Research is having a moment

Adam Ketterer: It feels like research is having a bit of a moment in marketing, advertising – in B2B for sure. I mean, maybe I’m conflating too many types. There’s all the AI stuff, of course, and the possibilities around synthetic research, which we can talk about later.

And there’s a lot of audience insight and ad effectiveness stuff, measuring performance or emotional response after the fact – people like System1 and that kind of thing. I interviewed Adam Morgan for B2B POV and he’s been doing amazing work on the Cost of Dull with System1 and Peter Field and others.

But I guess in B2B we often deal more with research that’s upstream of the work, helping you shape the proposition or the brief or whatever.

So let’s talk about your niche. When you say you speak to customers, what are you looking to learn?

Hannah Shamji: Yeah, I think research is having a moment. With the increase in speed and efficiency and everything that’s happening in the market, research can be an anchor. There’s all this pressure to produce and ship and publish and create and develop. It’s like, okay but make sure you stay anchored in your customers. So it’s definitely having what I hope is more than a moment. It’s a nice wave to be riding.

An accurate commentary on AI: “I’m excited and terrified!”

I’ve had a few conversations now about synthetic research and synthetic users [AI-generated profiles based on real-world groups/research subjects]. Companies like Evidenza that are getting a lot of traction and starting a lot of conversations. I saw one comment which I thought captured it perfectly, which is like, “I’m excited and terrified!” I think that’s such an accurate commentary on all things AI right now, really kind of walking that fine line – especially when the intent with research is to sort of prototype human behaviour, which we know is irrational and unpredictable.

AK: It’s so strange how we’ve digitised research to the point now that we’re digitising the last part, the respondent. It feels like the insight version of click farming.

HS: Right, so we have to ask, is this a reliable proxy? I don’t think it is yet but there’re definitely elements of AI that it would be foolish of me, and maybe other researchers, not to start to take advantage of. There’s an opportunity to be more efficient or, you know, a little scrappy to fit in the confines of how a business works. That means letting go of some of the rigour that came with academic research, and finding what are the new goal posts and the new parameters. So we can do good-enough research, to make faster decisions and keep moving. And I think that’s the tug of war. Right?

AK: Yeah, finding a balance between your old academic principles and these new times must be tough.

Everybody’s a “researcher”

HS: Also, research is one of these words everybody uses. We all do research, right? Like, you need to buy a new house, buy a new car, buy a new laptop: we do our research. And so it’s difficult to agree without a clear definition. Even with my clients, if we’re talking about research we need to know we’re on the same page. Is your definition the same as mine? Because some people think, “Oh, but you’re just gonna sit and Google something”, right? Because that’s one version of what we call research. It’s like this word that can expand and shrink as much as you want.

And so, in a way, we can all feel like researchers. And we are. But it is a very different ball game to research humans and human behaviour than it is to research an object or an item that you want to purchase. Both are valid. They’re just different contexts, and require different areas of expertise.

AK: I was talking to my wife, who also works in B2B marketing and used to work more on the research end of things, about how Google now gives you that AI summary at the top of your search results. It’s often simplistic or biased or just wrong, but how many people will treat that as the final destination of their research? It kinda feels like the death of research. It’s scary.

HS: Yeah, it is. And I think it’s a good challenge, too. It forces researchers to be really clear on when something like that might be valid. You don’t always need the full gamut of interviews. What are the scrappiest, leanest ways to get you answers? I’m more in that camp. And so if AI can speed certain things up, then challenge accepted! Let’s see what we can kind of do with this. How can I make it work for me? And really hone my edge.

From “I hate being a researcher” to “This could be something”

AK: Speaking about your edge, I want to talk about how you differentiate yourself as a researcher, and any kind of defining points of view you have. So first let’s rewind and talk about how you became a specialist in customer research in the first place.

HS: Yeah, absolutely. I have been a qualitative researcher for 14 years, which feels kind of crazy to say. I have a bachelor’s in psych and master’s in public health, both very research-heavy degrees – but both also noncommittal. I chose degrees because I was like, I don’t know exactly what I like, but I like something in this social psychology, softer science world.

I worked in public health after my bachelor’s, so I thought, Okay you could become a lawyer, or a doctor, or a journalist, or anything. I remember my first or second day of the public health master’s and she was like, “This is a very research-heavy program.” And I just hated being a researcher. It was like the absolute worst thing to me because I felt like I wanted to be the star of the show, and research was just not right. All of the research labs were in the basement. It just didn’t feel like the front lines, you know.

And so, after my master’s, I continued to work in public health, in cancer care. Again, qualitative research, a lot of interviews with doctors and patients, and really trying to change the policy level of provincial care.

When I left that I had no inkling of going into marketing. I kind of just found it. Around the same time I decided to do psychotherapy training. I’d always thought, “Oh, I want to be a psychologist.” So I started that training. And then I found copywriting actually from a blog post on Copyhackers about how therapy and copywriting were overlapping, and that just felt like such a cool thing to me.

So I fell into that. I tried to be a copywriter, but in the end I defaulted to the interview part. The research was just so second nature for me. And the writing is where I would get stuck.

So it took a while before I fell into the research. There weren’t a lot of examples of other people doing that in the marketing space, and I really liked the pace of research. In government, in healthcare, it’s slow, right? So much red tape, so much bureaucracy. You don’t really get to see the output of your research for years to come. You just have to carry the badge of, “Oh, my name was on a few important papers and changes in legislation” – which was cool, but I liked the business world. I liked the marketing space. Much faster, much scrappier. And it ended up being a really nice marriage with the psych world.

