Media Hub

The John Griffiths Show is part of Research Talk - Regular podcasts of interviews with researchers.

Stakeholder Research Goes Social

Episode 2: In which we delve into the extremities of stakeholder research and discover how it’s being pulled towards a more cohesive, organic, inclusive model.

This podcast includes:

• John Griffiths – Planning Above and Beyond
• Kate Tribe – Tribe Research
• Peter Hutton – BrandEnergy Research
• Surinder – Research Talk

 

Listen to the podcast

Stakeholder Research Goes Social

Transcript of the podcast

Surinder: So welcome to the second episode of the John Griffiths show.  Hello John.

John: Hello.

Surinder: How do you feel now, having done sort of one and actually now we’re about to do a second one?

John: I’m kind of excited really, simply because this is a wonderful opportunity for us to get to know and have conversations with people who, quite often we wouldn’t ever get to see these people talking together …

Surinder: Mmm.

John: … or to, and we actually have the opportunity to bring people together, of which today is a really great example because Kate Tribe who claims, as you will hear, that she wants to visit London, well she hasn’t, so the only way of making these sort of conversations happen is through the magic of the Internet and using, you know, a Skype phone call.

Surinder: So this is our virtual panel.  Before we have that conversation, just a few things.  I was going to mention it on the last show but I forgot, Peter Cooper from Cram International QiQ died, unfortunately, from, and he was in his 70’s I think.  I had recorded a podcast with him a couple of years ago and had a chat and my only memory of him is that he was a … given he was kind of a couple of generations ahead of me in terms of the market, I was surprised that he was listening so intently to some of the things I was talking about in terms of all the changes on the web and all that stuff.

John: Yes, I blogged about him simply because my first job as an Advertising Researcher back in the 80’s was with that big bad agency, Allen, Brady & Marsh, to whom Peter Cooper was utterly essential because of the work which you were doing on the likes of Guinness and National Dairy Council and he must have been involved in just about every piece of business.  And his way of working then was considered absolutely radical and this is when qualitative research wasn’t that old and Peter was absolutely out there.  So, you know, having had the privilege of seeing Peter in action debriefing, quelling  Managing Directors with a look and a very creative research thinker and, in his hey day, he was the original research guru.

Surinder: So, our combined condolences to family and friends.  The next thing, the research liberation front which, you know, I was privileged to be part of for a couple of seconds at the very beginning and you keep being part of the team, this year’s plans are for what?

John: This year’s plans, well, we tried to go on being subversive and, just to be clear that we’re not just a bunch of mal-contents, all of us founder members have been on the conference platform; I have the brand of being a rebel but also being on the conference platform this year as well.  I think it was Fiona’s turn last year and Steve’s maybe the year before that.  So we continue to play a reforming role.

This year our theme is ‘Raiders of the Lost Art’ and the idea is to se up an art exhibition of artefacts which come out of research because no one, as far as we’re aware, has ever done that before.  So we are, we’ve been calling for three, for research agencies to provide three different kinds of art for us; one is artefacts which are made by respondents or participants in the course of research, and the second would be something which is made by a researcher – it could be just about anything – and the third is simply something which is part of the research process, and it could be like an animatic or a piece of stimulus that goes in there.

But, between those three, we think there’s enough artistic endeavour, where if you sat it down or you put it on a wall and said, “Look at that, what’s that about?” that we can actually look at these things as being art works, something which tells us about what it means to be human, even if 99% of the time we’re using it for a function purpose which is working towards the debrief, which is ever closer.  The whole point about the RLF is to make a bit of trouble in the nicest possible way and keep research fun.

Surinder: Okay, so on to this show, who are we speaking to today?

