For many people in the Market Research & Insights profession, the fun part of our projects is delivering the results in written reports. This is where we really get to shine: we get to show that our methodology has resulted in useful and usable information. The challenge? We’re under pressure to deliver these reports very quickly. How do we write reports that are going to ignite insights when we may have as little as five to seven business days to create them?
In the quest for speed, many market researchers sprint straight to synthesis: trying to find the golden nuggets in their results. But the brutal reality is that you have to walk before you can run. If you don’t do a good job of summarizing your research results (walking), you cannot do a thorough and objective job of synthesizing them (running) into usable key findings, conclusions, or recommendations. Worse, this is a career damaging choice: if you skip the step of walking before running, you run the risk of somebody else noticing that your analysis was rushed and potentially even incorrect.
So how do you efficiently summarize and leave yourself enough time to synthesize data so that you can inspire those insights?
“Let’s talk about what that means,” explains Rockstar president Kathryn Korostoff in the latest episode of Conversations for Research Rockstars, “When we’re writing market research reports, part of our job is to summarize the results. It’s not the sexiest part of our job and doing so well can actually be very challenging”. Summarization is a multi-step process, beginning with objectively reviewing the data. Kathryn explains, “I have to read my data, I have to write those summary statements, not only because I want to be a good reporter and an objective researcher, but because this is going to help me to digest those results.”
Picking up speed, Kathryn takes us to the next step of the process: weaving. In the video Kathryn shares an example of weaving and explains, “I’ve got two different data points and I brought them together to help tell the story. Whenever I can bring two or more data points and weave them together like that, I’m adding value, I’m finding relationships, and I’m showing how they go together to tell that story.” At this point, the researcher has gone beyond simple summarization and is starting to approach synthesis.
Struggling with synthesizing data? Kathryn offers tips including, “the best thing you can do is to use frameworks or taxonomies to help you, and there are many known frameworks or taxonomies. Some of you may work on teams where you have your own frameworks or taxonomies, and some of them can be very high level. Even a SWOT analysis, the classic business school “strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and, threats” can be a useful framework.” Categorizing your summarized data into four different buckets can help you, as the market researcher, see important patterns or themes that describe the target market’s relevant attitudes or behaviors. Of course, there are many other visual and thematic ways to map data into useful themes or patterns, but the classic SWOT can be an easy one to start with for market researchers who may be newer to doing structured synthesis.
For more information and examples about the steps to take for efficient and effective summarization and synthetization of market research data, check out the video episode on the Research Rockstar YouTube channel. The approaches described here are also taught as part of our course, Writing Quantitative Research Reports.
