Interview Summary

The interview with Clare Otridge, Director at Grounded Research, provided a comprehensive overview of market research for a marketing audience. Otridge defined market research, emphasising the critical importance of establishing clear objectives before selecting methodologies. She detailed the research process from brief to reporting, highlighting the core questions of what needs to be known, why it matters, and what will be done with the information. The discussion covered practical applications of research, tips for marketers conducting their own initial investigations, and the key benefits of hiring an agency. Otridge also addressed the limitations of research, such as the "say-do gap," and concluded with insights on her professional background and the emerging role of AI in analysing past research data.

 

Interviewee Background

Clare Otridge is a Director at Grounded Research. Before moving into research, she had a decade-long career in marketing and brand strategy, with experience at organisations including the National Trust and TSB. This dual background gave her a unique perspective on ensuring research findings were translated into practical, actionable strategies for marketing teams.

 

Key Points

  • Market research was defined as the process of gathering data to generate "actionable insights" that help identify opportunities, manage risks, and understand customers better.
  • The most crucial part of any research project was establishing clear and focused objectives, guided by the questions: "What do I need to know? Why does it matter? And what do I do with that information?"
  • Marketers could conduct valuable preliminary research by reviewing past studies, using online tools like Google Trends, and, most importantly, speaking directly with customer-facing staff like call center teams.
  • Engaging a professional research agency was recommended for gaining an unbiased external perspective, accessing specialised tools and expertise, and avoiding common methodological errors.
  • A significant limitation of research was identified as the "say-do gap," where what consumers report about their behavior often differs from their actual actions.
  • AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude were presented as useful starting points for analysing and summarising old research reports, though Otridge cautioned that they required careful prompting and should not replace a thorough reading of the source material.

 

Transcript

Transcripte are auto-generated.

Announcer (00:01):
This is the Cambridge Marketing Podcast with market research, the topic for today's programme.

Clare Otridge, Grounded Research (00:08):
Really what you have to think about is: what do I need to know? Why does it matter? And what do I do with that information? Either for yourself or because you're sharing that across the team.

Announcer (00:19):
This is the Cambridge Marketing Podcast.

Kiran Kapur, host (00:27):
Hello and welcome. This week we are in the world of market research, and I'm delighted to welcome Clare Otridge, who is director at Grounded Research. Clare, welcome to the show. We'll start with a very simple question. What is market research?

Clare Otridge, Grounded Research (00:44):
That's probably a broader question. So market research is basically gathering data for a specific purpose. How it relates to marketing - you'll probably hear the words actionable insights bandied around an awful lot. But it's basically looking for things that you can then use to identify opportunities, risks, gain a competitive advantage or understand your customer better. So it comes in a number of guises. You've got your surveys, focus groups, interviews, intercepts, a whole host of methodologies that are used individually or combined together to really create a picture to understand the problem that you're looking to solve or the objective that you're looking to get information about. In a nutshell.

Kiran Kapur, host (01:38):
Thank you. And great nutshell. And just so that we can sort of picture where we are, can you give me two, three examples of the methodologies?

Clare Otridge, Grounded Research (01:47):
Yeah. So I mean, before the methodologies, you kind of have the process of market research. So as an agency, we often receive briefs. Sometimes they're formal briefs, sometimes they're on the phone or an idea that a client might want to bandy around, which I know because, I worked in marketing for 10 years before research, isn't uncommon in marketing either. But it really is the more you can put into the brief and the more you can do the planning, the better the research you'll end out. So spending some time on that is really great, either for yourself or when you're working with an agency. And a big element of that is being really, really clear on your objectives. And it's a bit like having smart objectives when you're doing your PDRs [Personal Development Reviews]. And it's understanding what you're trying to achieve. Before you then get into things like the methodologies, the scope, the sample frame.

(02:41):
So what are you going to do and with who? Then you move into your data collection. How are you going to do it? And what are you going to use for that? So it might be a survey platform, it might be online focus groups. Then you get into the processing and analysing. So that's cleaning the data, reviewing the transcripts, whatever that might be, and conducting some statistical testing on that. Then you move into the reporting stage, which can be a lot or a little. You can have a hundred page long reports that go into all of the statistical methodologies, or you can have sort of an internal deck that you can circulate that gives you the key findings that need actioning. But really what you have to think about is what do I need to know? Why does it matter? And what do I do with that information?