John: Today we have, we’re going to be looking at the issue of when you focus more on researching in and around your company.  So we have Peter Hutton, who I first used to work with when he was providing tracking data for me when he was working at Mori’s as a Managing Director, and more recently he’s been running BrandEnergy Research which is looking at the energy which flows in and outside of organisations.  And our second visitor, all the way from Australia, time shifted neatly by I think 11 hours, is the very luckily named Kate Tribe who runs Tribe Research, which funnily enough is very tribal in it’s thinking.  So, she’s got a whole group of web tools, which I think she’ll explain about later, about how one evaluates the tribe, but what I found fascinating about Kate’s approach is the way in which she looks at research as being something organic which starts within the company and flows right out, not only to its customers but also to other stakeholders, including suppliers, so I’m very excited that we’ve managed to bring the two of them together to talk with us today.

Surinder: So, welcome Kate, welcome Peter.

Peter: Hello.

Kate: Hello.

John: Okay, and there she is right over in Australia.  What time is it at the moment, Kate?

Kate: It’s currently 8.12pm.

John: Wow, there you go.  So, conference call land and all that stuff.  So thanks for being with us.  The reason for talking to Peter and Kate this morning is because of the focus of their businesses and what they’re doing in research companies that they’re running.  Could you very briefly, Peter, explain where, what BrandEnergy is about and that concept around your business?

Peter: BrandEnergy was something I kind of, which sort of came to me in one of those sort of ‘Eureka’ moments I suppose in about 2002/2003 although, to be honest, it had probably evolved over quite a number of years before then.

I had been working in sort of a traditional, fairly large then, market research agency and ended up being responsible for corporate reputation, marketing, customer satisfaction and employee research, under one umbrella, and what struck me is that, first of all, I couldn’t actually get those four different areas to join up.  Secondly, the way I read, the way business, high level, if you like, business thinking, what was business and, you know, how businesses create value and what the whole value creation process is about and so on, but thinking had become much more holistic and integrated and, if you like, joined up.  And it’s an argument which I sort of put down in a 2006 SMR paper but it just seemed to me that, what we’ve got in market research still, is techniques in each of those areas that feed a particular business function but don’t feed the business as a whole.

So I evolved this idea of BrandEnergy and the idea is that an organisation is actually not just trying to build relationships, if you like, with each of it’s stakeholders, but what it’s trying to do is to build and maintain an energy system, a system of, where the stakeholders, internal and external stakeholders, are all part of the same system, and what research should be doing is not, if you like, applying template, standardised questionnaires to each stakeholder separately but it should be dipping into the different parts of the system and listening to what people are saying about it and saying about the brand, saying about the organisation, saying about the experience.  And so the brand bit, if you like, is about the purpose and the meaning, and the energy is about people doing things because that is really what creating value in the, you know, organisations and society are about; it’s about people interacting and doing things in a purposeful kind of way, and what organisations are, in order to exist and survive, they’ve got to maintain this energy system and through a network of relationships with stakeholders.

John: Okay, turning to Kate now, tell me about Tribe Research and if there’s any, what the kind of likenesses and unlikenesses are with what you’re doing?

Kate: I suppose the only unlikeness is I didn’t have a ‘Eureka’ moment, which I’m often really sad about in these kind of conversations.  But I actually was born with the name Tribe and …

John: Well, I was going to come on that.  Lucky or, you know, coincidence or what?  Go on.

Kate: … and I’ve had the bizarre path that I’ve never worked full time for any one organisation other than myself.  When I first came out of Uni I did a few different part time and casual roles but Tribe Research started fairly much about the same time as my career started and, when I was starting to look at the path that I was going to take, I started off doing health research because that was where my core education was, but health research, while fascinating on one level, can be rather depressing on another level.  It also had a lot of familiarity or similarities with a lot of what small businesses need to do really.  And so, having never worked for a big organisation, I kind of thought about the fact that they’re actually quite well serviced by a lot of market research organisations, but who aren’t well serviced?  The groups that are trying to get to know their existing stakeholders but don’t know how to do it and don’t have a clear path to it and also don’t have a lot of resources.

John: Mmm hmm.

