Engaging Top Management
While every study is unique, many organizations face the same kind of challenges when it comes to:
- Deciding on a methodology that will engage consumers, but also convince top management of the validity of the approach
- Presenting results in a compelling fashion, but also effect the changes that the findings indicate are necessary
- Respond to the ever- increasing need to get results faster, but also allow client involvement and produce both qualitative richness and quantitative reliability.
Methodology that works on top management
A major insurance company was looking at other ways of selling insurance outside of the agent, including direct mail.
The Market Research Department was getting frustrated because senior management could only tell them what they didn’t want, and found it impossible to articulate what they did want.
In probing the internal decision-makers we elicited their key issue. Essentially, this was that they considered the very act of researching insurance and direct mail among consumers was doomed to failure. All the decision-makers had sat through many focus groups hearing that “direct mail doesn’t work on me” and failed to see any reason “to waste more hours sitting in dark rooms”.
Our conviction was that qualitative research had a big role to play in better understanding peoples’ attitudes towards alternative channels for insurance. Management needed to be convinced that the qualitative process would work.
Our proposal was essentially to fully involve respondents in the research sessions – not as (skeptical) consumers, but as members of a team charged with developing a company and a portfolio of products designed for real people.
In order to help show top management this could work, we persuaded them to let us take them though the same process we proposed for their potential clients. Now comfortable with the process, management quickly approved and supported the project.
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