Planning Your Market Research Deliverables

(part of Chapter 9: A Successful Presentation)

 

When delivering market research project findings, the most effective approach is one that combines multiple forms of delivery. After all, this information is the kind you want retained by your colleagues so they can really apply it.

We all know that delivering a 100-page slide deck just puts them to sleep. Read on to learn more.

 

Planning for Retention

As we consider the audience’s needs, bear in mind learnings from the education and training sectors. Sharing MR results is essentially training people to apply new information. What lessons from these other sectors can we apply?

• Repetition is important. Just like when we’re teaching kids how to spell, practice makes perfect. The first time people hear information it has a certain amount of impact, but if they hear that information two or three times it improves retention.


• Multiple modes are important. We’re more likely to retain information if we read it, hear it, and see it in visual displays like graphs and charts.
  
  Better still, if we get to apply it through practice quizzes, role-playing, or other interactive exercise. In contrast, if we only read something, we retain far less.

What does this mean? It means we can’t just email out a research report and assume the project has now been delivered. If we expect people to retain and apply research results, we have to create a more comprehensive delivery strategy.

 

Slide Decks: Not Just Overused, Abused

A lot has been written in recent years about how slideware is overused. Well, it is overused. I don’t think anybody would disagree with that, but it’s still a very efficient way of delivering MR results. And it is likely that it was one of the deliverables you selected for your project.

So let’s use it, without abusing it. We’ve all seen MR reports that were basically 300 pages of poorly labeled charts with very little helpful text. Who’s going to get anything useful out of such a report? Those reports are created too often, and they’re not very helpful.

Let’s stop blaming the slideware, and start using it sensibly. Let’s start with the basics.

• Keep the MR report very modular so that the executive summary or the management summary, as you prefer, can be a stand-alone document of no more than 10 slides that would give an executive audience everything they really need as key takeaways. Now if they want the supporting details, obviously they can refer to the main body of the report.


• Organize the report by project objective. Avoid writing (or if you are using an agency, approving) a report that shows the results by order of question as appeared in the questionnaire. That approach shows that nobody is really thinking about the logical use of the data.
  
  Instead, it is usually best to have reports organized by logical objective. This way, if there are three or four objectives covered by the study, a reader who’s only interested in one or two can get the relevant information easily without slogging through 240 unnecessary pages.

 

This is an excerpt from the book, "How to Hire & Manage Market Research Agencies," which is available on Amazon. Published by Research Rockstar LLC. Copyright © by Kathryn Korostoff. All rights reserved.