Don’t Let Your Tracker Get Stale: An Interview with Lucy Robin

By The Fulcrum Research Division

Lucy Robin is one of the co-founders of Fulcrum Research Group. We sat down with her to discuss some of the most important topics in market research and how they relate to the approach Fulcrum takes – and will continue to take – in the future.

This is a portion of our interview and has been edited for length and clarity.

Getting Answers vs. Asking Questions

Interviewer: How have you applied your background in psychological science and psychological understanding to market research design and analysis?

Lucy: For me, thinking about survey design, clients often say “I want to ask our respondents how they would design a marketing piece; what would it look like?”

But, that’s not going to work. Respondents are not marketers. You can’t just ask them to act like marketing. Our job in market research is to take what the client wants to learn from their audience – which you can’t always ask directly – and reconstruct that potentially leading question into something respondents can answer.

For example, you can’t just ask, “Doctor, when was the last time you missed a diagnosis of this rare disease?” The physicians want to appear to be good doctors, so they would say, “Never. I am always careful when evaluating my patients.” So, you have to figure out ways to evaluate that without asking directly. That’s the sort of nuts and bolts thing that our psychology background helps assess.

One of the things that has worked particularly well for us is to remind clients to take a step back and say, “What are your brand’s strategic objectives now? What is your brand looking for in the coming year?”

Ensuring ATUs Stay Relevant

Interviewer: Lucy, you mentioned ATUs, and you say for better or worse, you do have a lot of experience with them?

Lucy: For better, for worse, yeah?

Interviewer: Any tips on how you’ve helped companies get the most value out of them?

Lucy: The trick with the ATU is that it’s always there, and it can be at risk of becoming a kind of a dumping ground for stuff that doesn’t fit elsewhere. We put something in for one wave, for example, trying to gauge a recent market development. Then you think, “Great, we put this in for a wave and get an answer.” But then the next wave, someone on the client team may say, “Oh, but we can’t take it out because somebody might ask that question again.” So, once it goes in, it’s really hard to get out.

One of the things that has worked particularly well for us is to remind clients to take a step back and say, “What are your brand’s strategic objectives now? What is your brand looking for in the coming year? What about in the coming five years? We would like to align the ATU with your strategic plan because then we can inform your strategic objectives as opposed to just being a report where we’re adding another dot to a line.” This strategic focus in kickoff and alignment meetings has really helped us ensure we stay on the strategic targets, not just the historic questions. This has really helped us to get a lot of value out of ATUs for our clients.

ATUs can and should be quality pieces of market research. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t be getting as much value out of the 10th wave of the ATU as we are out of an ad hoc piece of research. Your brand evolves, your ATU needs to evolve with it.