet cancelled 3 flights but not sure that answers that question.

So here’s my point. Rather than spending hours crafting and analysing survey results from people who could be bothered to tell you about their trip, BA could have developed a plan of action in one day. By living the experience with me. During my six hour end to end experience I can tell you:

1. It was my worst travelling experience for some years

2. It was clear a lot of people were turning up without the right paperwork. It’s complicated. So some pre-departure advice or checklist for travellers from BA may helped have reduced this

3. Alternatively disconnect the paperwork checking from the bag drop. That would allow hand baggage only people to get through the system more quickly

4. Consider checking the paperwork at the gate – as was the case we experienced last year. This means the people checking are 100% knowledgeable about what the entry requirements are for that destination and don’t ask you for things you don’t need. If we hadn’t been clear ourselves we may have panicked

5. Let people know in advance they might need to bring some food with them or promote pre-ordering more prominently.

6. And if cabin crew are there for our safety, why hide them at the back of the plane? A lot of the survey questions were about how “safe” I felt. I was on the plane. Doesn't that say something about my confidence in BA?

All that insight in six hours with some actionable suggestions versus a big survey which will feed into a dashboard and verbatims cogitated about over many weeks

“Walking in their shoes” and observational research are amongst the most powerful forms of research if you’re looking to understand where an experience is going wrong or well. I recently spent a very insightful two days watching people clean their toilets and was able to feed in more insight than any survey asking people how satisfied they are with their bottle of Toilet Duck ever could

There’s a lot to get fixed here, most of it crap that's been imposed on them and they're doing their best, but I do hope BA don’t wait weeks to get round to fixing it.