Kate: And so my path was taken more from saying, “You’ve actually already got a whole lot of people that already have some relationship with you.  They’re now commonly known as your tribe,” more thanks to Seth Godin than me really, “and they have perspectives on what you’re doing really well and what you could improve and, by simply asking them what they think you do really well and what they think you could improve, you’ve got an amazing area of different things that you can put in your marketing and you can do business planning on.”  You don’t always want to adapt and adopt every single idea that you get, but you can get an amazing array of ideas purely from people who are just using and interacting with you already.  And if they hear you are listening to them, they will then talk about the fact that you listen and you adapt and that, in itself, is going to increase the size of your tribe and people who are interacting with you, regardless of whether it’s in a health or a small business area.

John: Okay.

Kate: That’s kind of the space that I come from.

John: Can I just chat with both of you, because there’s this kind of perception that kind of classic marketing has to look at the category, has to look at all the brands together, has to look at the competitors and stuff, is that something where you’ve been put under pressure for almost walking away for from that or how do you address it in the work that you do, Peter?

Peter: To some extent, I think the way in which people perceive things are relative, aren’t they?  I mean they kind of, you know, they like one thing about one particular brand or product and don’t like something else, and so I think you’ve kind of got to at least have sort of comparative dimensions and, you know, comparing and contrasting one brand with another, so I don’t think you can kind of or you should … it’s all part of the whole area of meaning, isn’t it, of how you understand and relate to a particular brand is coloured in by how you relate to other brands, and I think having that comparative perspective is important.

But, on the other hand, it’s also not that straight forward.  You know, I remember someone pointing out to me that actually, you know, if you’re buying a gift, a fountain pen is in the same category as a cigarette lighter, for example, and so, and even sort of snacks, are chocolate bars in the same category as packets of crisps and so on?  I mean, you know, this whole area of what a category actually is is very, very fuzzy indeed.

John: So it is artificial.  Kate?

Kate: Yeah, I definitely agree that, I think the lines of a category is blurring and I think you notice that even more in the spaces in which I work where there is a lot of that blue ocean kind of thinking.  And so it’s not quite so easy to say, “How do you compare with your competitors?” ‘cause often they don’t directly know who their competitors are.

John: Right.

Kate: The competitor could be them doing it in-house, choosing to do it externally or any one of those different options, and I think that really makes it very difficult to ask questions within a category.

Peter: The whole pressure it seems, for me, in that area in research is to come up with a sort of standardised approach which you can sort of say, “Well this is the, you know, X and Y company standardised approach,” and you build up, you know, if you can build up norms and charge clients’ premiums up and, because you have these sort of standard questions which you then apply to whatever the market is, to, you know, to try and underpin the validity, if you like, and the integrity of your particular approach and then you end up with a whole series of questions and then you come up with these extraordinarily fabricated theories of how the consumer’s mind works and how the market works and how brands work, which have nothing really to do with the way it actually works but it has everything to do with your trying to justify these set of, you know, often fairly unrelated sort of standard questions that you’ve come up with.  And I think that really is, over the years, it sort of, it means that you have these different kind of areas of research that have evolved and their kind of defined by the big agencies’ …

John: Yep.

Peter: … standard questions, which are, with rather thin theoretical underpinning, which really have taken you away from the reality of how the markets worked and create a kind of pseudo reality which …

John: Yep.

Peter: … clients often end up paying a premium for.

John: So that’s kind of, is research almost talking to itself for its own sake?

Peter: Absolutely, yeah.

Surinder: There are certain metrics that do go across different brands, whatever the category, so there are certain things you want to capture that are relevant, so awareness and …

Peter: Yes, there are.  They’re also really quite controversial in the way they’re often applied and even, you know, the kind of wording that you use and the context you put them in.  And, you know, there are big question marks often about, you know, how comparable they really are.

John: And then, if I was to ask a challenging question which is to say, “If I gave you a choice of two metrics, one which measures something real but which never moved, and one which wasn’t very real but which moved all the time, which would you go for?”  And, in this kind of fantasy world of research, we would go for the volatile one every time.  Why?  Because it’s there to fulfil, in effect, an anthropological function, which is making businesses feel like they’re doing something.

Surinder: Yeah.

