SBR 34: LAURA MORRIS ON THE IMPORTANCE OF INSIGHT
Recently, I was lucky to catch up with Laura Morris, Head of Brand research at Trinity McQueen, a behaviour led, insight consultancy. She’s worked in research and insight for the past 20 years. Mostly in agencies but she’s also worked client-side at Nestle. Her work spans numerous clients across many sectors, but they all see the benefit of working with insight to tackle their marketing challenges. She’s obviously an advocate of using agencies like Trinity McQueen, but in this interview she gives some pragmatic research ideas for scaling brands who don’t have large budgets along with some things that larger brands can learn from smaller, more agile brands.
GT: The beauty of working at an agency is you get this slice across hundreds of clients. What do you think established brands can teach emerging brands?
LM: Obviously I'm going to come at this from an insight angle, because I believe insight should be the foundation and all marketing strategy should stem from that. Even if you're a startup or an emerging brand without much cash to invest in research, it doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. I remember Mark Ritson saying, it's amazing what you can find out just from a day's worth of Google activity. There's lots of free stuff. That's not to take away the value of doing proper research with an agency like ours, but there are ways of getting insight into your activity.
GT: Are there any examples of great tools you've seen brands using? What are some of the tools out there that an emerging brand could look at?
LM: You can glean things from social listening; for example customer forums or even the likes of Twitter. It's also amazing what a quick search on some of the free AI tools out there will return to you. There’s also lots of free sources that you can read for secondary research insights. But to be honest I’m a big believer in just getting out there and talking to customers. I don't know if you've watched that series called Undercover Boss? The MD usually walks the shop floor and meets real customers & staff. It’s always a real eye opener, because for once they've stepped out of the bubble and are seeing what's going on in the real world.
GT: I agree with you. When I joined Weetabix, they sent me out with an insight person to someone’s house for breakfast. We asked him about how he eats his Weetabix and whether he had any problems with crumbs. He said he had no problems and yet he was carefully peeling back the wrapper and delicately putting the Weetabix into the bowl.
LM: That’s a great example; observation is something anyone can do. For initial hypothesis gathering data on the category, we might go into store and observe people picking products up off the shelf. It's amazing how much you can just see with your own eyes.
GT: There are so many insights in the milk fixture in supermarkets, one is that the milk is put in cages! It's wheeled in and out like it’s in a milk prison. Another was that I watched someone buying Cravendale. They went to grab it and they did a double take on how much it was, looking over at the standard fresh milk at half the price. They had to justify that price premium to themselves in a moment of hesitation.
LM: Clearly the price point meddled with their pain receptor in their brain because most supermarket decisions are done on autopilot, especially in a category as habitual as milk.
GT: So one of the things you talked about was freely available research. At Big Black Door, we've used things like Trustpilot to look at what people are saying about your brand or there's Google Trends.
LM: Precisely. Light touch research doesn't have to be expensive. If you wanted to ask a couple of questions on an omnibus, that's also relatively inexpensive.
GT: So it’s important to put consumers at the heart of what you're doing, get a deep understanding but also to scratch beneath the surface of that observation to see why people are doing this. Not to take it at face value.
LM: Yeah, this is really tricky because even if you do ask people why they behaved in a certain way, you're going to get a very rational answer. We know people are poor witnesses of their own behaviour, they often don't know why they do what they do. It's hard for them to articulate this, so our job as researchers is to ask the questions, do the observation, and then triangulate between that to find out what's going on there. Often it's having to triangulate lots of different data points to get to the truth.
GT: A wise man called Robert Mellish once said to me that research is only one input and as a marketeer, you've got to take that input along with some commercial input, retailer input and an understanding of your customers etc. Consumer research is an important voice, but it's only one voice in all the voices I've got in my head.
LM: Absolutely. We're mindful of that. It's not as straightforward as saying “customers said x, therefore you should do y.” There's much more nuance to it than that. There's internal things going on. There's competing investment priorities, you've got to get in the boardroom and understand the pressures that an MD is really facing. And that your piece of the jigsaw is just one piece, an important piece, like you say, but just one piece.
GT: What is it that you see in large brands that you think they need to ditch? What could they learn from smaller brands?
