Building Your Fame Muscle: A Workout for Qualitative Researchers

After thirty years working in B2B communications, the workout I most commonly perform with clients is helping them build their fame muscle, assisting them in developing the power to be famous. At the QRCA’s virtual summit in January, I passed on my expertise in this area to a group of qualitative researchers. During my session, I shared my learnings to help them improve their communications.

So, before we get into the how we need to first understand the why. Why does building our fame muscles help us? Well, by working our fame muscle, we can make a difference in our organisations and ensure the insights we share have impact and are acted on. We can stand out as a team, or as a company, so more people know who we are, what we do, and why. Ultimately, however, we need to use our fame muscles to tell our stories. If telling stories is what we do in insights, we must practice our fame workout to get those stories out there.

In my QRCA session, I covered three areas that I have learned from that have helped me hone my fame muscle – and that you can apply in your work.

1. Learning from the media

There are two key qualities you need to succeed with journalists and the media: empathy and storytelling.

First off, empathy – something qual researchers excel at, in terms of understanding their research participants. The best communicators are the best listeners. However, what has always struck me as being odd is how we research our client’s audience through a microscope, but don’t bother to understand our own audience. In good communication, knowing your audience is key. Who will be looking at these insights? Who are our clients and stakeholders? Only by doing our own research into their challenges and needs can we deliver the right communication to them.

Now we need to understand what our audience wants. So, ask yourself, what does a journalist want? The answer: A story. The next big scoop. And that’s the purpose of qualitative research, too. To tell a story. But there is a difference between researchers and journalists in how they tell stories. Journalists tend to open with the conclusion, which often goes right into the headline as a hook. Then comes the context which supports the conclusions, and to end the story, they give you the supporting data. We can learn from this in how we structure our research stories.

2. Learning from branding

The second area I shared my learning from was in branding. If marketing is what you say to consumers, branding is what consumers say about you. There are four main areas that we apply in branding that we can learn from in our insight communication: To be distinctive, clear, consistent, and authentic. Being distinctive means you stand out, you define and articulate exactly who you are and what makes you special. When I say clear, I simply mean that. No mixed messaging: One simple snappy strapline is all we need. Think: Just do it. To be consistent, use the same language, imagery, and designs when communicating both internally and externally. Don’t confuse people with different logos, fonts, or messaging. Keep it the same. And finally, be authentic – add some personality and make it yours!

3. Learning from digital marketing

The third area I think we can learn from to hone our fame muscle is digital marketing. The two lessons I focused on here are to use a call to action wherever possible and how important brevity is.

Whenever you communicate digitally, people need to know why they are receiving this information and what to do with it. When you send out a report, people need to know why they are receiving it and what they will be doing next – you should include a call to action every time you communicate with someone. Digital copy should also stay short. Based on some of our research with clients, we recommend that titles are between 3-8 words long, emails and opening text should be about 25-40 words – make sure you aren’t telling any more than 3-5 stories and that videos are no longer than three minutes long.

Wrapping up

Now remember, journalists taught us to be empathetic and focused; branding taught us to be clear, distinct, consistent, and authentic; and digital marketing taught us to embrace brevity and understand the importance of calls to action. With this workout, your fame muscle should already be growing. Practice these learnings and you will build your insights communications to new heights (or weights!).