To Succeed in the Future, Invest in Standardization Now

To succeed during challenging times, businesses need more research. To enable this, significant investments in technology and adoption of new insights methods, especially standardization, are critical to fulfilling business demand for research overall.

Insights Should Deliver Shareholder Value

Business leaders are tasked with creating shareholder value. For some, this includes trimming operating expenses, optimizing marketing spend, or increasing dividends. However, none of these deliver the critical component to creating value, which is fulfilling customer needs. Repeatedly fulfilling customer needs is the only consistent source of business value; any other source is a temporary salve that will not provide lasting relief.

Staying abreast of customer needs requires managers to understand the customers and act on this information. Dr. Bob Cooper, a leading innovation scholar, writes, “A thorough understanding of customer needs and wants, the competitive situation, and the nature of the market, is an essential component of new product success. This tenet is supported by virtually every study of product success factors.” And how can an organization understand customers without investing in research?

What is striking in the recent GRIT survey is the steady state adoption of technology solutions to deliver insights to research buyers. Frankly, the investment in technology is not enough. While many products are developed utilizing customer feedback and careful research, most products are not fully analyzed or vetted for launch by the time they go to market, resulting in most products, in every industry, failing to achieve their objectives. Technology can create efficiencies and scale that allow more products, services, and messaging to be tested.

Insights Standardization and Shipping Containers

Current insights practices cannot deliver the volume of research needed in a timely manner to make good decisions. We need more standardization and automation to appropriately scale research to meet business demands. To illustrate the impact of standardization, let us look at the shipping container industry.

When shipping containers were introduced in the 1950s, they revolutionized the way goods are transported around the world, dramatically increasing trade volume in the process. Prior to the development of shipping containers, cargo was loaded onto ships in a labor-intensive, time-consuming process that was inefficient and costly.

After their introduction, the use of shipping containers spread quickly. Standardized containers could be loaded and unloaded more quickly and efficiently, reducing costs, and increasing productivity. As their adoption rose, a new industry sprang up around shipping containers. Cranes, forklifts, and more efficient ships were all developed in response to the standardization provided by containers. International shipping increased by about 11 times during the 1960s in a direct causal relationship with the adoption of shipping containers.

The increased efficiency of container shipping led to significant reductions in transportation costs, making it easier and cheaper to transport goods globally. Today, experts estimate that about 90% of the world’s goods are transported via shipping container at some point during their journey.

Invest in Standardization

So, it should be with insights. Businesses urgently need to increase the volume of customer research they are conducting, but trying to scale expensive and laborious custom research projects does not support that. (Note that what I am not writing is that “custom research is bad.” To the contrary, much custom research is necessary and vital.) Just as the introduction of standardization in shipping dramatically increased the volume of shipping, standardization in insights ought to increase the volume of research conducted, thus delivering better customer knowledge and more value to all stakeholders.