The customer interview piece was something I found later that was a gap for a lot of folks but felt natural to me. And the copywriting training I had done was really helpful. I saw a lot of people struggling: “Talk to customers? How do you actually do that?” That was my first inkling that this could be something.

It was around that time I started working as head of research at a Copyhackers agency. It gave me a huge confidence boost, the fact that research was its own department.

After about a year and a half, I left there and I’ve been out on my own since. I started doing client work and research for mostly B2B SaaS clients, and now I do training for teams and individuals too. So that’s kind of my windy, windy path here.

Scrappy, good-enough research plus an understanding of human behaviour

AK: Fast forward to today. In this ‘moment’ that research is having, how do you position yourself as a practitioner? If you’re pitching a client or something.

HS: A couple of things I try to hit on – one is the idea of scrappy, lean, good-enough research. I think that really appeals to the decision maker who wants to move fast and is potentially struggling to pause to do a little bit of research. So resonating with that is really important. There’s a lot of ego that can happen in research because suddenly, I become the person who knows the customer better than the people selling to them. That can be a difficult dynamic. So being mindful of my own ego, as well as theirs, is important. I could push for full rigour in research, but if it’s not necessary, then it’s just me trying to feel good about it.

How many interviews is enough?

In qualitative research, there’s a saturation point where you start hearing the same themes and stories from a group of interviews. It might be dressed in different clothing or nuances, but you hear the same things. Research shows that this typically happens after 9 to 15 interviews, so I usually do 10 to 12.

Now, that can sound really small when you’re used to the world of statistical significance. But 10 conversations with customers can be enough. Obviously, it needs to be a homogeneous sample or homogeneous enough. You need to be studying the same category of things.

That can be tough for a founder, if there are critical decisions to be made on the back of the research – where it can either mean the company is gonna develop something new or kill something that they’ve got on a product line. They might turn around and say, “I’m not okay with that. Screw the actual rules. I need some more rigour there.” So it’s about finding the line.

Most companies have some intel on their customers, whether it’s passive because they’ve just heard customers saying it indirectly, or they come from the industry themselves.

And so it’s like, you have data, is it data you can use? Is it in a document or just in people’s heads? Is it good-enough data? A lot of B2B SaaS teams, tech companies, they have tons of data but they’re not really leveraging it, right? It’s siloed, it’s scattered, or it’s not great quality, because the teams are too close to the product so they’re asking safer, biased questions. It’s one thing knowing your domain, but you also need someone who understands human behaviour objectively, and who knows how to tease out that information through an interview. That’s kind of the other angle that I’ll bring in.

All good research drives more research

AK: It’s also kind of heartening because that 10-15 number sounds familiar from a lot of B2B marketing projects where you might be working on a positioning or a value prop or whatever, and that’s maybe as many people as you can easily corner for your inputs.

And it’s interesting what you said about the founders who might be naturally precious about their product or their brand, and the research says scrap it or change it, and they get defensive.  But on the flip side, if they like what the research is telling them, then I guess there’s the risk of confirmation bias, or maybe you’d call it preference bias.

Do you ever find yourself thinking, I need to go back for another round, just to be sure?

HS: Yeah. So the kind of premise I have is that all good research drives more research. It’s like a never-ending question, especially with B2B and lots of verticals, lots of industries. So if this is the first round of research I’m doing with a client, I will intentionally not dive too deep into individual segments. You want a cross-cutting to justify going deep later. You could do surveys on the back of an interview to validate and kind of expand what you picked up in interviews, so the second round doesn’t have to be super deep, at least immediately. That’s how I approach it.

The framing of the research > the research itself

I find that the framing of the research is so much more important than the research itself. If you’re not delicate about that, it will flop.

I had a construction tech company I was working with, and my point of contact was initially the founder, and in the last instance it was head of marketing. And she said that they had been kind of debating over the value prop for so long, teams were just arguing, and it was difficult, because they all have a slice of the customer, but it’s not the full view. And then it’s whoever’s opinion matters most in the room that wins.

Sometimes alignment is more important than new insight

I had a construction tech company that had been debating over the value prop. With the research, it was not necessarily that they learned anything that was super-new, but you can actually make decisions faster because you can align. They were able to rewrite the website and ship it in like two weeks. They saw a lift in site impressions of like 60%. It was a huge win.

AK: I think people so often use consultants or agencies because they need that third-party validation. And here the third party is the customer. And who better?

HS: Totally. And I need that too: a lot of my presentations are direct quotes from the research.

Timing is everything

My psychotherapy training was honestly the best thing for this. I’m very aware of how to anticipate and navigate bias. I will kind of put out surveys, find sneaky little ways to ask questions.

AK: It’s that kind of investigative thing. You want to trip people up, but you want to trip up their subconscious bias and lies. So you ask them the same question four different ways to try to get to the truth.

HS: And also the timing of questions. So, when I had a newsletter a little while ago, when people signed up I would direct them to a survey page that would ask them what made them sign up today. Same with unsubscribes – you want to know why, but answering questions takes effort so you want to minimise the effort and make them feel like they’re just reporting on an experience they literally just had. And these things can be a great avenue to get little bits of insight that you can then pull together into like a bigger narrative.