Peter: That’s a good point.

John: Sorry.  That’s cynical this early in the morning or late in the day, Kate, but, you know, that’s the danger, that it talks to itself.  Almost an additional question, which really came out of the way Kate introduced herself, and that’s really, she almost described, okay, that you can almost start off just helping small businesses.

There is quite a difference between what I would call the sort of, the business of doing research in a very kind of separate and quite academic, or no, intellectual way, and helping companies where the barrier between getting market data or market information and simply providing support, in other words, the gap between market research and marketing, seems to be quite narrow in the way you talked about it, is that fair?

Kate: Oh yeah, I would say it’s quite narrow in the sense that I think a lot of small businesses just don’t do that routine basic conversation information path, which market research can do, and I don’t mean by creating as marketing ‘cause I know it’s a very clear, defined line, but I think that by getting feedback from your existing stakeholders who are interacting with your business and saying, you know, “What did you love about us?” so we can do a basic testimonial or even put it in rating so you can build it into your own metrics, and I think that if small businesses start doing those kind of things routinely when they are really small and it becomes part of their system of how they run their annual calendar, then, as they grow, it’s already working within their business.

John: Okay.

Kate: And that’s helping them grow; that’s … by seeing both getting the ideas and getting the feedback on what they’re doing well, those simple processes can help them grow.

Surinder: And your background, Kate, is, were you a researcher before you started Tribe Research?

Kate: I was a university student.

Surinder: So you’ve had no classical research training?

Kate: No, other than … so I did a Bachelor of Science and Applied Economic Geography and I did Honours in Demographics, basically.

Surinder: Okay.

Kate: And then I did a Masters of Health Administration, so it was designing surveys and it was getting to know people who had arthritis, through certain surgeons …

Surinder: So, Kate’s learnt basically on the job, effectively.  She’s taught herself.

John: Absolutely.  Peter, you were saying?

Peter: And I think that’s an interesting point, what Surinder says, is what, I think it’s quite sort of important to recognise in a sense what Kate was saying, that actually at the end of the day what we’re about is listening, and what I suppose market research and the sort of classic ways in which it has evolved is a kind of systematic listening, and we’ve used certain tools to do that.  But I think every often these tools are sort of passed on from one generation to another, totally without questioning, and …

Surinder: Yeah.

Peter: … and they can take on a life of their own and they can actually be really quite bad questions but, because they come from a big agency and there’s lots of data behind them, they’re treated with almost a sort of God-like status in …

Surinder: Yeah.

Peter: … in the research world.

John: I want to come back to this, again, this distinction between marketing and market research and it seems to me that what you are … are you simply, to use your phrase, listening to what people are doing or, to what extent, is your actual activity of measuring it or researching it contributing to the energy which is going on?

Peter: Well, I think it probably is but I suppose that’s true in any kind of social science research intervention.

John: No, I just wasn’t sure about that because it just seems that we were starting to trespass into this area which clients are getting very excited about and moving all their budgets into social media research and all the rest of it.

Peter: Right.

John: Not just social media activity, and where it’s a lot less clear as to whether what you’re trying to do is to track what’s going on or to, to actually try to influence or create what’s going on.

Peter: Research, rather than being the, I suppose, the traditional, if you like, the classic market research of 20 or 30 years ago, was that you had this sort of air of Scientists in white coats who were some way removed and a bit apart from the subject that they’re researching, you know, sort of more of a classic scientifically, which was never actually fully realistic anyway because in social sciences you can’t be totally separated from the thing you’re observing and researching.  But I think even in the social media you’ve now got all these interactions going on and then, if you then try and graft on to that some kind of market research, it just seems to me it’s a different kind of market research, this sort of classic kind of research.  There are a lot more dangers in that approach but, on the other hand as you say, I think a lot of its done in a very fuzzy area of, actually we’re not really that interested in what they have to say anyway; we’re just interested in getting them to talk about the subjects, you know, our brand and what it can do and, you know, so it sort of goes buzzing around the Internet.