(03:36):
Either for yourself or because you're sharing that across the team. So I touched on a couple of methodologies. They're probably going to be quite familiar to a lot of marketers because you've probably seen them kicking around. And if you read Marketing Week or campaign, you'll hear a lot about insight driven advertising and things like that. And it really is horses for courses. And blending the right methodologies is what will get you the best insight. So surveys, focus groups, and interviews are kind of the most common, but in terms of how they're divided up, it really sits across quantitative, which is the numbers, the stats, and the qualitative, the people, the words. So that's sort of an overview of how it all fits together.

Kiran Kapur, host (04:25):
Brilliant. I love the way that you corrected me as I went straight into methodologies in a typical marketing fashion of "what are we going to do" and said, "actually, you've got to be clear on the objectives". So can we go back to that bit because I suspect that's probably one of the most problematic bits. You said sometimes people have an idea, and I know I do that. Had this great idea, why don't we...? What do you need from a client to really get into the objectives and what they're looking for?

Clare Otridge, Grounded Research (04:52):
"I've had an idea". It's probably one of my most haunted comments from a client, to be honest. Or that, and "can we just run a survey?" Then followed swiftly by, "Can I please get a quick stat on?" So in terms of firming up your objectives, it really comes down to 'what it is you want to do'. And if you have a great big long list of objectives, you're never going to quite achieve the real key ones as well as you possibly could, particularly as we know, marketing budgets are never on your side as a marketer. But market research, if you do it properly and go through a process of working out what those objectives are, when you're firming up those objectives, thinking about how you're going to deliver the findings will really inform those. So again, what do I need to know? Why does it matter and what am I going to do with it?

(05:53):
An awful lot happens where you're collecting data for the sake of collecting data or "while we're doing a survey, we'll just ask a question about..", and that very quickly starts to dilute what it is you're trying to achieve.

(06:08):
If you use it properly, as a marketer, it's really hard to get a seat at the table. It's getting better, but it's always been the problem for us. Understanding your customer and understanding all their pain points, all their challenges, all of the good things about what you're selling, whether it be a service or a product, is going to make you invaluable to all of the other business functions around operations, product design, customer service, and any other business function you can think of. Knowing how people feel about what you're selling to them is only going to be a bonus. So use this as the best way to be in at those early strategic decision making processes.

Kiran Kapur, host (06:53):
So I like the fact that you're concentrating on what are you going to do with the research because we've all been to offices where they've blown electronic dust off the market research that they've done and said, "Well, we spent lots of money on this, but we've never actually used it. " So can you give me some ideas on what people can do with the research? What can research actually help with?

Clare Otridge, Grounded Research (07:15):
We've got some pretty standard tools in market research. You've got a brand tracker, which you might already be doing some of in marketing with Brandwatch or Sprout Social, whatever it is you might be tracking to understand what people are saying, how they're feeling about your brand. You've also got sort of segmentation studies or profiling. I've seen some amazingly creative customer profiles in my time and even made some myself. You've also got it for product development, so that iteration of you've got something new, you want to test it, you might have a longitudinal study, which is where you keep going back to customers to see what they think of how you've sort of actioned what their feedback was. You might have a customer satisfaction survey, which can either happen as a, we call it a cross-sectional study, which is where it happens at a moment in time, or that might be a triggered customer satisfaction survey where they sort of get it after a certain amount of time after receiving the product.

(08:20):
And again, as marketers, we're probably seeing those ping into our inbox and looking at them possibly with more detail than most normal people do.

(08:31):
And a lot of it you can start to do yourself and I was going to share a couple of ways that you as a marketer can start thinking about that, but there is also some benefits to bringing in an agency, which I'll also cover.

Kiran Kapur, host (08:46):
Brilliant. So shall we do just that? So how could I do some of this myself?

Clare Otridge, Grounded Research (08:51):
Well, as you said, blowing off the dust of any previous work is a great place to start. It's made all the more easier with some AI functions. So as long as you've got a PDF, I would upload it and ask it to disseminate the key insights that are relevant and then maybe give it some more context around what it is you're looking at, to see what you can pick apart already. A lot of these studies are really, really long. They're only done every three years. So if you think about looking at one now, you're going to be looking at a post- COVID world, which was a very, very different place. So take it with a pinch of salt, what's being said, but also things don't move that quickly. I think it's something that is forgotten a lot in marketing that essentially you're dealing with humans.

