In a recent survey of nearly 100 pharmaceutical and life science market research executives conducted by my company InCrowd, 80% identified their respective brand as being in a volatile market, characterized by disruption and uncertainty.

The last decade has been filled with unexpected events, from the global financial crisis to Brexit to the election of President Donald Trump. The reputations of polling companies have taken a public beating, and data gathered from surveys, interviews, and focus groups may fall under increased scrutiny as a result.

Given the current climate of volatility, how can consumer insight professionals, research analysts, and marketers choose the right forecasting methods and make meaningful predictions with confidence?

Satisfaction surveys are rife. From hotel stays to meals in restaurants, booking train tickets to searching comparison sites — as a consumer, you can barely get through a day anymore without someone asking about your customer experience and likelihood to recommend them to a friend.

The merits or pitfalls of this constant quest for consumer satisfaction data could be debated all day, but I’m not going to because (thankfully) B2B is different. Here, customer satisfaction measures are normally less frequent and more bespoke, with programmes typically conducted anywhere from quarterly to biennially.

“How is my brand perceived relative to competitors?”

“What perceptions of my brand most drive behavior?”

“How do I positively impact perceptions of and behavior toward my brand?”

These are common, vital questions raised by marketers and brand managers. Measuring a brand’s “health” – how consumers perceive and interact with the brand, and how perceptions and behaviors align with revenue – is a common objective in market research, but is often not achieved because not all elements of brand health are measured.   

The internet remains a great source of free information for people to use on a daily basis. You can find the answers you need on a wide variety of topics, and you don’t even need to leave your desk or make a phone call to get it.

In the current environment where fake news sites are popping up all over, it is more important than ever to decide what business information you can reliably obtain from the web and what you are better off purchasing from a professional publisher of market research.

What core skills should researchers build in order to excel? How can researchers stay relevant and impactful long into the future, as technologies continue to evolve?

A variety of thought leaders in the marketing and research sectors shed light on these questions in the new report Towards an Insights Driven Organisation from the MRS Delphi Group.  

According to the report, a passion for the customer and rigorous objectivity are just baseline skill sets. Researchers of the future must also develop the following attributes and abilities.

Industry executives, consultants, and sales professionals often need accurate, up-to-date information about a company for a variety of business and competitive intelligence goals, such as:

• Understanding a company’s financial health and key business segments
• Identifying and qualifying potential customers, affiliates, and suppliers
• Searching for investment and acquisition targets
• Capitalizing on a competitor’s weaknesses
• Increasing sales by understanding a clients’ businesses better
• Tracking corporate news such as restructuring, business expansion, and contract wins
• Accessing key employees to initiate business deals

Market research clients and suppliers have what seems to be a long-standing relationship where each wishes the other would just be nicer, faster, and more realistic. There often seems to be tension between the two sides when it comes to schedules, deliverables, decisions, and even resource capacity. This tension ends up manifesting itself in internal discussions on the client side, “I have no idea why it’s taking them so long to get me my data,” and on the supplier side, “They’re being so unrealistic with their schedule!”

Corporate professionals and entrepreneurs aren’t immune to unconscious biases and cognitive distortions. After all, the same thinking patterns that drive our everyday behaviors also carry over into our work and influence our decision-making. 

As Andrew Campbell, co-author of Strategy at the Corporate Level, wrote in the Harvard Business Review, “The daunting reality is that enormously important decisions made by intelligent, responsible people with the best information and intentions are sometimes hopelessly flawed.”

Fortunately, there are systematic ways you can reduce the risk of mistakes. The first step is learning to recognize thinking errors in the first place. Here, we highlight three cognitive distortions that can damage your business strategy and explain how to circumvent them.

Understanding the performance of a company is always at the top of mind for leaders and consultants. While internal analysis of the company’s financials and data can be insightful, it can also be somewhat baseless without comparison to industry peers. It is always prudent to couple internal analysis with external benchmarking.

But, where do you start?

Working with clients trying to determine their performance and identify improvement opportunities, I always start with the top six strategic benchmarks: