Special thanks to webinar moderator Antoinette Staples, Senior Director of Customer Insights and Success at McKesson.
When Research Says Stop, But the Business Says Go
In the first part of the webinar, Raina Rusnak from StarKist discusses how to handle situations where research findings conflict with business momentum, emphasizing the importance of protecting brand equity and communicating risk delicately through individual stakeholder alignment.
What happens when you have credible research and insights that conflict with the momentum of the business and ultimately makes them take a step back and challenge their frame of thinking? Can you tell us a little bit about your first reaction when that happened?
“In a previous role that I held, a brand leader came forward with an idea he had been working on for two years and it was a new incentive program for customers. And he brought insights in at the 11th hour to check a box,” relates Rusnak. “Quite uncomfortably, my research showed that not only were we not going to attract new customers with this strategy, but we were going to alienate our most loyal customers. My instinct and my reaction as a person in the room was yikes, and then this fight or flight kind of sets in. But research instincts kick in. That’s where we need to remind ourselves that our job is not to rubber stamp everybody’s pet projects and ideas. Not every idea can or should get the green light. Our responsibility is to protect the brand, protect the brand equity and to serve as the voice of the customer. That involved some difficult conversations offline before I brought it to the broader group, but the research said stop and we actually did stop.”
Defending Your Research
Sometimes we want to defend the research. We put a lot of work into it. We’ve done a lot behind the scenes to even get to the place where that recommendation happens. It’s not always going to be in our best interest or the brand or the customer’s best interest to defend the research. What do you do when you want to diagnose those findings before you deliver the message? How do we know when it’s the idea itself or it’s the way it’s been executed or maybe it’s the way that the research has been designed? How do you determine which of those is really the issue?
“Sometimes it’s trial and error,” says Rusnak. “It takes a little bit of digging to figure out, is this an execution issue? Is this the approach I used? Is it true customer resistance? A few years ago, I fielded a traditional quant survey and the research was conducted properly and we did not get the results that we were expecting. We were looking to understand the consumer experience for grocery delivery. You want all of your groceries to be intact, you want your order to be complete and you want your driver to arrive on time. Now, if your driver arrives three hours late, your eggs are broken and half of your items are missing, that’s not a good experience.”
“This was an example where traditional quant was not the appropriate tool because those big pillars were so overpowering. We weren’t seeing the additional nuance that could make or break an experience after those conditions are met. This was the first time in my career I ever went back into the field right on the heels of original research. This was unusual because we had the luxury of time and budget. But this time I approached it differently. I did an IAT, an implicit association test where we were looking at system one testing. That’s the unconscious bias, the quick processing. We teased that out and we found that once we controlled for those things, then that’s when the other elements made a difference between being just a baseline acceptable experience for consumers versus a superior one.”
She continues, “We don’t always have the time or the money to be able to do something like that, but it’s a reminder for us as researchers to stay curious, be brave, and try a research methodology that you maybe haven’t tried before. That was my first IAT that I had ever done and it turned out to be the appropriate tool to help us get that business insight. That would have been a very costly decision not to have that proper insight. It’s a reminder to stay curious and to figure out is this the research that we did? Is it true customer resistance and how do we tease that out?”
Delivering a Tough Message
What would you like insights professionals to walk away with when they’re thinking about how they can make sure that they’re diagnosing this properly, that they’re not holding too closely to their assumptions, to what they believe is most valuable for the business? Sometimes the stakes are really high and they might be afraid to bring those insights forward and challenge the business momentum. What would you say is something practical that they should consider?
Rusnak says “I would say give yourself that time to take a step back and carve out that time to make that happen. Trusting your instincts is really valuable. As researchers, we want to be impartial and we should be and we want to be true to the data, but our instincts are almost always right. If we feel like even though we’re seeing, because it was a perfectly fielded quant survey, there was nothing wrong with the execution of it. On the surface, it was great, but we need to challenge ourselves. Maybe we need to rethink something and give ourselves that white space to be able to process through it because we’re moving at an incredible pace and we don’t always give ourselves that gift.”
