Reduce, Reuse, Recycle!

Delivering more, more, more! With less.

By Madeline Phillips (pictured) and Ariane Julia

“You’ve got to finish your plate before getting dessert.”, “You have enough clothes.” or “We have food at home.” are sentences repeated a hundred times in our households growing up. Why was it that already from a young age we favour anything new over the well-known, habitual, and already acquired??

While some of these behaviours have changed in our personal life, transforming our habits to be at least slightly more sustainably and financially responsible, there is opportunity to change this behaviour in the world of research as well.?

How many times have we discussed commissioning new ad hoc research, reworking brand strategies or even adding new questions on a tracker prior to examining what was already available to us? ?

At Incite we recognise the growing pressure on our clients to achieve more with less. By working together and examining what we already have and what can be done with it, we can help maximise the impact of our client’s budgets and leverage our combined expertise as insights professionals to optimise the available resources.

Collectively we should be working towards a more sustainable industry where we all acknowledge that new doesn’t always mean better.?

So here are Incite’s “3 Rs” of waste management and sustainability when it comes to data and research: Disclaimer: some vocabulary may be familiar.??

1. Reduce!?

To reduce the amount of data wasted, one must reduce the amount of data produced in the first place. Investing in durable research is comparable to purchasing a new pair of shoes: a well thought through standalone high-quality piece will serve you better and more durably than several cheaper, smaller and/or lesser quality ones.??

Marketing budgets are only getting tighter, and it is precisely why we encourage our clients to spend the amount they can spend as wisely and durably as possible.

We also understand that time is of the essence for many of our clients, however, to ensure a study will procure as much return on investment as it is capable of, we must take the time to ask ourselves at every step of the way – will this piece stand the test of time? How can we help ensure it will be well embedded into the business and continues to deliver impact in the future? Will it still be a valuable source of consumer information in one, two, five years? ?

1. Reuse!?

Some of the most fulfilling projects to work on are those where clients asked us to go back to previous research, reopen the data and explore it with a different angle in mind. It is mind boggling to realise how much was there all this time which we didn’t see, simply because it wasn’t what we were looking for at the time.??

Just a few months ago, we were commissioned to rework a demand spaces study and extract a category entry points strategy from it. The initial study had strong local markets and brand focus, whilst the new, additional work determined a global CEP targeting approach focusing much more on consumer needs than existing industrial capabilities. As the data was already available, worked through and understood, we saved a considerable amount of time, money and brainpower which was of course very helpful for our clients who could action our findings much more quickly and efficiently than if we had started from scratch.??

Not all studies can be reused as such though. There are some key questions that we ask ourselves whilst assessing whether we can reuse an existing study for a new purpose... How bespoke/ anchored in a specific context was the existing research? How broad were the research questions? And how fast did the category evolve?

For example, we would be very careful with recommending to reuse existing data if several new market entrants or even if any new product developments have appeared since the last data collection. And sometimes the best use of an existing piece of research isn’t to directly reuse it, but to recycle what we can from it.?

1. Recycle!?

Truly great projects often all start the same way; going slow before we go fast (as Melanie Lewis recently explored in her blog, don’t confuse speed with simplicity).??

It's imperative to carve out dedicated time at the beginning to review all existing resources and knowledge (including sales data, qual and quant consumer research etc) and extract all relevant contextual information which could inform the research.??

For example, even if the category players changed significantly since last data collection, did the user profile also change or can we use the previous results for quotas???

Detailed document reviews can also be the standalone approach we take in a project. We synthesise numerous available documents across research and sales data, joining the dots to uncover fresh insights in order to offer a fresh point of view. ?

Recycling is more than just exploring old data, it’s about getting the best parts of what we have and bringing them together to offer a new way of looking at the market, category or your brand. ??

Here are some questions that we ask ourselves and the client before starting a project: What do we know so far? What do we think that we know? Are there some dark spots that previous research could alleviate? What can we extract from the existing work which would save us time, money and/or effort??

In short, being more sustainably minded about research will save you time, money and effort in the long term, as long as you invest sufficient time, money and effort at the forefront.??

At Incite, we always interrogate the brief and challenge any pre-existing assumptions on an approach we if think an alternative route or use of available resources can ultimately lead to more actionable insights. Looking at business challenges from a different angle or through a new lens can often uncover that the solution may already lie within reach.?

For any advice on whether to conduct new studies or dust up existing data, please don’t hesitate to reach out to [email protected].