The Importance of Flexibility in Research
The Importance of Flexibility in Research
The research industry is filled with people who combine discipline with curiosity. Discipline drives us to practice responsibly and maintain high standards and rigors, while curiosity pushes us to constantly learn, adapt, and evolve. It’s an interesting tension between rigidity and flexibility, and I find fellow researchers have no shortage of stories about striking a balance between the two.
My background in both research and innovation has me leaning into the curious, flexible side, but long before my career as a researcher began, I thought I would be an engineer. Sitting down with an academic advisor, a 4-year plan was laid out for me to earn an engineering degree, but I was surprised how few options I had. “I was expecting a little more room to individualize and be creative,” I told the advisor. The response was something along the lines of “This is the one path,” so on to business school I went. Afterall, I’m wired to be as structured as I am innovative.
Fast forward 25 years and I’ve amassed a number of researcher stories of my own throughout my consulting career. And I think the reason I’m successful, and further, actually enjoy the unexpected, is because of how I am wired.
I recently worked on a qual-quant study which aimed to explore how people think and talk about a new technology embedded in a home product. This particular product is one that almost everyone in the U.S. uses daily, but some clever engineers found a way to deliver a highly scientific, yet elegant, set of new benefits. It became evident during the qualitative interviews that people were a long way from comprehending the tech integration of the product and the messaging we were testing. In other words, the messaging was not ready to move to quant testing as we had originally planned.
The pivot came midway through the qualitative interviews, as we adjusted the messages and the discussion guide to follow the emerging insights. The further we explored, the more consumer confusion we unearthed that pointed to a need to expand the marketing communications. It was like we kept shining light in new directions and continually found more critical needs to be addressed.
A second pivot in the project came as Catapult Insights and our client jointly decided a second round of qual would be more valuable than the quant we initially planned. The amazing part is that we pivoted to a new plan without losing any momentum in the project, all before the end of the initial qual phase. I won’t pull back the curtain entirely, but I will say there are many researchers I’ve worked with in the past that would have struggled (and grumbled) behind the scenes to make this adjustment. Instead, it was a smooth and easy transition for us because we worked so closely with our clients along the way.
Another project that comes to mind was a pricing study for a personal care product. The first tricky part of this work was the novelty of the product itself, which introduced an anchoring bias in our initial Gabor-Granger results. The second tricky part about this work was that our client was entering a new-to-them space with the product, so the pricing work needed to be precise to be successful.
Luckily, we have the very best statistician who was able to identify the anchoring bias, and we consulted our client on next steps. That’s when we devised a plan to triangulate pricing through a second pricing study using a monadic testing design. The results not only were precise and impactful, but they also gave our client the confidence they needed to move forward.
And one of the first projects Jill and I did as Catapult Insights was an innovation project with an automotive client. As is the case with many projects involving ideation, we started by defining the areas of opportunity as a group, using research data to help guide our decisions. This is an all-too-often overlooked phase of ideation that sets the guiderails for solution development. Would you be shocked to hear that 7 out of 10 times the opportunities we define are NOT the same as we thought they would be? It’s true, and this project (like many others) featured a highly valuable adjustment to the problem statements we spent time ideating against.
Unexpected twists and turns are part of the research journey, and as Tyson says, “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” My advice is to surround yourself with a team who can embrace reality and roll with the punches. Those who are truly great in this field are the ones who can master the art of flexibility with the science of research.
JUSTIN SUTTON
CO-FOUNDER
CATAPULT INSIGHTS
