It's not just about more data, but about being able to effectively judge what is important. Advice from Ipsos for navigating the too much information age.
It's not just about more data, but about being able to effectively judge what is important.
Tara Beard-Knowland Head of Social Intelligence Analytics Ipsos UK
Ipsos has been in business for well over 40 years, and some parts of our organization are even older. As the Information Age, which started with the advent of personal computing, has progressed, so have research and insights.
Over all those years that we have been in business, we have seen many trends and many fads in how clients use data and what methodologies are hot or not. What we see is that we have by no means reached the nexus of the Information Age – we hear from clients and suppliers that there is no shortage of new information to mine.
The problem is that the Information Age is turning into the Too Much Information Age. You would be hard-pressed to find a department in any organization that doesn't deal with data of some kind. If everyone has access to data and can lay claim to creating some useful finding, what is Insight?
We see many clients grappling with these questions, and we see early signs of an important shift: a digital-first approach, with more triangulation of data sets. For those at the forefront of insights, this leads to a desire to know not just more but to be able to effectively judge what is important. It is like a box of chocolates – there's a lot of great stuff in there, but if you don't have the map of what's what, then you can end up just blindly tasting them until you find the kind that suits you.
Digital resources like social and search are fantastic places to start with landscaping an issue or a category. We have worked on many projects over the past year which have started with a digital fact-finding mission that can change the shape of future work.
For example, a comprehensive view of social media impacting the US retail grocery landscape. We explored the landscape using advanced text analytics to depict what is trending in key categories and determine prevalent associations of client and competitor brands. This sets the stage for other work we are doing to understand trends, brand attributes and effective communications in this space.
US Retail Grocery Landscape Map
Indeed, digital methodologies alone can be more than sufficient to create the landscape understanding. What's especially great about social media data for this is that it gives us the real language that people use, without us feeding them our structured view of the way a sector works.
With all of the information now available, we have all become more acutely aware of where information falls short – whether that be more traditional sources such as surveys or newer sources like social media or communities.
Triangulation is a great way to build more robustness into your data sets. We have seen a trend emerging in this for profiling work in particular, whether as segmentation, personas or other audience mapping. With the addition of social media data, search terms, and online audience profiling (e.g. Synthesio Profiler) to more traditional research methods, we can create more complete, real pictures of people,
Our client conducted a segmentation and identified a core target for a new brand launch. The client's brand offering was sleek and well-designed, with communications to match. Subsequently, we conducted audience profiling of that segment, using Synthesio Profiler. Not only did we discover key interests for our client's core target, but we also discovered that the brands that the target had the most affinity to were busy and frenetic: the very opposite of how the client was portraying itself. This is something the original segmentation did not uncover. The client is now reviewing its comms strategy for this target audience.
As more and more clients start to look for what is important, the first question we recommend asking of any data is 'how can this data be useful to my organization?'. With less traditional data sources, such as social media and search data, it is important to take a view with a wide lens. Most categories and sectors can't directly replace existing data sets with these newer sources. Instead, they can often add new insight, for example about the wider issues affecting your questions, or act as an alert system.
To avoid the challenges that the Too Much Information Age poses, we need to think better, rather than bigger and remember that more is not always more useful.
Discover: Find out what's out there first. There is so much information, some of it may already exist in your organization.
Prioritize: What do you need to know and where can you get the information from. Like all the best things in life, it sounds simple but can be challenging to do.
Triangulate: Once you know what's important, don't be afraid to pull different threads of data together to create the full picture. We now have more data than ever at our disposal to help close these gaps in our knowledge.