By Jeff Resnick, Stakeholder Advisory Services
Every industry endures periods of tumultuous change. Ours is no different. How we collectively deal with the challenge of a changing environment will shape our legacy and determine the vibrancy of our future. From my perspective, our industry’s opportunities have never been greater but we must effectively address three key issues – trust, innovation and the delivery of actionable insights.
Trust is at the core of our business. If target audiences trust us, they freely provide their opinions, attitudes and allow us to track their web behaviors. Yet, as a
GRBN study demonstrated, trust in our industry is in need of improvement. Trust is built through experience, interaction and demonstrating that our commitments to those sharing information with us are consistent with our actual behavior. Protecting the privacy of our respondents’ personally identifiable information (PII), respecting their time by ensuring the questions we ask are on target and visibly self-policing those in our industry who violate our code of ethics are all behaviors that build trust. There are certainly other mechanisms to build trust but getting these three right is essential to our future.
Innovation is core to the longevity of any business. Failing to innovate only leads to one outcome – falling behind your competitors at best, and business extinction at worst. Finding ways to build innovation into the culture of our businesses is essential to achieving success. While requiring concerted effort, ongoing innovation is eminently achievable. In my book,
Transformation IQ, I profile CEOs who accomplish this task.
Continual innovation not only improves our businesses but enables us to provide deeper insights to our clients, leading to their success. Innovation comes in many flavors – technology, methodology, analytics as well as other areas. We must always look to new horizons to ensure we keep ourselves and our clients competitive.
Generating
insight may well be our most important challenge. The days of the multi-hundred-page PowerPoint deck are long over although some did not attend the funeral. It is no coincidence that the two most sought after skills identified in the
Q1/Q2 2016 GRIT survey are ‘finding the story in the data’ and ‘data visualization skills’. Both are essential skills required to move from describing the data to providing the insight that enables action. I’ll also be a bit contentious here. Insight comes from individuals who can take a holistic view of their clients’ business. Elements required to accomplish this include well-developed business acumen on the part of the researcher and a willingness to share the business context and issues on the part of the client. As an industry, we need to ensure we bring professionals with the right skills sets ‘to the table’ and begin to move our clients in the direction of true collaboration where full details about their business issues and context are freely shared.
Our reputation, our legacy, will depend on our ability to shape the view others have of our industry. We must own the responsibility to develop an unbreakable trust, continually find ways to bring innovation to our clients and move decidedly away from describing data to providing insights that make a tangible difference to our clients’ business.
If we achieve these three goals, we will be well on our way to sustaining our industry as a vibrant career option for generations yet to come.
About Jeffrey Resnick
Managing Partner, Stakeholder Advisory Services
Jeff Resnick is the founder of Stakeholder Advisory Services. He is a thought leader, trusted advisor to clients, business strategist and mentor. He serves his clients within the areas of reputational risk assessment, key account management and issues relating to business transformation and growth.
He served as President of Opinion Research Corporation’s US Group where, in addition to his responsibilities for managing top and bottom line growth he initiated and led the CNN|ORC International Poll, recognized as one of the premier polls of American public opinion. He is passionate about the requirement to transform the market research industry and is the author of the Transform blog carried on the Greenbook blog as well as CASRO’s CXO blog. Jeff had the honor of serving as Board Chair for CASRO in 2012.
Managing Partner, Stakeholder Advisory Services
Jeff Resnick is the founder of Stakeholder Advisory Services. He is a thought leader, trusted advisor to clients, business strategist and mentor. He serves his clients within the areas of reputational risk assessment, key account management and issues relating to business transformation and growth.
He served as President of Opinion Research Corporation’s US Group where, in addition to his responsibilities for managing top and bottom line growth he initiated and led the CNN|ORC International Poll, recognized as one of the premier polls of American public opinion. He is passionate about the requirement to transform the market research industry and is the author of the Transform blog carried on the Greenbook blog as well as CASRO’s CXO blog. Jeff had the honor of serving as Board Chair for CASRO in 2012.