(09:39):
There might be some amazing new tools and it can feel really overwhelming on the marketing side of everything you've got to get to grips to, but we're humans and the general public don't move as fast as marketing. Marketing gets bored of its own stuff way faster than your customers do. So it's something to bear in mind. It might feel old to you. It could still feel very new to them. And that's really where market research can come in because it can bring you back down to earth a little bit. And using that voice of the customer in whatever guys you want to pick it up in can be really useful. The other good place to start is some of the online tools. So you've got 'Ask the Public' is a great one just to see how people are asking questions about some of the stuff you do.

(10:25):
Any social listening or Google trends, keyword research is a really great start for desk research, especially if you're not too familiar with market research as a practise. You can also look at some product reviews if you have a product or a service, see how people are talking about you and look at some of the customer feedback. I used to work in marketing at the National Trust and one of the best places to understand how I should be communicating to members was to go and speak to a bunch of call centre staff and ask them, "What are people coming to us with? What are the key reasons they don't want membership anymore?" There's a lot you can get from data and stats and dashboards and everything else, but also don't forget to go and talk to the people who are speaking to your customers. And it's the best way you can do research yourself internally is to make sure that you've got a real cross-section sources.

(11:18):
You're asking the people, you're looking at the figures, you're reviewing everything that's being said, not just about you, but your competitors as well.

Kiran Kapur, host (11:24):
That's great. Thank you. And at what stage should I be thinking about using an agency rather than trying to do it myself?

Clare Otridge, Grounded Research (11:31):
I think always do a little bit before you engage an agency, just so you're really clear on the objectives. And it comes back to that great brief writing element. From an agency, you'll get expertise. So you'll get people that do this every day, all the time. If you're only dipping in and out of it, you might not know what the best best practise is. You might not be up to date with data collection, laws and regulations of which there are many. Although I know in marketing, you have to be pretty hot on those anyway. It also gives you that outsider's perspective, which you can never come to your own business or your own product or your own services with a fresh pair of eyes ever again. So engaging an agency is really useful on that side. An agency will also have tools and processes that make the whole thing more efficient.

(12:21):
They'll have partnerships with survey partners and sample sources that you might not have outside of your own customer base. They also come with a lot of experience. Nine times out of 10, you'll be looking to use an agency that's done something similar with somebody like you before. So you can't unlearn what you've learned, and there'll be a lot of things in there that were uncovered that you won't have because you're becoming new to it. But as an agency, if they've been doing it time and time again, particularly on things like customer satisfaction, you're not going to get that kick yourself, "Oh, I wish I'd asked that. " Or, "The audience didn't interpret that question the way I anticipated they would, or the pilot study wasn't done with enough rigour," or all of these things that we know about and know as watch outs because we're doing it every day might not be quite as obvious to somebody who's sort of picking it up once in a blue moon.

Kiran Kapur, host (13:23):
That's a very good point. One of the questions I got when I asked the students about that I was going to be doing this was, is there anything you can't research in marketing?

Clare Otridge, Grounded Research (13:34):
I think there's a lot of things you can't research. One of the really tricky things that we've been working on quite extensively with some big public projects is what's known as the say do gap, which is pretty self-explanatory. It's what people say versus what they do. And there's countless examples of where people say they ... Recycling's the best known one. They say they recycle, but we look at the figures and there's absolutely no way that everybody is recycling to the extent that they say they do. One that we looked at recently was how many people say that they eat organic, but then don't when we start doing some receipt tracking. Similarly with British food, we also looked at how many people said that they actively look for British produce, but then when it comes to the purchases, it's either under-reported or over-reported in several different areas.

(14:33):
So research will get you so far and you can overcome some of the difficulty in what people say versus what they do with some very clever statistical modelling, some psychology applied in there, but you're never really going to get it with a hundred percent accuracy. And the other thing to note is what people tell you as a marketer or a representative of the company that you're asking them about will be very different to what they might tell an independent agency. So we've had it where we'll get insight from customer satisfaction surveys that sort of blindsides some of the internal team because their customers are just, they're too nice to be able to tell them some of those things, especially if you have a service based one where they have a good working relationship with their account manager or their salesperson. And it's just not British to be telling them that they've got things wrong, which happens more than you'd expect.

