The Business of Storytelling with

Quantitative Research
Graham Saxton and Andrew Davidson
OTX Europe Research

PREFACE

This paper has been written by two authors with varied backgrounds in the research
business; a mix of both agency side and client side roles which have provided an
informed perspective of the research industry. We are both passionate believers in
research as a part of the marketing mix. From both sides of the fence we have seen the
power it has to enlighten clients, build better brands, and ultimately create more
successful businesses.

But, we're sorry to say, more often than not we have seen good research sitting there,
gathering dust, being ignored, wasting everyone's time and the money invested by clients,
purely because the story it tells is locked impenetrably in the data.

So, this paper is about the lost potential in research. Specifically quantitative research,
which in an increasingly sound-byte driven, creative and audio visual world where
knowledge is infinite in breadth and increasingly shallow in depth, often loses the
audience in the detail of the methodology alone.

But at the same time the industry as a whole is facing the challenge that the very same
clients are demanding increasing robustness and the security of data to make a decision
that often only quantitative research can bring.

This paper will explore the problem, and the reason why quantitative reporting is seen as
such a challenge, and will go on to suggest that lessons from the very cultural context that
quantitative research is struggling to be heard against can often be applied to help solve
the ever challenging problem of reporting data in an interesting and compelling way.

INTRODUCTION

Let's start with a short fairy story:

Once upon a time there was an abstract object. It was 100% animal, 0% mineral and 0%
vegetable, 98% of its surface area was covered in keratin strands a mean length of 2.4
centimetres, although in places it was as short as 1.2 centimetres. Its average denture
length over-indexed on the norm by a factor of 121, its eyes by 134 and its ears by 132.5.
Its extended coccyx was 2% longer than the average length of the base measure, but this
was not found to be statistically significant given the small sample size. And its statistical
likelihood of being found near a cottage with another individual in the 98th age percentile
in its large intestine was 10 to the power of four.

Can you guess what the story is about boys and girls?

It is probably fortuitous that the Brothers Grimm decided against using data to
communicate the fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood lest several hundred more
grandmothers may have been devoured alive thanks to the loose lips of their small red
hooded granddaughters.

Let's be honest, quantitative research has an incredible ability to kill a good story. And
today, if you don't have a good story, no one is going to remember it. And if they don't
remember it, they aren't going to use it.

One of the reasons is the sheer mass of information available. Three hundred years ago
only two bodies had the power to communicate influential information en masse, the
Church and the State. With the arrival of the Twentieth Century there were hundreds of
media publications people had to listen to and filter. Today in era of self-publication there
are literally billions. For consumers and business people alike the question is the same,
who do you tune into? Who do you listen to?

Noah Brier Head of planning and strategy at the Barbarian group (2008) wrote on his
eponymous blog recently: “Today, I find a good test of whether something I have
blogged about is interesting enough, is if I start mentioning it to other people in
conversation afterwards.”

We know word of mouth is increasingly important, but how do you get your information
talked about? Increasingly experts in the transition of information talk about memes – the
units of cultural inheritance.

Richard Dawkins (2006) suggested in The God Delusion “Like genes in the gene pool,
memes that prevail are the ones that are good at getting themselves copied.”

And far back as 2001, Seth Godin a commentator on contemporary marketing coined the
term the 'Ideavirus' to explain the concept.

Our brief for this paper is to look at quantitative research – and with that lies the problem.
We share a strong belief that research is about understanding real people and their real
behaviours – and the way we have seen quantitative research presented has consistently
demonstrated that in many cases the real people component has been removed from the
equation.

Nancy Duarte summed up the issue neatly in her inspiring book Slide:ology – the art and
science of creating great presentations: “The presentation of data is not really about the
data, it's about the meaning of the data.” Or to put it another way…
…Dude, where's my target market?

WHY STORYTELLING?

Why are clients increasingly unwilling to immerse themselves in the depth required to
understand the more complex or subtle research issues?

We believe the issue can be understood within the wider context of the general
'youthification' of culture. In The disappearance of Childhood (1994) Neil Postman cites
the printing press as the media technology that created the separate worlds of Childhood
and Adulthood – as children could not access the secrets of adulthood, and they had to go
to school to learn it. The TV was the device that began to dissolve these differences.

Postman died in 2003, but today with its total on-demand nature, bite-sized clip formats
the internet seems to be the media tool that is now promoting the qualities of youth to be
the most powerful in our culture. As adults desperately seek to learn and understand the
language of youth, rather than youth seeking to understand the secrets of adulthood,
civilisation has been effectively reversed.

