Strategist, Ellen Cavell-Clarke, breaks down how to get to great audience insights.

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Love Thy Audience

“We do not see the world as it is; we see it as we are.”

Anaïs Nin

This is a quotation by Anaïs Nin. It is scratched up above my desk as it has been everywhere I’ve worked for as long as I can remember. I put it there because it keeps me focused and working to transcend all the unconscious bias, received wisdoms and experience I carry with me and forces me to hunt instead for someone else’s story and truth.

This is a post about getting to great human insights: the meat of our trade and the keystone of any great brand or real creative opportunity.

To begin it’s worth talking about what gets in the way of our endeavours. This can be uncomfortable, because when was the last time you worked with a strategist who wasn’t white and middle class? The ratios are nothing to be proud of. However you don’t have to be part of a given audience to get to great insights, you just need to be very clear about what you don’t know and where we unconsciously substitute or prioritise our own experience or point of view over our audience’s.

In his Radio 4 programme Sideways, Matthew Syed examines the shape of the western mind. He talks to Professor Joe Henrich whose thesis is that Western society is unique because it is ‘weird’: Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic. Henrich’s work began in Chile where he was trying to understand how locals made economic decisions and so was focusing on things like problem solving and themes including trust, perception and honesty. But he was confounded – no one was behaving the way he expected they would behave – nothing that he had learned from his texts books at home was resonating. And then it dawned on him: the books were based on experiments done in the west, and it was looking very much like that research can only really be applied to, well, us.

We are not conducting significant social and anthropological experiments in Chile, but we are subject to the same challenge: context and experience informs our understanding. Fortunately, with integrity and graft, we can get over these obstacles. Here are a few dos and don’ts

Do

Pull your sleeves up

There is never as much money as we would like for research so be practical and get out into the world your work needs to inhabit:

• Immerse yourself: get involved in the world you are researching
• Ask the experts: connect to the people who are most knowledgeable
• Rinse and share your networks: You will always know someone who knows someone who you can talk to.
• Go direct: If you know who your audience are exactly – just get out there and find them
• Loiter and ask: in shops by products, or venues or waiting rooms or studios… wherever it needs to be.

Read widely

Extend your reading beyond what *you* are interested in: Heat, The Daily Mail, anything that is relevant. You don’t have to agree with it, you just have to understand it. Read it without scoffing or getting mad. Read it like your audience read it.

Be interesting

What you learn and tease out of people will be as interesting as the questions you ask, so be expansive in your own learning and in your approach to research.

Qual *then* quant

You need qual to get inside the audience and then quant to see if that insight scales.

Listening properly

Active listening is a skill:

• Ask open questions, don’t lead to answers
• Use short words of encouragement: Don’t fill in the gaps; give people space to give you *their* answer
• Summarise and reflect: check you have understood – this develops trust and encourages more discussion
• Read the body language, but don’t allow your observation to make you intrusive
• Clarify: ask for examples
• Be relaxed about leaving your list of questions behind; use what you learn to develop the conversation
• Contextualise: understand the person you are talking to beyond the product or service you are selling.
• And finally, we often worry about the challenge of self-reporting, that it can signpost us to someone’s intention or desire rather than reality. But that is, of course, a step towards an insight.

DON’T

Be a snob

If you look down on someone, you have already failed. Your work runs the very real risk of patronising or insulting the people you hope to connect with. Have a word with yourself and start to feel the love because from love, respect, care, understanding and empathy with a person’s context and choices…. There. That is where the good stuff is.

Be reductive

Reduction always exists in the shape of our own prejudice and ego. Avoid.  

And finally, never start off thinking you have the answers. 

Once you have connected with an audience in this way you can combine your real insight with your experience as a strategist and your intuition to move past the obvious, past the things that have already been said and done, and towards new opportunities that truly resonate.