Have you ever experienced this dilemma: you’re working on an awesome project only to feel like once you deliver the final report, it’s going to collect virtual dust in some forgotten corner of a digital archive? As market research professionals, we know that the perceived ROI of our studies depends on whether or not the results get used, so we want to do everything we can to make that happen, and a key way to do that is by socializing the results.
What does it mean to “socialize” market research results? It means taking steps to make findings easy to understand and share across an organization. The goal is to make sure that valuable insights are not lost, misunderstood, or undervalued. It often calls for repeating key findings through various mediums and settings.
In our most recent Conversations episode, our host Kathryn Korostoff had a special guest, Kory Grushka, the founder and CEO of Stories Bureau. As a former lawyer, his position required him to craft persuasive narratives on behalf of his clients that judges and juries could understand. Moving into the market research space, Kory’s storytelling skill was transferred to helping organizations communicate their insights for impact. Together, Kathryn and Kory explored the challenges of ensuring that valuable research doesn’t end up collecting virtual dust, including strategies to optimize the impact of research results.
Unraveling the Challenge: Overcoming Insights Inaction
What is one of the main deterrents to motivating business leaders to use research? The reluctance to take risks. Most people are naturally risk-averse, especially when taking risks may impact their careers, and Kory points out that this can stem from a few reasons:
- Difficulty of getting buy-in to research results, especially in larger organizations where multiple departments may be involved
- Fear of confidently standing behind a bold insight and potentially being wrong
- Receiving a data dump of research results that are cumbersome and onerous to wade through
So what is the solution? Storytelling!
The Role of Storytelling in Encouraging Insights-driven Action
Now that we’ve identified the problem (risk aversion) and its potential solution (socializing results), how do we do it? Kory and Kathryn explored using storytelling as a way to tackle the challenge of socializing insights. Storytelling can be difficult, especially for researchers who have put in a lot of time synthesizing and analyzing data, and are on a (often) tight deadline. Adding storytelling takes time and intention, which can be hard when the clock is ticking. But options to make storytelling a more realistic goal exist, and one of them is by using templates to turn complex data into compelling narratives.
Strategic Templates: A Game-Changer
Highly contextual and robust templates designed specifically for insights reporting can help market research professionals with their storytelling. We agree with this, which is why Research Rockstar students have access to three fully editable templates for quantitative, qualitative, and global market research in our courses.
Kory’s team, by analyzing recurring elements in various insights decks, advocates for a template-driven approach that empowers professionals at all levels. From foundational slides to curated assets like icons, these templates serve as a practical tool for elevating storytelling and communication within the insights function. While this is one of many services Stories Bureau provides, we believe insights professionals could particularly benefit from these strategic templates.
Socializing Insights: Beyond the Report
So, let’s say we finished assembling our report. It’s beautiful—fresh findings, compelling graphics, and actionable recommendations everyone at the business can understand. But as we mentioned before, how do we ensure these results are actually used? Kory emphasized the need for a comprehensive socialization plan, shaped by considerations like the research client’s organizational structure, research experience, and research sharing channels. Repetition also increases comprehension, so using multiple modes like newsletters, internal videos, events, and targeted communications can be highly effective in circulating our storytelling-fueled findings.
Conclusion
Storytelling is an approach that can help the research professional socialize research results and (hopefully) activate their use. And while it may feel daunting to embrace, creating the storytelling content can be aided by templates. We hope this episode equips you with practical strategies to apply storytelling in your next project.