John: Kate, what do you think about the whole social media thing?  Is that related to what you do?

Kate: We haven’t used it as, in terms of getting feedback for our clients at all yet.  I enjoy social media for myself; I think it’s an interesting place to pose questions or to get ideas, particularly in the survey design process, but I think there’s still a lot of background method, logical things that we have to work through and work out before I want to start using it.

John: Can I ask about this, kind of the insider and outsider views, ‘cause it sounds as if both of you are using methodologies with employees as well as with external, if I can call them that, customers, prospects and so on.

Can you just talk about if there’s any differences or ways in which you need to treat employees differently?

Peter: They are very different.  I mean one of the worst examples, I mean there are, you know, I’ve seen a number of people who have done stakeholder surveys and some particularly bad examples where they say, “Oh, you know, there’s a great opportunity, we just ask the same questions of customers and opinion leaders and employees and we stick them all on a PowerPoint sheet and we look at the comparisons,” which is totally and utterly the wrong way of doing it because the whole nature of the relationship that you have with each one of these is quite different and therefore the questions you’re asking actually have a different meaning to employees who are intimately involved in and part of the organisation to, you know, customers and potential customers out there who just see it from a different perspective.

Kate: I think it’s useful to sort of look at the outside views and then evaluate it differently to the internal views but much more on a perception of the business and how health it is rather than particular brands and particularly looking at, within staff, segmenting out where they are in the organisation and what perspective they have as far as how high up they are in the organisation – I think that creates really different views.  We don’t do a lot of competing the inside and the outside views to each other though.  I think that can get quite tricky.

John: Yeah, okay.  To what extent is, are the approaches you’re taking, both of you, dealing almost with the story telling in terms of where is the company going?  I mean Peter’s used the word ‘energy’ and you use this very emotive concept of ‘tribe’ which happens to be your own name as well, Kate, but, you know, how does the story of the company get told and how do you research that?

Peter: I’m misquoting this, but branding is all about creating a story that people want to be part of and I think that’s sort of spot on really.  And employees want to be part of the story, you know, they want to sort of feel that they’ve come into an organisation which has a bit of a history or a heritage or, if it’s a brand new organisation, it’s got a future and it stands for things which they actually believe in.

John: Okay, can I turn back to Kate just to ask her about this matter of story telling?

Kate: We don’t do a lot of story telling in the sense of staff.  In the social sector area, we do quite a lot of staff story telling surveys, but in the small business sector I actually do a lot of story telling of how I engage my staff more than anything else, rather than actually researching …

John: Right.

Kate: … how other small businesses can do it.  And one of the reasons behind that is that most SME’s don’t have a large staff base in which they can then do something with.

John: Yep.

Kate: And a lot of what I talk to them about is actually engaging the views of everyone.

If you’ve got a small team, you need all of them on board and setting those metrics doesn’t work with them either but, by engaging them in every part of your business, then, and setting the targets of the business, allows them to get emotionally involved in where the business is going.  So you, as an owner, isn’t the only person that’s, that’s driving it somewhere.

Surinder: How do you engage someone, do you actually give them a huge carrot, is there a stick involved?

John: Beating the staff now (23:31)?

Kate: I use as many metaphors as possible.  I actually close my business down one day every six months and we go offsite and I look at different themes.  Sometimes I base a, we call it a planning expedition, but it’s more because we base the branding of our business on research and expedition into unknown space, and it nicely fits with tribes as well.  We go offsite, we sometimes base it on a book; everyone has the opportunity to contribute to a session but we lay everything down; we do SWATS on areas of our business, we celebrate the highs, we do all those things throughout the day and, at the end of the day, we work out a whole lot of goals and targets and everyone gets set them.

So my staff set goals for me, which I then have to keep, and at the next planning day, I’m then just as accountable as them at the next planning day.  That forces everyone to be able to … like I can’t then sit there and say, “Oh well, you know, I didn’t have to meet mine but you have to meet yours.”  Everyone meets them, or should be meeting them, and is aiming and striving towards meeting them, but everyone’s also understanding what is driving those goals as well.  It’s not like I’ve sat there and said, you know, “You have to do X, Y and Z KPI’s to be able to get a pay rise.”  We can then say, “Okay, for the business to get to where we’ve all decided we want it to be, we need to put aside the time to do these things and we need to reach these different targets and do these different things.”

