What Planners Can Learn from Academics

Never thought I would write that sentence (title). But then again, planners can and should learn from EVERYBODY, right?

I recently came to the understanding that academic research can be a very usable guideline in the development of meaningful insights in advertising as it holds a lot of parallels. For people not familiar with the advertising world: there’s a lot of confusion and bullshit about what exactly an insight is. By writing this post, I’ll use my college experience and what I’ve learned there so far, in trying to clarify a little bit.

An insight is not an idea. Great ideas come from great insights. And great insights come from great research. That’s basically the middle step why there is such a thing as a career in planning and why they get paid by an agency. An idea is mostly the task coming from the creatives. And the research mostly is outsourced to research firms and agencies that are qualified and have experience to produce valuable market and consumer research. Often do you hear people say “Then what the fuck do planners do?” Planners are supposed to be the ones coming up with the insights. Let me try to explain through a few examples I got in contact with through my education in psychology which is indeed an academic scientific course.

An insight BEFORE research is done
I’ll underline this one with one of the most inspiring research mankind has ever known (in my humble opinion) and I blogged about before (click here if you don’t know it): The Milgram Experiment. Milgram found an astonishing fact that marked the birth of some amazing social psychology: Almost 65% of ordinary people are conforming to give another innocent participant a shock of 450 Volts. This 65% of all participants conforming is a research fact.
The INSIGHT however is the fact with what Milgram came up with after World War II and Nazi Germany: How far can regular, ordinary people go in conforming to a perceived authority (the experiment leader) in order to hurt another innocent human being? No other research had been done (not in that quantity and quality) about this conforming behavior and Milgram was the very first one asking himself this question. The IDEA in this case is how he would study and observe this kind of behavior. A brilliant idea came up to him: a fake participant that should be learning word pairs and will be punished with an electric shock every time he’s wrong. The idea (the setting of the experiment) came after the insight (questioning how conform people really are). The research is the setting, the methodology and the results: 65 percent.

An insight AFTER research is done
In an academic environment, research always will be done in order to study an a priori formulated question. Market research is being done on constant base just for the sake of being up-to-date with everything. Obvious. But once in a while psychological research can produce content out of which great insights can come which are different from the initial set-up from the experiment. This is what should happen in advertising as well: seeing through the research data and finding the brilliant ‘why’-question.
For my example, I will use The Hawthorn Studies: In the 1920’s – 1930’s, Henry A. Landsberger wanted to study and measure the productivity from factory workers in whether higher or lower light levels. They manipulated the levels of light for a while at a working place and measured the outcome in productivity. The results were at first sight very strange: over the entire range of experimented manipulations and levels, all productivity was increased compared to regular working days before the experiment. Here, the INSIGHT came after the entire research, namely: People become more productive when they know others are watching / observing them. This is something advertisers should be good at: trying to find the WHY into the data, even though that data was not measured for that final purpose.

An insight WHILE research is done
Apart from being valuable, correct or unbiased research, I’m thinking about the psychoanalysis stream in psychology and of course it’s well-known guru: Sigmund Freud. He basically came up with his insights through listening to his patients, asking the right questions, observing behavior and writing everything down the moment he heard something of which he believed had value for the theories he set out for himself.
I’m posting this because I think planners can learn from him or any scientific approved interview content adaption when they’re working with focus groups and interviews. Interviews are a very nasty thing in psychology as they are so easily biased by lots of factors, but for advertisers that doesn’t hurt the planning as much as it does the research: only one participant needs to say something valuable to make you approach the manifested problem from a different angle, and you can find yourself suddenly on a complete new and interesting track to follow and dig into further. I think this definitely comes down in great anticipation on what’s happening right in front of you and what people share with you. I could be wrong on this, as I have to confess I haven’t been involved yet in focus groups or interviews for advertising purposes. I do have for psychological research purposes.