Creative Consumer Research turns 50 this year. Fifty years of client work, tens of thousands of projects, a research practice built on one question: what do people actually need to know to make a good decision?
Over the coming months, we’ll share a few of the observations and ideas that have held up across decades of helping organizations figure out what they need to know and why.
The first one is the most important.
Every project begins with a conversation.
If you’ve never worked with a marketing research firm before, you might assume the first meeting is all about methodology.
- Should we conduct a survey?
- Would focus groups be better?
- How many interviews do we need?
- How quickly can we collect the data?
Those are all important questions, and we’ll eventually answer every one of them. But they rarely come first.
When I sit down with a new client, the first thing I usually say is, “Tell me what’s going on.”
It’s a simple question, but it opens a different conversation than, “What kind of research do you need?”
Clients don’t usually start with describing a methodology, but rather by describing what’s happening in their organization. A new competitor has entered the market. Sales have flattened. Brand awareness hasn’t improved despite increased advertising. Customer complaints are becoming more frequent. Leadership has two very different opinions about the direction the company should take.
Somewhere in that conversation, the real project begins to take shape.
I’ve learned not to rush that part. Before we ever interview a customer, we conduct an in-depth interview with the client. We listen to the history, the frustrations, the assumptions, and the decisions they’re trying to make. Only after we understand that story do we begin thinking about the questions we’ll ask everyone else.
I’ve worked with clients who came in asking for customer satisfaction research when the real question was about loyalty. Different problem, different conversation once we named it. I’ve seen organizations request advertising testing when what they actually needed to understand was whether consumers understood the product at all. The methodology doesn’t always change after that first conversation. But the clarity about what we’re solving for almost always does.
Research doesn’t solve business problems. It helps people make decisions. If we don’t understand the decision, we can’t know what information will actually be useful.
Those early conversations don’t follow a script, and they shouldn’t. Every organization arrives with a different history, different assumptions, a different definition of success. The job isn’t to move quickly into questionnaire design. It’s to understand the business well enough that when we do begin the research, we’re answering the right question.
The first conversations are the ones I remember most, more than the surveys or the final reports. They’re honest. Sometimes uncomfortable. Rarely neat. But that’s where the real picture starts to form.
The survey, the focus group, the interviews will come soon enough.
For now, let’s just start by having a conversation.
— Richard Cisneros, President & Chief Research Strategist