John: That sounds pretty engaging.  I’d be engaged.

Kate: So, when my first full time Project Manager left, she actually said, “Can we start up a past staff club where we have the opportunity to come back to your planning days?” And she’s since taken annual leave from her next job after she left me and come back to my planning days.

Surinder: Ohh.

Kate: Which is fantastic because I can then have a planning day with current staff and ex staff and we can all sit in the same room and she has much more background on, a longer history of background, but she also has opportunities from her new role.  Obviously, if she works for the competitor it’s a bit difficult but she went working into the health area, so isn’t working with a competitor at all.

John: This is legendary to me ‘cause you’ve actually got a living pre-tracking study.  You bring your pre-measures with you, how cool is that?

Kate: Yeah, no we do other random things like that.  We have a picnic every year and then I have ex staff who come to the picnic; I give out awards to every leaving staff member that gives what their lasting mark on Tribe Research was.

John: Mmm hmm.

Kate: So current staff then see what a leaving staff member gets as a, as their lasting mark on the business and so that then drives them to want to have a lasting mark on the business.

John: This is interesting though because all these examples you’re giving, and you’re giving them obviously from your company, they to me indicate a way of looking at research which is kind of organic and comes from inside the client company, in other words, you’re not simply handing it to an intermediary research agency to say, “Go away and set up measures for me and tell me what’s happening,” but very much a way in which this takes us right to the business decision support.  How does someone who’s running a business, how do they feel that the business is going somewhere, how is it helping them and how is, you know, how do you build a kind of nervous system for a management team so they know everything that’s happening in a very natural way which is not either embarrassing or forcing their staff or their customers to lie or to kind of speak equivocally – whatever?  It’s a very different way of thinking and maybe part of the difficulty is what one would call outsourced research, as in done by third parties for companies, versus helping people with their own kind of corporate nervous system, if that makes sense.  Have you got a comment on that?

Kate: And I think that’s a really growing role.  I think that’s … and I mean one of the tools that we have in the tribal tool kit, which is our new online survey platform, has a tool called ‘cloud maker’ and it has a survey tool in there where you can simply ask a very simple question like, “When you think of our brand, what are the first three words that come to mind?” and I can send that out to my team before a planning day and I can say, “When you’re looking back over the last six months, what are the first three words that come to mind?” and we’ll start our planning day off with that.  And it’s completely anonymous; we can then put it up on the screen and it’s a conversation starter for us to work with and it gives something very easy and it’s words that you can, in a way, track over time because you can say, “At this time last year these were the words we had up.  This time this year these are the words we have up, and we can see how they’ve changed or they’ve stayed the same.  If they’ve got more positive, if they’ve got negative, what are we going to do about it?  And what can we, what can you as a business owner do to take the words you don’t want there – out?”

John: Absolutely, and you get the bad words as well as the good words.  That’s the other thing which is important.

Kate: Yes, that’s right.

Surinder: Just a question for you, Peter, I mean, hearing all of this, you know, we know Richard Branson famously tries to keep his organisation fairly flat, small teams, and I think that’s kind of to give everyone a sense of ownership of their patch and inject this entrepreneurial zeal, and Google’s got the same sort of idea – a small team so that there’s a lot of autonomy.

I mean, just hearing what Kate’s been talking about and how passionate she is about her areas, do you think there’s something that large companies can learn from the way that they do these studies and the way they actually put some of the results into practice?

