5 ways to engage your C-suite with market research insights

There are many reasons why your C-suite may be disconnected from consumer insights. Whether it is because the presented discoveries aren’t meeting their needs, or that they just don’t have the time to review, executives are often hard-pressed to engage. It can even fall to disengagement because they don’t understand how the data is relevant to the business problem that they are trying to solve. Whatever the reason, there are some key ways to overcome the challenges you may encounter in getting the C-suite connected with the critical insights you’ve worked hard to uncover. 

Here are five strategies you can employ to create demand from the C-suite and help build a reliance on consumer research insights. 

1. Enrich the consumer research picture by combining multiple data sources. For example, when you use sales data that addresses the “what” about your consumer and overlay that data with consumer research like an ad-hoc survey (the “why”), a clearer picture will start to emerge. When you output these findings in a single, visual analysis, the attractiveness and context of the insight are far more significant. This helps to drive engagement with those who are heavily focused on the results.
2. Deliver results in ways that are easily digestible and device agnostic. C-suite and senior leaders tend to have particular preferences when it comes to technology. Delivering insights to them on a desktop-friendly interface, when they prefer mobile, is a losing proposition. One way to accomplish this is by focusing on the simplicity of design, with a view that gives them high-level, vital insights and data. Generally, taking this approach will translate well across multiple interfaces. The option to drill down into the data is important too.
3. Make the data interactive and exciting. Think beyond a PowerPoint printout and bring your data to life for every stakeholder. For example, an interactive geo-map visualization of brand awareness and sales achievements in a specific region is much more captivating. Software or apps that help to achieve this level of engagement are great avenues to ensure wider use, participation, and proliferation of market research data around an organization.
4. Bring all the data together in one place. Your C-suite sees the business at a higher level, so siloed data won’t do when they are making crucial business decisions. A complete picture can only be accomplished by integrating data sources, and rolling all the pieces together into the coolest, fastest, most valuable way. Bringing everything together by combining consumer data sources is critical in creating engagement with market research.
5. Let the data tell a story. Storytelling has gained in popularity in the business world because it brings things to life. When it comes to market research data, this approach can resonate with leadership because instead of just listing facts and numbers, it provides a relevant and understandable framework for the insights. After all, consumer insights represent feedback and behavior from real people, so placing data in this context is more memorable and can help facilitate action. 

For the C-suite to become champions of market research functions, researchers must deliver insights in a way that resonates with these executives. Projects must be tailored from the outset so they can positively impact decisions that affect the business, and the outcomes of the research must be easy to digest and tailored to solving executive-level problems. 

It is part of our core mission as a company to see the value of market research data extended to as many areas as possible within an organization. These five key strategies to connect the C-suite to consumer insights and marketing data have worked for us, many of them born out of our clients’ needs and comments. We hope they add value to your journey too.

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