Kiran Kapur, host (15:35):
Yes, that's a really clear reason why an agency and a third party can also be incredibly helpful. You've said a couple of times that you were a marketer and you've moved into research. So do you mind me asking what made you make that transition?

Clare Otridge, Grounded Research (15:50):
Yeah. So I always wanted to go down the marketing route because I was always really interested in why people do what they do. I had marketing jobs all the way through until 2020 in brand strategy. I worked at National Trust, TSB, some professional consultancy and sort of other agencies as well. And what drove me to go into research was, it was actually my mother's agency is the one that I've now sort of inherited or taken over. And during COVID, my expertise was in digital marketing, so getting people to do stuff online. And because during COVID, all face-to-face research dropped off a cliff for obvious reasons. I was on mat leave from my current job, and she asked if I could give her a hand. And I just enjoyed it so much. Always really enjoyed marketing, but doing the research has been a really interesting kind of sideways step on what was quite a squiggly career.

(16:57):
And I was only supposed to be here for a couple of months, and four years later, I'm now a director and really enjoy bringing the marketing understanding and the branding and the strategy to what we do in market research because it means that we can sort of handhold some of our customers through that process of landing the research and applying it to get to those actionable insights that is the elusive actionable insights.

Kiran Kapur, host (17:27):
Yes. It's funny how often one hears the word actionable insights, but actually people aren't necessarily clear what they are. So one of the things I wanted to ask was you're a Director of Grounded Research and you talk about that your agency does exceptional research. So I just wanted to sort of ask a little bit more about that.

Clare Otridge, Grounded Research (17:48):
I hope we do exceptional research. We approach things in a slightly different way, and I think that is a lot to do with that marketing background I have. We are probably more creative in our methodologies and we're much more adaptive. So it's bringing that sort of ... I had training in agile project management. So more often than not, research does not go to plan. It's even worse than working in marketing. What you expect to get, what you actually get, especially if you're working with harder to reach groups, they might not even exist in the sample size you need. So the exceptional research element comes into, we sort of plan creatively, have backup plans, have a sort of a just course continuously. And it's that adaptive, creative approach that makes us a bit different.

Kiran Kapur, host (18:44):
Clare Ottridge of Director at Grounded Research, thank you very much for that insight into market research. That's been really, really fascinating. And thank you also for the suggestions of places to go if people wanted to try research themselves. One final question, you said you could use AI to help you look dust off the digital dust of a previous market research. Is there a particular AI that you recommend that people use or just generic AI?

Clare Otridge, Grounded Research (19:12):
ChatGPT is everyone's favourite. I am seeing that when it comes to interrogating reports and things Claude is a really good option. It's quite nice because as a marketer, you can use it to get a lot very quickly. I wouldn't rely on it because it's still got hallucination rates. It's still using the same hackneyed terms of, if I see a rich tapestry of results one more time, I might scream. And it's a really good place to be able to have a bit of a conversation with almost like having the ghost of the market researcher that wrote the report sitting next to you because you can kind of say, did it show anything like this? Where would the next steps be recommended? And you've got to be really careful about prompt engineering. And I know there's a whole load of podcasts and things to understand that a bit better.

(20:08):
So ask it to act as the market researcher that wrote the report, tell it who you are and what you're trying to get out of it. And the more context you can give it as a prompt, the better the response will be is the best advice I can give there. And similarly, if you've got multiple market research reports, you can upload them and create your own chatbot to essentially have a conversation with all of those documents. Again, be really careful about just using that. And I would say make sure that you're reading the documentation before just dumping it, asking it five minutes, one of the questions and thinking you know everything about the last 10 years of the research that your company might have undertaken. But it's a really great starting point to kind of help you find your way and think about where to next, especially when you can start uploading some of the challenges that you'd like to start investigating as kind of a follow-up.

Kiran Kapur, host (21:07):
Clare Ortridge, thank you so much for your time and your expertise this morning. Thank you very much indeed.

Announcer (21:13):
Thank you for listening to the Cambridge Marketing Podcast from Cambridge Marketing College. Don't forget to like and subscribe to our channel for regular episodes with interviews from leading experts in the industry. You can also explore our previous episodes, including out of home advertising, marketing the nighttime economy, and working in the third sector. Just look for the Cambridge Marketing Podcast wherever you normally listen.