Peter: Yes, and it’s interesting, I mean the point that John was making, that outsourcing your employee surveys to any third party rather than perhaps doing it yourself, I mean, you know, the reason they do outsource it is because they want an independent view and so on and so forth and also they’re not necessarily very good at actually designing the right kind of questions.  A good survey should, when you sort of come back and say, “Well your staff are actually saying this,” you probably should be telling them a lot of things which they kind of already know or thought were possibly the case.  I mean, if it’s something, “Oh God, I wouldn’t have thought of that in a thousand years,” it probably means that you’ve got a rather fabricated measure which doesn’t really mean very much in that particular organisation, so you’ve got to be a bit wary of it.

John: So, both of you, do you perceive that what you’re doing is, how can I put it, counter-cultural to research, as a first question?  The second thing is do you think that research generally, research practice, is heading in your direction?
Peter: I don’t think what I’m doing is counter-cultural ‘cause I think actually good researchers are always very self-questioning.  I’m sorry, what was the other question, is research going in this direction?

John: Yeah, that’s right.

Peter: I think to some extent it is.  I mean, when you look at how research has evolved over the 30 plus years I’ve been involved in it, I mean it has just got bigger and bigger and bigger and it’s sort of brought in sort of new techniques, particularly with new technology and so on.  At the end of the day, I think it’s still the same in as far as it’s actually all about asking questions of different audiences and interpreting the results.  On the other hand, it’s also very different because the techniques are different; I think it’s becoming fuzzier and fuzzier and less sort of standardised in its approach and, you know, its being challenged all the way and there are lots of debates like this one going on the whole time.  Perhaps it’s moving broadly in the, kind of more integrated sort of direction, but I think it’s also moving in other directions as well.

John: Kate, what do you think?

Kate: I think research is definitely going through a current cultural shift.  Not really worked in large market research firms, I think I’ve always had a bit of a different approach and I think I like a bit of both, like I like some of the process and I like always questioning the change and always looking at doing something differently, and I think it’s always hard to look at the whole sector because you have a tendency to surround yourself with those who have a bit of a similar approach in thinking.  So I seem to be meeting more and more people like that; I don’t know if it’s just ‘cause I’m ferreting them out or if it’s because there are actually more and more who are thinking in a different way.  That was a bit of a vague answer but …

John: No, I mean it’s just the way you describe what you do, it feels like it, well it also has the ‘tribe’ word attached to it, but it feels like a bit of a movement.

I mean, if you’ve got former employees wanting to come back and spend a day, presumably not just talking about their new job but about the old job when they worked with you, that seems to be more than simply just research – that is kind of hearts and minds – so I’m just kind of interested as to whether this approach of looking across the various stakeholders, of looking at a business as a kind of living, organic thing, is something which research is more likely to embrace now than it used to.

Kate: I think also that …

John: That’s a leading question isn’t it?

Kate: Yeah, a bit.  But it’s okay, I know how to dodge them.  I think the organic component is also an advent of being a small to medium business owner and I think society seems to be moving more towards a greater proportion of having small to medium businesses like that.

John: Yep.

Kate: So I think that is becoming more popular.  And also that, that much more engaging connection with your previous boss rather than saying, “It was just a job in a path that I’m taking,” and also I think it’s the owner accepting that.  Like, I never expected, when I hired my first staff and they were, you know, end Uni, first job out, that they were going to stay with me for ten years.

John: Mmm.

Kate: I expected that they were going to come, get a bit of experience, think about some things, maybe go on a long trip overseas, come back, do something different and, by creating a space where they could always come back and it was always comfortable and, you know, I wasn’t going to be cut and dry about it, it allowed a much more ongoing relationship with some really interesting people.  I mean, they now refer work to us and they’re kind of a long term marketing strategy in that way.

John: Yep.

Kate: And I gain and learn just as much as they gain and learn, so that’s why it is that organic growing thing.  But I don’t, I think there are more and more businesses around like that, maybe just in Sydney.  No, I don’t think so.

John: No I agree.  I mean, I think that’s one of those interesting things, which is why I think this concept of starting with the organisation but not being so cut and dried about it, I think that’s why, to me, why it’s so interesting, because it seems to me that companies, until relatively recently, have defined themselves either by their building, as in who walks in and out, you know, at the start and end of the day, or as a kind of incorporation or being a Limited company and, you know, that’s who the boundaries of the organisation are.

