Tomorrow's Insight Skillset - What's Worth Learning?
What’s the best way to equip ourselves for tomorrow’s market research world – which of a raft of new skills to learn, that are worth the time and effort? Change is happening so fast in tech that the skill set question is a bit like aiming at a moving target - and we're all susceptible to being influenced by hot topics and hype.
Ray Poynter took a broad approach in his NewMR piece a year ago (http://bit.ly/2g6xRag) – highlighting 18 possible “new” skill sets, listed below. It’s a great piece, covering many other aspects of future-proofing your MR career – his advice is simple: learn one new skill, any one, per year to protect yourself against natural skill obsolescence.
The September 2016 edition of Harvard Business Review (http://bit.ly/2aLWe8Z) provides a broader angle on the same theme - in an article on the transformation process in the Unilever Insights function.
The Unilever CMI mission statement is interesting –– “to inspire and provoke to enable transformation action” - no mention of the word “insights”, no mention of data quality, methodology, sampling….. Thought-provoking. The 10 competences are taken from a large scale Kantar study (n=10.000) 2015 global study of business folk on the topic of consumer centricity, executed by Kantar.
Unilever divides them into 7 “operational skills”:
data synthesis
functional independence
organizational integration (integrated planning)
collaboration
experimentation
forward-looking orientation
affinity for action
…and 3 “personal skills”:
whole-brain mindset (creative and analytical)
business focus
story-telling
The article outlines in detail how these competences are applied in practice at Unilever – on the topic of business acumen, for example, CMI performance bonuses are linked to category growth, thus incentivizing the shift from insights to impact. Great idea.
How urgent is the issue of new skill acquisition?
Two recent studies examining the health of the CI industry suggest there’s no time to lose.
Cambiar has teamed up with BCG and Yale to update/replicate the 2009 Boston Consulting Group benchmarking study( “The Consumers’ Voice – Can you Hear it”). Highlights are published in Research World/ September 2016 Issue.
One key take-out: 48% of all insight managers were classified as “Traditional”, or Stage 1 contributors – this is the very first level of insight excellence, with Stage 4 being “Insights is a source of competitive advantage”.
In an era of seemingly non-stop restructuring and streamlining this is a worrying finding.
The second study – “Future of Insights”, a joint effort from Brainjuicer and the WFA (World Federation of Advertisers) – is featured in the October 2016 issue of Research World.
Asking “how can Insights help increase profitable brand growth”, the study highlights perceptual clashes of the Insights function – how we see ourselves and how marketing sees us. 2% of Insights professionals see themselves as "Librarians", but a whopping 30% of Marketing folk would use that label. Conversely, 40% of CI professionals see themselves as “strategic consultants” as opposed to only 25% of marketing folk.
The corrective action suggested by both studies includes a strong focus on ROI measurement, the Brainjuicer study perhaps not surprisingly also recommends the adoption of System 2 insight methods, as well as an educational role in BE.
The overall message is clear – perceptions of the value of the Insight function aren’t good, and the pace of change from data deliverer to insight consultant is slow.
Back to the question of skills – it’s likely urgent, but where to focus?
I’d say: take a mix of a more specialist skill (eg from Ray’s list) and then choose an area from the Unilever list and see if you can work on both.
Business acumen is my personal favourite – so often over the years it’s the area most noticeably lacking, especially amongst those who have never worked clientside.
The future can be bright for us – it’s certainly data-rich, and if we can help more folk make sense of all the noise out there, then we confidently laugh about being labelled librarians and caddies….Books are great. Golf can be fun.
Curious, as ever, as to others’ views.
*Infographics, online focus groups, MROCs moderation, designing mobile surveys, max diff/segmentation/conjoint, social media, B2B, advanced excel, project planning/costing, international research, semiotics, text analytics, SPSS, neuroscience, biometrics, salesforce, copywriting.