It sounds like handing the kids the keys to the car, I know. Humor me for a minute though.
When you hear “creatives” if you envision toddlers screaming around marking up walls with crayons and leaving behind a trail of chaos and pain, then you’ll have a hard time making the leap to letting these mini terrorists have any say in something as serious as research, data, and results that you will hang your every future hat on. Bottom lines are at stake! Critical decisions need to be made! Do not let the clowns run the circus! I feel you. I totally do.
Plus, from the perspective of the creative team, why would they trust research? If we’re talking about a focus group methodology, they think it’s problematic at best. Taking a campaign out of context and giving it to a roomful (or zoomful) of people is the opposite of research. Participants show up for the free lunch and say what they like and what they don’t, according to personal preference. Saying what you think you should think is not the same thing as what you actually think, or how you would actually respond IRL. It in no way represents the environment someone would otherwise come into contact with said campaign so any response participants have is baseless. Ah-hem. I mean that’s what I imagine the creative team would think.
There is a happy day in here, I promise.
We can bring “creative” and “research” together without ending up with “creative research”. (Which sounds like it could be a prosecutable crime and I’m not looking for trouble.) And yes, there is a case for focus groups, within the right set and setting, for a specific purpose, and in the appropriate circumstances. The overarching takeaway is, when the creative team helps develop and design the research methodologies and instruments, you get the data you need to lay the foundation for a successful campaign.
Some nails to hammer this home:
—More critical than the choice model, are the questions. From online surveys, to interviews, guided group discussions, and mediator-led focus groups, the questions you ask determine the quality of the data you get in return.
—The creative team is going to create the work. They know what types of answers they need in order to develop strong brands and insightful campaigns. Because they know what they are looking for, they know what to ask to draw out both functional and emotional responses.
—Language is the job of the copywriter. A writer can craft a survey question clearly, in a way that will encourage a clear answer that goes beyond yes or no. A writer knows how to talk to an audience, build trust, and get an authentic response.
—Design is the job of the designer and/or art director. How the questions are laid out, matters. (Just ask Florida’s Hanging Chad.)
—Show me don’t tell me. Once the results are in, data visualization can bring the numbers to life, helping to foster a deeper understanding or spark a fresh interpretation. You need a skilled designer to do this if you don’t want to end up with some snoring charts and graphs that make people want to smother them with a pillow.
—Creative teams are conceptual thinkers. They will already be noodling ideas and rationales that can be preliminarily “tested” with carefully developed questions—in effect, to take the temperature of potential consumers or stakeholders before sinking resources into fully developed ideas. (Not being in the heads of the creative team, a research analyst or consultant has no mechanism by which to reverse engineer the instruments in this way.)
—Your creatives will trust the process and results more if they are involved. They’ll be less likely to allow false environments, and therefore, be more confident the data is a true and accurate representation of the responses.
—Your creative team can help with analyzing results and forming insights. Again, as conceptual thinkers, they are adept at taking large sources of information and finding compelling outcomes.
—Not everything needs to be taken at face value (nor should it). Creatives know that just because a test audience may say they do or don’t like something, it doesn’t mean you do or don’t do it. It just informs the manner in which you may or may not do it.
—We’re here for the client. We’re closer to the client (their brand, service, product, customers etc.) than a research company can be. It’s our job as communicators and marketers to lead, inform, change minds, and change behaviors. Instead of basing next steps on auto-pilot reactions to straight data, we interpret findings and determine a path forward within the context of our clients’ brand presence, vision, obstacles, and goals.
—Trusting your creative team can mean the difference between an expected end work product and an exciting, original, brilliant one. The end result is you get not just creative for creative’s sake, but creative that has chops; with strategy and data to back it up, and it will have a bigger, more effective impact because of it.
To be clear, I’m honing in on customer/audience and stakeholder research, whether qualitative or quantitative. I’m not really talking about trend analysis or broad market reports, those are a heavier lift and expertise is always required. As is more detailed analytics, measurement, optimization and reporting.
Obviously, developing research instruments isn’t the only activity a research partner is responsible for. There’s the whole recruitment and screening of participants, crunching the numbers thing, aggregating the data stuff, and a bunch of other mumbo jumbo. I say that not to imply that research is “mumbo jumbo”, but to fully admit there’s a large, highly critical part of it, that I don’t understand. And sometimes it’s huge numbers we’re talking about, with tons of data, and I wouldn’t even know where to begin. Clearly I’m out of my lane now so I will stop talking and let the research people take over from here.
I’m not trying to mess things up, or upset some sort of research + strategy + brand + creative equilibrium, or discount the work of analysts. Because our jobs depend on how well they do theirs. We need each other. We need to ride in the same vehicle together.
Done right, imagine how far we could get.
So what do you say? Ready to hand over the keys?
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