What role should your designer play in shaping your market research? asks Steve Gibbons
As my farming neighbour tells me, weighing a pig doesn’t make it any fatter. In the public sector – certainly in the UK – the previous administration’s need to test, measure and endlessly evaluate everything from school league tables to rail punctuality now seems to be being swept aside. While all their aims were laudable, the very systems they set out to independently measure became bent out of shape by their being measured in the first place.
So not only did the pig not get fatter, but its squeak also rose an octave. I’m wondering if the private sector’s reliance on metrics might likewise become more open-minded in some areas, and in particular I’m thinking about consumer research.
For us as designers the biggest hurdle – and for us it invariably seems like a hurdle, when it shouldn’t – is market research. There’s a general belief amongst designers that it is the new and different that is always most vulnerable to market research. Every designer will tell you that some of their best ideas have been killed off by research. Why should this be when it’s potentially such a powerful tool for revealing consumer insights? In fact there’s an advertising and design award scheme (the Chip Shop awards) devoted to promoting the ideas that got away, often because they didn’t survive the research process.
My argument is two-fold. Firstly, a designer’s specific skills should be weighed in the balance alongside a researcher’s and that marketers should look upon consumer research ‘results’ as an interpretation of reality and shouldn’t fall too easily under the spell of their sometimes seemingly mathematical certainty. Secondly, research should be used at the correct points in the design process. What all good designers do is get metaphorically into the shoes of their consumers; they do everything they can to see the world through their eyes. All of a designer’s education and the essential premise of design is predicated on the idea of problem and solution. Present a designer with a blank piece of paper and no brief – in effect no problem to solve – and they will flounder. This in essence is where art and design diverge. Artists flourish without boundaries, designers can only function with them.
What this means is that from the very beginning of their design education designers start to develop their intuition through their endeavours to enhance the consumer interactions with their designs. But this skill is to too often undervalued.
It’s not always the case and an enlightened client of ours, overwhelmed by a barrage of seemingly irreconcilable qualitative research, simply asked us “from your expert point of view, what is wrong with my packaging?” Our simple, straightforward analysis of the problem in the end proved far more useful in guiding the development of the design brief.
In this instance the problems were largely self-evident; in effect a series of rather more modest insights but which will cumulatively have an enormous impact on the packaging’s effectiveness. In the end what was needed was the application of a good dose of common sense.
From their ivory towers academic marketers, admittedly unhindered by the need to make real life decisions, will insist that there is no such thing as a research-derived truth, only an interpretation. So no research finding can ever be framed unequivocally. This of course isn’t to say it’s not very valuable, it’s just that in the end it’s really down to interpretation. Rather as scientific endeavour can only ever go in search of the truth and can’t claim to have actually found it, market research can only provide ‘an’ answer, never ‘the’ answer. But with the client’s understandable need for certainty they can too easily be tempted into taking a researcher’s results as definitive. This is where a designer’s perspective and their interpretation of the market research should be listened to alongside a professional market researcher’s.
So onto the second part of my argument...
From our, perhaps somewhat simplistic, perspective there seems to be essentially two types of research. There’s research undertaken before even pen meets paper with the objective of helping frame the brief and uncover a particular consumer insight... the type of research that gets to the behaviour, motivations and beliefs of consumers. And then there’s the research that’s about validation... the research that’s done after the designers have done all their work.
Both are valid if done rigorously, the right questions asked and the responses correctly interpreted. But generally the balance is to the latter, and if budget is limited it is invariably at the expense of the former.
The delivery of enduring and commercially effective design solutions to specific business problems has to be the only real reason for the design industry to exist and clearly market research plays an important role in this. Marketers have to make fundamental decisions about the future direction their brands take and they need to convince a hard-headed board that their decisions are the right ones. So it is entirely understandable and appropriate that they commission validatory research.
However, our view is that the money we see our clients spend on research could be better apportioned and that they could better use designer skills in both undertaking and assessing their research.
As the late, great David Ogilvy said: “Marketers often use research like a drunk uses a lamppost: for support rather than illumination.” But he also said: “People who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals,” so this isn’t just a thwarted designer’s whinge against market research that didn’t favour his view, it’s a request for a more balanced use and assessment of research.
Charles Saatchi has some illuminating thoughts too: “I have spent too long being able to manipulate the answers I want from research to rely upon its findings any more than I do a weather forecast.”