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Whether your environment is academic or industry, every social, market, and consumer insights expert has developed a unique set of skills shaped by their education and experience. Regardless of the depth or source of these skills, they remain, however, incomplete. With that in mind, here are some key skills that industry and academic researchers can learn from one another.
Embrace the randomness of real life
Every researcher loves a fully factorial, experimentally designed retail aisle, but those don’t exist in real life. Real-world shopping means not finding a product, brand, size, or format you’re looking for, coming upon unexpectedly low or high prices, and dealing with rude customers and employees.
Practical researchers who conduct on-site shop-alongs and ethnographies have extensive experience analyzing and interpreting complex, messy, real- life scenarios. Their hands-on experience makes their work highly relevant to business leaders needing to understand current industry needs, market trends, and consumer preferences. Real life may be messy, but academic researchers should learn to embrace a bit more mess.
Incorporate more theoretical depth
Human behavior isn’t new. For more than a hundred years, academic researchers have worked to understand market and consumer behaviors and to build theoretical foundations like Cognitive Dissonance Theory and the Diffusion of Innovation Theory that can be used to hypothesize and predict future behaviors. They’ve built on the work that came before them, knowing that it is the foundation of their own research. This is what elevates their work from simpler descriptive analyses and hypotheses to deeper understandings of who, what, when, where, why, and how certain consumer behaviors occur.
Rather than trying to understand a single problem, such as which package will be successful today, academic researchers work to build theories that will have a broader impact. By digging into the human behavior archives more often, industry researchers could also generate more robust conclusions and recommendations.
Practice agile research processes
Where academic researchers often have months or years to run a research project that accommodates a wide range of variables, industry researchers often have days or weeks. Industry researchers have learned to expect and adapt to changing circumstances so that they can meet rapid turnaround times. Their work is efficient and responsive to the real world, which can change literally overnight. Industry research is often simple and quickly actionable. Bang for the buck is clear and personally observable. Academic researchers could definitely benefit from tightening their timelines and getting their outcomes into the real world more quickly.
Engage More Stakeholders
Determining whether customers like package A or package B more is not as simple as it seems. Yes, a highly controlled experiment will reveal a winner, but simply moving forward with the results of what is essentially a customer vote could lead to a massive failure.
To ensure an experiment doesn’t land in the proverbial file drawer, industry researchers are careful to engage many of their stakeholders, including not only customers but also the package designer who will need to make any subsequent tweaks to their beloved design, the brand manager who campaigned for the losing package, the category manager who must budget for a more expensive package, the business development team who must promote a design they don’t personally like, and the executive leadership who is divided on the decision.
By engaging a cross-disciplinary team from the beginning, industry researchers have learned how to strengthen the applicability and reach of their research. Sometimes, academic researchers need to remember that uncovering truth isn’t the automatic path to success.
Take risks with new innovations
If you’re not already using AI, your competitors will pull ahead and leave you behind. That doesn’t mean you should jump onto the AI bandwagon and use it everywhere you possibly can. It does mean you should find ways to incorporate new methodologies like AI as soon as you find practical and valid uses for them.
Rather than waiting for academic researchers to complete highly controlled studies, industry researchers are incorporating AI tools and techniques for experimentation along the way. With side-by-side comparisons, industry researchers allow their customers to see and get comfortable with the results while also ensuring the innovations are valid and reliable in real life. The key is to take safe and considered risks along the way.
Value long-term learning
You’re a researcher because throughout your life, as a baby, toddler, child, teenager, and young adult, you were exposed to a set of experiences and circumstances that consciously or unconsciously led you to reject some job opportunities and choose this one. You are a lifelong experiment, not a one- time study from last week.
Similarly, academic researchers value lifelong experiences, which means that many of them conduct studies that take 5, 10, or even 50 years to complete. These studies help us understand systemic, longitudinal issues that are not visible in one-time, cross-sectional studies. Longitudinal studies are how we understand the impacts of early education on later voting patterns or early community service experiences on later-life consumer issues. Industry researchers would be well-served to take a longer-term approach to some of their studies.
Incorporate more scientific rigor
Academic researchers are rigorously trained in statistics, sampling, and research methodologies. Through years of schooling, they’ve learned to scrutinize and interpret data with a critical eye. They know when to use a Scheffé correction and why they won’t use it this time. They know the pitfalls of data tabulations and when to use Python and R scripts. Consequently, they succeed with high research quality and validity, minimal biases, and maximum reliability.
Given that many market and consumer researchers are serendipitous members of the industry and only receive on-the-job or as-needed training, this is definitely a gap that needs to be filled.
Summary
Whether you’re an academic or industry researcher, we all have knowledge gaps across a range of areas. Having a growth mindset focused on uncovering and filling those gaps is how good researchers eventually become great researchers. We would all benefit from taking a masterclass from ESOMAR or a course with the MRII, so don’t be shy. Have a look at their offerings and see how you can add new skills to your repertoire. Or, if you’d like to chat with a passionate colleague about research techniques, please connect with one of our survey experts. We’d love to hear from you!
