“After searching for data on home décor styling trends, Assortment Styler was the only report with details on how Americans decorate their homes. The report gave us the competitive advantage across multiple titles of knowing the top home décor styles and historical and future trends.”
Knowledge is Power, How to Share Corporate Insights (Knowledge) to Accelerate Your Success
Our research reports typically contain 75 to 200 pages of information. That’s a lot of information. Which is why we also provide management summaries; to make the reports easier to read (especially for those who don’t feel comfortable reading tables and charts). We still wonder, however, how much of those insights and valuable strategic and tactical knowledge is really retained? Do our clients refer back to the reports? Do they share them with new employees to learn about the brand, consumer needs/wants, the products and the industry? Research reports are a great, unbiased source of market knowledge and should be a key part of the corporate memory and awareness on an on-going basis, not just at a moment in time.
One of our clients, a large consumer products company, has a great system to maximize the benefit of research reports (and, no doubt, other key strategic information as well). Smart companies maintain a central KNOWLEDGE DATABASE accessible to all employees that include all of the research they do. Research reports are cataloged by brand, product category, type of research (focus groups, online surveys, ethnographic research, etc), type of knowledge (brand equity, brand awareness, product insights, consumer shopping habits, path to purchase, consumer lifestyles, generational informations, etc) and other key items. Anyone can pull a report up to read it.
Knowledge is shared; the system works! We know that because several years after conducting a study for a client using this system we received an inquiry from an associate we never worked with, asking for additional analysis on the data. Those of you who know Design Research, know that we never discard our study files. We were able to do the additional analysis quickly and far more cost-effectively than if our client had to start from scratch running a new study. Think of the time and money this saved the company!
Cataloging research reports for widespread employee use isn’t difficult and it’s a great way to leverage the learning produced. Let us go through the projects/reports we’ve done for you and organize the information by keywords to facilitate easy searching: “brand equity”, “cookware”, “shopping habits”, etc. If you want us to share all of the old research we’ve done for you to that end, let us know. We still have it all! 90% of our clients are repeat clients so you may be surprised at how many studies we have conducted for your company!
Call (609-896-1108) or email- Rick@designres.com today for a list of the studies we’ve done for your company and an assessment of what we can do to develop a database of them for you.