LM: I think there are too many layers of sign off and bureaucracy at times. Big corporations can be painfully slow to do business with. By the time an insight reaches the person who's going to act on it, it's been moulded and changed beyond its original form. It slows things down and causes things to stay stuck. That’s the beauty of working with smaller companies or even larger companies but where you’ve got direct access to key decision makers and perhaps even the CEO has been a stakeholder in the process. There are not so many layers of chain of command to go through. I remember earlier on in my career working on a brand transformation piece for the menswear retailer Moss Bros. We were lucky to have direct access to their interim marketing director and the board. We even had the CEO coming to some of the focus groups we ran, which was brilliant. It meant they could take decisions quickly. The lesson is making sure you've got the people with the right level of influence and the right decision making authority to get stuff done.
GT: So how in that example, what can I be doing to get the right people in the room?
LM: The best insight clients we work with assemble the right stakeholder team from the onset. At Trinity McQueen we use the RACI framework ... you go through different people and identify what level of involvement they have or need to have in the project. Do they just need to know about it, and that's fine and nothing more? Do they need to be consulted on it and for you to get their input? Or are they a main owner of it? Mapping this out at the onset is key. I've seen projects done badly where key stakeholders weren't consulted upfront. The team goes away and does this nice piece of research and then tries to push it out, and it then hasn't landed properly. We once worked with a client who had done a shopper segmentation study and were having problems landing it internally. They came to us to help re-package it and sell it in to internal stakeholders. But it was too late at that point. You don't want to be signing off questionnaires by committee but you do want to keep that wider stakeholder team engaged in the key project milestones, so they feel the impetus of the project as it's gaining momentum. Little bits of ‘snackable’ insight to feed on to build that anticipation for the final delivery.
GT: We used a RACI at Weetabix and at Arla where it was an amazing tool to demonstrate where we were in a project. It saves so much energy. And speeds up the process. The other build is classic stakeholder management. If you know someone could derail you, keep those people informed. Not always just emailing them, it’s important to understand their communication preferences.
LM: Yeah, communication style is key. There are people on projects that love detail, but then also there are people that just want headlines.
GT: So what about your advice to marketers? Top tips?
LM: One that stands out to me above all else, is when it comes to what your positioning is or how best to communicate, we must remember people are cognitive misers. Because generally speaking, people don't care that much about brands in normal life. They care about the consumption point. It's a fallacy for marketeers to sit here thinking brands are a big part of consumers’ lives. It’s damn hard to cut through, especially to get the attention of people who haven't bought you before, who aren't primed to notice you. So my advice is don’t overcomplicate your message or your brand positioning. Keep it simple. Keep it focused, keep it consistent and hammer it home time and time again. People's memories decay over time so it’s no good just doing a campaign in January, then forgetting about it for a year. You've just got to keep doing it.
GT: That takes some resilience. Because it's expensive to keep communicating with people in terms of cash and effort. And if you're not seeing immediate results, it takes perseverance to keep going.
LM: Absolutely. Another tip and what emerging brands can learn from established brands, is that in the early years of a brand, you are going to need to build sales, distribution, hone your product. So you're not going to be as focused on brand building at this stage. You’ll be more reliant on earned media than paid media, for example. But this doesn’t mean you forget about the brand. Having a short term mindset only will take you so far. At some point the brand has to kick in. Remember that your sales activation is essentially only talking to the 5% of the people who are in the market right now. But there’s the 95% of the market who aren't in buying mode right now … we need be building positive brand perceptions with them so that when they're ready to buy they are more predisposed to buy our brand.
GT: Dr Grace Kite talks about getting more people in your room. Performance marketing will convert the people in the room, but you need to get more people in your room, because it's a limited cohort of people that you can convert. So, what are you working on at the moment?
LM: I’m pushing our research services in regard to brand research, and learning things all the time and taking onboard learnings from the likes of Ehrenberg bass Institute, Mark Ritson and professionals such as yourself, Gareth. Hopefully, working with new exciting brands. The other thing I'm wanting to do is start a podcast of my own. I want to interview marketers, talk about the brand challenges they're facing and how they’re tackling them. Brands are my passion!
GT: How can people get in touch with you?
LM: I'm on LinkedIn as Laura Morris.