Andrew Wiseman reflects on a LinkedIn conversation that started with a fairly simple observation about research debriefs, and ended up challenging when we should really start thinking about activation.
I posted something on LinkedIn last week that I thought was fairly uncontroversial: a final debrief is not insight activation.
It’s one of my long-standing research bugbears. We finish a project, present the findings, everyone nods in roughly the right places, someone comments on how interesting one particular finding is, and the deck gets circulated afterwards. Research complete. Insight activated.
Except, of course, we’ve reported the research. What happens as a result is something else entirely.
What was more interesting was where the conversation went afterwards. A few people agreed with the basic point, but also suggested I hadn’t gone nearly far enough.
Simon Dannatt, CEO at The Sound, made the observation that perhaps thinking about activation shouldn’t start before the final debrief at all. It should start before the brief.
The more I thought about it, the more obvious that felt. Most market research isn’t commissioned simply because an organisation wants to know more things. Usually something needs to happen. A proposition needs developing, a campaign needs improving, a customer journey needs fixing or a business needs to decide where to invest. Somewhere at the end of the process, there is a decision to be made.
Yet research briefs can quickly become dominated by questions about what we need to understand, who we need to speak to and which methodology we should use. Those questions matter, but perhaps they come after a more fundamental one:
What needs to be different when this project is finished?
That sounds like quite a small shift in emphasis, but I don’t think it is. If we know from the beginning that the research ultimately needs to help a marketing team choose between two propositions, we can design the work around that decision. If somebody needs to turn the findings into a customer communications strategy, we need to understand what they will need from us to do that. If the ambition is to change behaviour, understanding the practical barriers to making that change matters just as much as understanding the behaviour itself.
Why activation should shape the research brief
Thinking about activation at the start changes what good research looks like. It also changes who needs to be involved.
Ann Van Den Bossche made this point particularly well in the discussion. I’d suggested that, on segmentation projects, we increasingly like to bring stakeholders into a discovery session while the solution is still emerging, giving them an opportunity to kick the tyres before the final reporting stage.
Her response was essentially that even this may be too late.
If the people expected to use the research only become properly involved once we have something to show them, we’ve already made an awful lot of decisions without them. That doesn’t mean turning research into a committee exercise or allowing the loudest stakeholder to reshape a robust finding because it doesn’t fit their worldview. It means understanding the world the research eventually has to live in.
What decisions do people actually make? What systems do they use? Where have previous projects fallen down? Which internal audiences matter? What budget or resource is available to do anything with the findings afterwards?
That last question is especially important. Ann also made the point that there should ideally be some kind of deployment plan and budget in place before kicking off. There’s not much point designing the perfect activation programme after the project has finished, only to discover nobody has the time, resource or money to deliver it.
The market research you were planning might not actually be the answer
Those early conversations can also expose something slightly uncomfortable: the research you were planning might not actually be the answer.
Ann commented that, in her experience, segmentation isn’t necessarily the solution in anything like every case where one is initially proposed. Discovering that before spending the budget seems like a pretty successful research outcome to me.
We should never become so attached to doing research that we forget why anybody wanted it in the first place.
None of this lets the final debrief off the hook.
I still think we have a habit of treating the presentation as the natural end point of a project, which is why I like the idea of discovery sessions before the final report is nailed down.
Put the emerging thinking in front of people while there is still room to work with it. Let them challenge it. Find out which parts feel useful and which need more interpretation. Ask what they would genuinely do differently if the finding is true, and where the barriers to doing that might sit.
That process doesn’t weaken the research. It helps us understand whether the insight survives contact with the organisation expected to use it.
It can also change the output.
Research outputs should fit decisions, not just reporting
We’ve become conditioned to think of “the deliverable” as a presentation deck, when the person responsible for CRM may need something completely different from the brand director. A frontline team might need a simple guide. A creative agency might need the insight translated directly into a brief. A segmentation might need to live in a database. A strategic team may need a decision-making framework rather than another 70 slides describing everything we learned.
The better question is probably not simply how do we present this?, but what does somebody need in order to use it?
There was another part of the LinkedIn discussion that pushed my thinking further.
Mark Whalley, Co-founder at EXPLNERS talked about the invisible audience for research: the people who aren’t stakeholders yet.
That really struck me because people leave organisations. Teams are restructured. Responsibilities move. Six months after a project finishes, the person briefing the next campaign may never have attended the research presentation. A year later, an entirely different team may be responsible for the customer strategy.
In a world where people can move roles relatively quickly, there is something fundamentally fragile about insight that depends on the institutional memory of the people who commissioned it.
If a piece of research only makes sense because Sarah remembers what Slide 47 actually meant, it hasn’t really been embedded.
Long-term activation has to survive the original project team. That might mean building findings into onboarding, planning processes or briefing templates. It might mean CRM integration, searchable insight systems or simply giving somebody clear responsibility for keeping the work alive.
The mechanism will vary, but the principle is the same: the learning needs to become part of how the organisation operates rather than something remembered by the people who happened to be in the room.
Nicola Stevens, Director at Ravenswood Strategy, added another useful point. Even when the research has technically finished, insight sometimes needs to be reactivated much later.
A campaign underperforms. A proposition changes. A competitor does something unexpected. The commercial environment shifts. Suddenly a piece of research completed nine months ago becomes relevant again, but in a context nobody anticipated when the project was designed.
That’s another reason the neat, linear model of research has always felt slightly artificial: brief, fieldwork, analysis, debrief, activation, done. Real life is messier than that.
Sometimes the most important use of an insight happens immediately. Sometimes it emerges months later. Something we barely noticed in the original findings can suddenly become significant because the world around it has changed.
The research project has an end date. The value of the insight doesn’t necessarily have one.
So I’ve changed my mind slightly since writing the original LinkedIn post.
A final debrief still isn’t insight activation, but I’m increasingly convinced that activation shouldn’t be thought of as a stage at all. It should shape the brief, influence the design, involve the right people, determine the outputs and continue long after the researchers have technically packed up and gone home. Which brings us back to the question that probably should have been asked before anything else:
“What needs to be different when this project is finished?“
If we don’t know the answer to that, maybe we’re not quite ready to start the research.
At Mustard
At Mustard, we think research should make a difference beyond the final presentation. That means understanding the decisions it needs to influence, involving the people who will use it and designing activation into the project from the outset.
Sometimes that means a workshop. Sometimes it means a tool, framework, CRM solution or something entirely different. The output should fit what people need to do next, not simply what researchers traditionally produce.
If you’re investing in research and want to ensure it creates action, not just another presentation deck, get in touch.
Thanks to Simon Dannatt, Ann Van Den Bossche, Mark Whalley and Nicola Stevens for taking the original LinkedIn conversation somewhere more interesting than I expected.
Want to read more about making your research actionable?
Why methodology alone does not create impact (LINK)
Why segmentation needs activation beyond the final report (LINK)