Research companies must learn from this, as increasingly our audience for research is
video literate rather than text or even image literate, they expect to be involved in a
project without having to view groups or attend endless meetings, and they want an
'event' to launch their results. An agency's output and working practices must reflect this.

On the flip side is the issue of data validity. We live in data-saturated times where the
basis of many media stories is a piece of research. Much of it is sensationalist, counter-
intuitive, and has its origins in client generated PR (that need to create memes again).
Increasingly fatigue or even mistrust of data is setting in and people also expect context
to their data which is something that can be achieved with the addition of new, what we
call tactical methodologies (more of which later) to existing quantitative processes.

OLD NEWS?

In many ways this is extremely old news in itself, and the research industry has been
increasingly focused in recent years on positioning research as much more than just data
provision.

Generic descriptions like 'added value', 'clarity', 'added insight' and 'actionable findings'
have become ubiquitous and seem to be used in almost every agency's credentials or
pitches. Speakers at most industry conferences will refer at some point to the challenge of
research industry engaging better with our clients – the ultimate users of the insights we
generate.

In today's ever more complex and fragmenting business environment one thing is clear.
Everyone is time pressured, low attention spans are prevalent and if you have something
to say often you have to say it clearly and concisely. And just to make things even more
difficult, real 'face time' with clients is at a premium and importantly the synopsis of a
research study is most often widely distributed and communicated in a written form
primarily by email and the dreaded PowerPoint deck.

In our view the essence of this can be distilled into a simple challenge – clients want
research that engages them, that is simple to understand and most importantly that is
actionable.

So that only leaves a slight problem …… delivering it.

THE PECULIAR PROBLEM OF STORY TELLING WITH QUANTITATIVE

RESEARCH VERSUS QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

Any qualitative researcher reading this paper might at this point wonder what the
problem is.

With the advances in audio visual capture and delivery, the explosion of the blogosphere
and the plethora of user generated content, it has never been easier to create an all
singing, all dancing audio visual qualitative debrief that brings the target to life and sates
the clients desire for video they can forward around to their colleagues.

They say a picture paints a thousand words, well it probably paints ten thousand columns
of data tables too.

Qualitative research differs from quantitative research in the respect that clients can be
engaged in the data collection process too. It's all part of the adventure. In one of our old
roles at a youth research agency, like a demented David Attenborough of cool, clients
would be taken on a journey into the seedy underbelly of youth culture. Smelling the
smells, recoiling at the sights, hearing the shrieks of delight as your client discovers that
in suburban London there is a pub with a 'twobicle' a cubicle with two loos so the girls
can go and chat whilst on the loo. This is stuff of meme dreams. That story spread round
the office at the client's ad agency faster than a new viral video for Caburys Dairy Milk.

Okay, it wasn't a great insight and it didn't help them reposition their lurid alcopop any
better, but you get the point.

The comparative scenario of the head of quantitative operations at a research agency

inviting the client to see the number of completed questionnaires against quota doesn't
quite have the same ring to it.

THE PROBLEM / CHALLENGES IN THE INDUSTRY:

So why are the average quantitative debriefs arguably predominantly chart led and with a
tendency for output that can be dry and complex to understand?
Clearly there are ways to tell stories with quantitative data and many people on both sides
are keen to do it, but there remain good reasons why it remains the exception rather than
the rule:

Lets take a look at a few of the main ones.

Often quantitative research is conducted with tight timing for both fieldwork and
reporting deadlines.
In this environment thinking space is not a luxury in most agencies and often there is an
imperative to get the numbers out.

Quantitative research is used predominantly in a validation role, with the remit to

“Prove it” and this equals a numbers driven process.
Partly, this drives the need to often report every question asked in a survey, even though
it may have not uncovered anything interesting or actionable.

Accordingly, full reporting or mechanically presenting every question asked as a chart is

the qualitative equivalent of presenting full transcripts showing every word spoken by
respondents in a series of focus groups

Removing any quantitative data from a report requires a narrative to explain the rationale
of doing this and an editor's voice to steer the client towards the most interesting and
actionable insights. Many clients resist this, purely because they think they are missing
something. Ergo the research lapses to reporting every question as a chart.

