Market researchers face the often daunting task of how best to deliver either bad news or good news to their clients.
Over the course of my career I’ve either given or listened to thousands of presentations of market research findings. Invariably, these presentations have been group events, from small meetings of three to six to department-wide events. Regardless of the number of participants, a group dynamic often governs the proceedings. Depending on the corporate culture, the discussions range from confrontational, where participants feel called upon to display their intellectual and managerial prowess by questioning, challenging, or even attacking the results, to cooperative, where participants quietly listen to the findings and walk away with their questions or doubts often unexpressed.
I used to dread these presentations, not out of a fear of public speaking or of being able to stand behind the results, but because I understood that the key messages and implications of the research had a high probability of being obscured or missed. This problem frustrated me until I slowly discovered how to increase my odds of socializing bad news or good news and the implications of either to both the business overall and to the individual stakeholders.
In an earlier post, I wrote of a former boss who was a master of corporate politics. He was also an expert in instantly grasping the significance of market research results regardless of whether they were positive or negative.
One of his strategies was to build support for the research implications by doing a soft launch of the research results. He and I would discuss the results at length. We would play out the implications and examine how the company might be affected in the future and how the market research findings would impact the various organizations inside the company and specific stakeholders. Having done so, we would develop short presentations of the study results that appeared to us to have either short-term or long-term implications (or both) for each of the major players who might be impacted.
We would then visit each of the stakeholders in private, present the results, and ask for their input and what they saw as the implications of the results. We were careful to keep our personal views of the implications to ourselves, not to withhold them so that we could later use them as a weapon or to puff ourselves up, but to present an open door for the stakeholders to express their views and concerns privately in a situation where the public spotlight was not on and the pressure to perform was significantly reduced.
We then took the input received back and incorporated it into the presentation that would formally publicize the market research results. While this approach did not always obviate the problems associated with rolling out the results as a “surprise” in a public forum, it definitely gave the stakeholders a level of buy-in on the validity of the results, even if there was disagreement as to the implications.