How do we communicate the risk without becoming a roadblock? Once you’re confident in your finding, how do you deliver a tough message in a way that helps the business make a better decision instead of feeling that the insights team is simply saying no and getting in the way of progress?
“We don’t want to be the roadblock, but I would say proceed delicately, but honestly,” says Rusnak. “Our job is it’s not to deliver all rainbows and unicorns. As much as that feels good, that would feel better for me if I could just sprinkle joy all around. But sometimes we’re not here to rubber stamp anything and we have to deliver bad news sometimes. What I’ve found to be an effective way to approach that is to have these individual conversations with leaders before you come to the broader group. And that helps to, one, take away the surprise, but two, to build alignment. The worst thing that you can do for your own initiative and in service of the research is to sabotage yourself by delivering a bomb in the middle of the meeting.”
“I read a book, it was several years ago, called Pitch Like a Girl,” says Rusnak. “One of the pieces of advice that comes out of that is to approach your boss as though he or she is a small woodland creature. And so no sudden moves, no surprises. The same principle applies here, even if you are not directly reporting to any of the players in the meeting that you need to deliver this message to. Approach them as though they are small woodland creatures and have those individual discussions to gain alignment, let the shock wear off if it’s going to be bad news that you’re going to deliver. You can even tee it up when you come to the meeting after you’ve done your pre-work. Here’s what we’re looking at and nobody’s going to like this, but here’s where we’re at. That will help to start building momentum.”
Dealing with Roadblocks
When you have to share research that can potentially impact the business momentum, maybe it hinders progress to a degree or they feel that it will and it’s perceived as a roadblock. What do you do? Are you pausing? Do you pivot? Are you saying, “I’m proceeding no matter what. I’m going to debate.” But we want to know when the business moves forward anyway, what do you do?
“The business gets to move forward and executive leadership gets to decide how they move,” reminds Rusnak. “That’s something that we sometimes need to remind ourselves of. It is our role to offer the decision makers for any given body of research complete information. That is where we come in. So they can make an informed decision. We as researchers need to stay true to the integrity of the research, but we need to find ways not to take it personally. It’s hard because that becomes our identity in a lot of ways, but when we are there, it is not a reflection on us if we are offering complete information.”
“But what I’ll add to this, I’m going to lean into a well-born example of Henry Ford where he said, “If I’ve asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me faster horses.” So it’s like sometimes the customer can’t even envision what it is you’re going to bring to market. They can’t fathom that. They can’t weigh in on it because they can’t yet imagine it. That’s where the vision of leadership can and should supersede what we’re seeing in research. So lay the case out, make a strong argument for it, but also realize we’ve done our due diligence by letting leadership make an informed decision.”
We are not here to prove ourselves to be right. The business has the right to move forward. What is one thing that you would do to encourage leadership before they walk away or enter into that next stakeholder conversation to get that courage and ‘pitch like a girl’? What would you say to each of them?
“Trust your instincts,” says Rusnak. “Our instincts are almost always relevant, but to be more effective, I lay out the landscape of the business, demonstrate anytime you want to influence a body of people or another person, it’s helpful to come in showing them that you understand their world, their landscape, rather than just charging in with research. To the extent that you can tie it to a business outcome, if you can demonstrate ROI, if you can talk about what you’d expect to see and increase sales, that’s generally going to get their attention. But the other thing I would add is as humans, we love telling stories. We love hearing stories. That’s where I’m going to make a case for bringing in some qual. When you talk about an event, you talk about people as a whole, that’s not nearly as powerful as double clicking into a case study and letting leadership hear directly from the voice of the customer.”
“To the extent that you can show ethnographies, you can show in the customer’s words talking to leadership, that will generally deliver a pretty big punch. Don’t take it personally if leadership goes in a different direction, but as long as you’ve laid out the trade-offs, you’ve made the case, you’ve demonstrated your understanding of the business, you’ve done all of those things, mission accomplished.”