Client expectations are also a driver of research vendor habits – in our experience
vendor side, clients can still be extremely one-dimensional in their expectations –
“just show me the numbers”.
From day one in qualitative research moderator school you are taught to ignore
everything the consumer says, and focus on what they mean. “This is mere reportage” is
one of the biggest insults you can hurl at a 'quallie'. Try it, it's fun. But the fact remains
that in qual research there is a mysterious black box of analysis where all sorts of
reference material is sucked in and helps make sense of the raw words that consumers
speak. This is categorically not the case in quant where clients will often accuse “but
that's not in the data, where have you got this?”

And so a stalemate remains on both sides as the majority of quant vendors default to
regurgitating slide after slide of charted data and clients sit there bored out of their minds
learning very little and remembering even less.

SO WHAT'S THE ANSWER?

We could have charted the answer, but in the spirit of this article we've written it as a
bullet point: “….genius is: 1% Inspiration 99% perspiration” – Thomas Edison.

HERE ARE SOME IDEAS

People:

Qualitative agency bosses encourage their researchers to make a virtue of rich

experiences which they think enhance their ability to assimilate life and account for
consumer behaviour. Accordingly 'zany' and 'creative' personalities aligned with broad
inquisitive minds often form the base skills needed for qual researchers. Compare this to
the traditional skills quantitative agencies will always go for in recruiting and fostering
talent – these are often Accuracy / Numeracy skills – understandable but often at the
exclusion of creativity. But does it have to be that way?

Another idea is to employ people that understand the product or service category that is
being researched or to prompt more agencies to train or immerse staff to embrace and
better understand the subject. If the team involved in a project do not possess a broader
knowledge – they can never provide a narrative or put data into a meaningful context.

But hold on a moment, within the research industry, specialism in the methodology or
approach is a given, isn't it?

Bridging the Qual / Quant Divide

Research agencies can't change their workforce overnight – but we feel there should be
greater transparency within agencies between the imaginary line dividing the qual team
and the quant team – even in integrated full service agencies. It sounds obvious but
involving people with different skill sets in the research provides a richer perspective.

Better still, another idea is to commission some online qualitative research to bolster the
quantitative insights.

On line blogs or interactive discussion boards are relatively cheap, and can help in the
process of understanding the “why” as opposed to just the “what”. It can also provide a
rich visual content, and ensures that both quant researcher (and clients) are directly
involved in the data collection process.

Perhaps the client you are currently working with doesn't see the value of doing this at
first, but several agencies we know have successfully tried it as a loss leader.

Delivery:

In the real world, no matter how well a story is told in words and pictures, charts are
obviously going to have a part to play.

But there are charts and charts…..

A default PowerPoint chart works extremely well, but arguably from a visual point of
view is not all that creative. We are both fans of Keynote from Apple – which does
exactly the same as PowerPoint but allows a wide range of animated data and creative
options to be used. It even easily converts PowerPoint presentations.

There are numerous other ways of increasing the story making potential of presentations
– all of these described below can be used on a standalone basis or used selectively to add
different elements to more traditional charted decks

Seizing the new story-making tools in the digital world provides a wealth of materials to
add to reports. If additional on-line qual has been carried out respondents are great as
content co-creators and they can provide

• Video clips
• And witness the emerging trend for 'Life caching' at the quantified self:
http://www.kk.org/quantifiedself/

Another concept that we have used successfully to add additional story telling dimensions
to reporting is to create a blog of the project – involving researchers and clients
throughout the research process. This encourages the sharing of experiences which can be
used to offer a narrative and context for the report.

And finally what we consider to be the most effective way of story telling – what we call
dynamic data or data you can touch. An example of this was an exhibition at a gallery in
East London created by MTV and OTX called Teenage Clicks. This brought to life the
findings of an International study called Circuits of Cool and included live exhibits such
as a Teenagers Bedroom.

CONCLUSION:

Not all of what we have described is either time consuming or difficult to justify from a
cost point of view. It just requires an additional investment of effort and a genuine desire
to serve up something that is not ordinary.

But remember the value of 'Noisy' insight and why this is so crucial in today's time
crunched workplace.

Story telling using engaging and impactful research that clients remember is good for us
all. And if clients remember it, they'll use it and hopefully it will make them look good
and they'll be back for more.

And we'll all live happily ever after.

(Or 82% of us could live happily ever after within a fixed set of variable averaging 25%
of the time)

The End….
REFERENCES

Richard Dawkins (2006) – The God Delusion

Nancy Duarte (2008) – Slide:ology – the art and science of creating great presentations
Thomas Edison – Spoken statement (c. 1903); published in Harper's Monthly (September
1932)
Neil Postman (1994) The Disappearance of Childhood

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