Striking a Balance with Agile Insights: Ideas and Inspiration from TMRE and Beyond

By Kate Whittle, SVP Strategy + Innovation at Material

At The Market Research Event (TMRE) in December, I talked with many old and new industry friends and clients, and one thing is clear: there is a strong, palpable need for agile insights solutions. But there’s also anxiety and tension – a love/hate relationship – where the desire for insights delivered in as close to real-time as possible comes up against the risk of sacrificing quality and actionability in the insights themselves.

I saw this myself as I reflected on my experience of launching Material’s first agile quantitative product offering, Material Spotlight, at the end of last year.

And it was clear from looking around the TMRE showroom floor, which was full of many DIY platforms, that the insights industry as a whole is struggling to navigate that tension. DIY insights platforms allow researchers and non-researchers alike to collect and analyze quantitative survey data extremely quickly – in days or even hours, and without needing to interact with another person or team.

These self-service platforms check the box of speed. But what about quality and real-world actionability?

“What I need is insights, not just data.”

At TMRE, I was on a mission to figure out if DIY is the future. How are vendors and clients approaching DIY insights? What are their limitations? How can we evolve research offerings to meet all needs?

While vendors are anxious to adapt their platforms to be faster and more agile, client-side researchers expressed a range of impressions on the benefits and drawbacks of DIY insights. I heard the following sentiments shared in conversations and on panels throughout the event:

• • “When we use DIY for everything, then the burden falls on me to do everything myself. Even with AI reporting tools, the research still needs to result in easily understandable, actionable insights, and that takes human critical thinking.”

  • “I actually love Agile and have nothing negative to say about it.”

  • “We dove too quickly into Agile methods when we didn’t have a fundamental understanding of our audience – what things work for them? And what is the human truth here that we’re trying to solve? We needed to take a big step back to understand the fundamentals in order to take five steps forward and move very quickly then using Agile methods.”

  • “All the time we saved on the front end with easy and fast survey design, we lost entirely on the back end by just getting a ton of data and needing to make sense of all of it.”

  • “I have seen enough DIY platforms at this event to last a lifetime. What I need is insights, not data.”

A resounding takeaway I had from TMRE – from all the panels, presentations and keynotes, and from these conversations around Agile insights – is that even though the speed to insights has skyrocketed to the forefront of everyone’s attention, the importance of the storytelling element of insights has not fallen away. That may seem like a “well, duh” statement, but when you consider how many DIY Agile platforms are focused on data and are not human-driven, analytical insights, maybe it’s not.

The true kiss of death for an insights report is for it to be just interesting. Just interesting doesn’t spark action. A quality insight is something that illuminates underlying truths – and, often, challenges established beliefs or assumptions that no longer serve their purpose – to deliver new value to the organization. And it needs to prescribe tangible recommendations for implementation and be tied to growth metrics.

Insights also need to be delivered in a way that grabs the attention of stakeholders. Today, we see increasingly short attention spans – and not just with consumers, but with our organizations, too. In her keynote speech, Stefania Gvillo of Domino’s Pizza spoke about how delivering insights is not enough anymore; companies need their insights teams to drive action. That means targeted, tight deliverables designed for each stakeholder to inform and motivate their decision-making. And it means being concise and cutting down to the core of what is going to ignite action.

Insights need to be energizing, awe-inspiring and connect the dots to growth to motivate action. Without that, there is no purpose for an insights function in an organization.

Material Spotlight

Speed to insights is not the only metric of vital and growing importance. Insights must also be high-quality, actionable and hypothesis-shaking, and they must be shared in hyper-focused and growth-oriented deliverables. The onus is on brands to balance these elements effectively.

DIY Agile platforms deliver well on the first need – speed – but they place the burden of the second two – analytical investigation and story design – on the researcher. Sometimes this fits the need in a specific situation, but when Do-It-Yourself starts to feel like Do-It-All-Yourself, there needs to be a different quantitative Agile research offering.

That’s why we created Spotlight, an Agile, actionable insights solution that enables informed decision-making at the speed of business. Spotlight provides the speed and efficiency of a DIY research platform, combined with Material’s industry-leading strategy consulting and behavioral science expertise. Leveraging Agile principles, our team of research strategists executes end-to-end quantitative research projects within as little as one week – illuminating timely insights in story-driven reporting for immediate business impact.

From fast inputs for executive meetings, to pulse poll companions for larger research initiatives, to simple gut checks on key issues, Spotlight provides human insights at the speed today’s organizations demand.

Here are some ways we are using Spotlight for our clients.

• • Hypothesis Testing. As AI quickly enters the gaming space, we used Spotlight to assess the positive and negative impacts for players of AI in gaming and how this brand could mitigate the negative risks in their growth roadmap.

  • Disaster Messaging. In anticipation of a category issue that could be imminently disruptive to businesses, we used Spotlight to test consumer reaction and messaging impact to prepare our client to take the appropriate PR action.

  • Feature Prioritization. With extensive flavor options, a CPG brand needed to narrow down to a small subset of flavors that would maximize consumer reach and appeal broadly, allowing for prioritized spend investment for further refinement and development.

  • Early Concept Refinement. A product team within a technology organization is refining the user experience within its ecommerce platform. They had a long list of conceptual ideas and planned to create many more. We used Spotlight to create an ongoing, programmatic way to test concepts, creating a database of norms to advise further investment decision making.

“I had the pleasure of working with Material on an Agile study using Spotlight that was presented to senior leadership. The communication from the team was prompt and collaborative. They adapted to my needs, while offering thoughtful feedback based on their expertise. Overall, it was a great experience, and I plan to utilize Spotlight again in the future.”

– Client in financial services

“Spotlight provided fast, targeted insights to a time-sensitive business question. The tool was flexible with the rigor and quality we needed to move forward quickly with confidence!”

– National Pork Board

For focused, time-sensitive business questions, prioritizing agility doesn’t need to mean losing out on quality and actionability. Want to learn more about our approach and explore how Spotlight can make an impact for your organization? Start the conversation today.