Agile Customer Insight: Revolutionizing Market Research

In my last article I described the balance that all organisms, and that all companies, must strike between exploring for more resources and exploiting the resources they already have. Any complex adaptive system must accomplish both tasks in order to persist in a changing environment.

Bees explore distant flowers to discover more nectar, while also exploiting what they’ve already brought back to the hive by making honey. Companies explore for innovative new products to make, while also earning current profits by exploiting the products they already know how to deliver. Bees and companies must exploit their resources to feed themselves on a day-to-day basis, but neither bees nor companies can persist for long on exploitation alone, because the environment they exist in is constantly changing, which requires them to explore to discover ways to adapt to it.

And here’s the thing: The faster the environment changes, the more important it becomes to explore. Whether it’s a bear finding and taking your honey, or a new technology threatening your business model, sooner or later exploration, discovery, and innovation will make the difference between survival and death.  

Technology today is changing the business environment more rapidly than ever before, which has driven increased business interest in “agile” methodologies, designed to enable rapid, cost-efficient exploration. The “agile” methodology helps a business explore, test, and rapidly iterate on innovations in a series of lean “sprints,” rather than trying to tackle a whole innovation project at once in a more expensive, time-consuming and inherently fragile process. The methodology was originally conceived as a way to do faster, higher quality software deployments, avoiding the inevitable pitfalls and setbacks that plague nearly any large-scale, top-down process. There used to be a humorous adage, in fact, that captured the problem with such massive and difficult IT deployments, known as the “Rule of Two:”

It will cost twice as much and take twice as long. And you’ll have to do it twice.

Because of its success in the software field, the agile methodology has now been adapted and applied to literally every conceivable industry in some form or another. Such is the methodology’s effectiveness at conceiving and producing innovative products and services that you would have difficulty today finding any startup founder or venture capitalist who doesn’t already know a good deal about “agile,” used as a noun.

We can also apply agile to the task of generating more rapid and cost-efficient customer insight, by balancing our use of qualitative research to explore for new insights with the quantitative research required to exploit the data we gather. This is the approach taken by a company I advise, UserVision. As they explain in their article on the Greenbook market research blog,

“…we approach the whole body of research as an agile process… Agile enables one to iterate and change the research questions, to reveal a different type of customer segment and include them in the research, to probe if a methodology will fail or to probe if there is a different methodology which could work better, and to change the hypothesis for reaching the ultimate research goal.”

In other words, UserVision employs qualitative research methods to rapidly explore the marketing space for new discoveries – discoveries that will help them more quickly and effectively reach their objective, which is to gain more useful customer insight for their clients.

UserVision isn’t the only research consultancy that has adapted agile to generate faster, more cost-efficient customer insight. What differentiates it from most of the others, however, and what especially appeals to me, is that UserVision has literally industrialized the process. The company uses a set of pre-configured strategic frameworks to automate and streamline their projects, with the result that the firm can frequently produce more useful results faster and less expensively than even its largest competitors. 

Customer insight, delivered by agile. That’s the future.