Mind Readings: The Worst Kind of Research

In today's episode, let's talk about the worst kind of research. What is the worst kind of research? Is it data that's uh too complicated, too uh advanced? Is it data that you can't process? None of that's true.

The worst kind of research, the research that you should spurn as much as you can, is in curious research. What is in curious research? In curious research is research that you or stakeholder that you're working with commissions to prove a point. So good research asks a question. Hey, what's the relationship between retweets and replies?

What's the relationship between new site visitors and conversions? How much do people care about issue X? Those are good questions that you could commission some research around and say, I want to know the answer to these questions because they're important questions. In curious research, bad research, sounds like this. I need data to prove that my point is correct.

I need data to prove that email marketing is dying. I need research to prove that the conservative point of view is correct on this matter. I need uh a paper that proves X. That is in curious research. It is data.

It is it's actually not even data, it's a point of view that is predetermined for a type of research. And it's really, really dangerous because the average lay person doesn't necessarily know how to distinguish between research that is curious, that is legitimate, and research that is not, research that has been commissioned to prove a point. News headlines often boil things down to according to the latest paper from whatever, according to this, or some scientists say, you know, quotes like that, and that obfuscates the fact that the research in question is not credible, is not uh unbiased, is not properly done. Any good researcher, any researcher worth their salt will say, No, that's not how research works. We're not going to take on that project.

And there are plenty of research companies that do incurious research. Uh, when I was uh very junior in my career, uh my spouse was working uh at a research firm, you know, just up the road from our apartment, and they were a conservative think tank. They only took on incurious research. A politician running for office or a business would go to them and say, we need research that says X. We need research.

Uh I remember one uh particularly egregious case said uh something along the lines of we need research to prove that um a certain population shouldn't be allowed to vote. Right? It's like that's in curious, right? You could you could ask, are there people who um perhaps you know might not be the but might not be competent to exercise their rights? Right?

That's a that's that's a more valid question. But even that's kind of invalid because at least it's written in law, there's a there's no distinction. It's as if you're of age, uh you can you can go vote. This comes up a lot. In curious research comes up a lot, particularly in marketing, particularly when you have stakeholders who are in a hurry or stakeholders who have just a very specific point of view that they need to push that point of view as much as possible.

And our job as marketers, as data-driven folks, as people who want legitimate answers, is to intercept those incurious requests and spin them around and say, Well, what if we did some research to find out whether that point of view is valid or not? You know, if somebody says, Well, you we need research to prove that SaaS software is gonna be uh the the most important uh industry sector in in our industry. What if instead we said, Well, let's let's find out what is the most important sector? It might not be this particular kind of software. Let's find out what is, and that information we could then use to set strategy.

Maybe it turns out that on-premise software is actually the most important type of software in our industry. Wouldn't it be good to know that for the company's sake, for our marketing sake, to say, like, yeah, gosh, um, customers seem to really be all about this on-premise software. Let's make sure that we have an answer and offering something along those lines to to demonstrate that we are in tune with our market. When you counteract in curious research, you are not only providing good information to your yourself, your company, and your stakeholders, you are also potentially opening up new doors for streams of revenue, for customer satisfaction, for all sorts of things. But you have to be willing to tell somebody who's asking for incurious research, hey, that's not how we do things.

Um, that's not how that's done. That's not a best practice. Whatever, whatever language will resonate with that person, you have to be okay with pushing back and saying, let's not go that route. Let's try this instead. So that's the worst kind of research there is.

Make sure that you're not doing it yourself, right? That you're not asking for research or data to prove a preordained point, but are instead looking at what is reality, what is fact, and then helping others to understand the value of reality as well. Thanks for tuning in and talk to you soon. If you like this video, go ahead and hit that subscribe button.