And I still remember working with a volunteer charity for six or seven weeks, researching the volunteers, and being absolutely shocked when, only accidentally, I discovered a document that they’d sent me to kind of check for them, where they described the volunteers as being an external audience.

You know, it was a tracking study in their external audience and the volunteers were external, and I suddenly understood why the volunteers were so angry, because they thought they’d joined and then discovered that they weren’t allowed to join.  And those sorts of issues are very, well maybe it’s just me, are very difficult to spot sometimes because, where an organisation defines where it is, is very obvious to those that are inside the organisation, but not always that obvious to people outside.

So, if those boundaries are getting weaker, I think that’s kind of a very interesting idea and it’s a real challenge for research, particularly as, if your research is to say, “Well this is employee research,” or “This is customer research,” it implies the company is a certain kind of entity, and it just seems to me that, if those kind of bonds are weakening and becoming much more intangible, then we need different kinds of research which let us explore that.

Kate: I think also, which is probably why I found it difficult before to answer the staff versus, you know, stakeholders question, I also think it’s important to ask your suppliers what their views are.

John: Yep.

Kate: In a similar sort of way, if you’re having an ongoing trading and engagement with them, then you need to find out how they think you could improve and …

John: Yep.

Kate: … and what they think you’re great at because it’s going to make it easier for you when you’re just talking to a new supplier for you to be able to say, “Okay, other suppliers that we’ve worked with think these things about us and we know where we’d get a better relationship going with you if we improve these things internally.”

John: Absolutely, which brings us …

Kate: It works on a level.

John: … neatly to this stakeholder thing.  Now, I have to ask you ‘cause we must have just about used all of our time now, can I have a last question, have either of you or both of you seen Avatar?

Peter: Yeah.

Kate: I must be the only person in the world that hasn’t, but yes I haven’t seen it.

John: To me it was a very interesting movie about research, potentially, because the idea is that you’ve got a bunch of mercenaries setting up a company on a remote planet and trying to take the minerals from under the noses of a tribe, as it happens, and to do it they send Anthropologists, aka market researchers, to get alongside them and understand them by taking on the bodily forms of the people who are there.

Peter: Yep.

 

John: Throughout the whole movie, there’s this sort of interplay between to what extent research, if I can call it that, is invasive and against the interests of those who are on the receiving end of it, and then the other point is that of course he falls in love with the beautiful daughter of the … it’s Pocahontas basically.  He falls in love with the beautiful daughter of the Chief and so on and then he wants to be a member of the tribe himself and then he’s accused of being a traitor to his own people and so on and so forth.  So you also get this idea of whether it’s possible to become an insider and whether you can belong or not.

So it is actually, to me, a very interesting movie about research and a lot of the themes which researchers kind of play with but are actually kind of uncomfortable about.

Peter: You’ve made me think of research for the tobacco industry there.  You know, you sort of use researchers to try and see how you can get people to take more of a drug which is going to kill them and give them extreme, excruciating pain in their last years.

I think maybe there’s, I suppose, to some extent, one has to be totally objective and stand back in research but, if you’re doing things where you actually, you know, the ultimate objective is not necessarily good for the, you know, the person your research is for.

John: The people concerned, absolutely.

Peter: Yeah.

John: Kate, you haven’t seen the film but, given that it’s based on, I suppose, research as an invasive procedure, and thinking about your own company, can you imagine any circumstances under which you would hire a researcher to research your customers and staff?

Kate: Yes I would because, if you’ve got a small team of current staff, then …

John: Yep.

Kate: … whether you do it in-house or you do it externally, then it … you’re going to be able to work out who the people are doing it.

John: Yep.

Kate: Who the participants are, especially by the open responses.  But I think it’s (38:09) of staff where people can become anonymous, then I think it’s actually very valuable to do it externally.

John: Okay.  I was just checking that because it just seemed to me that your, the system you describe is, and you describe it very powerfully, is so much a way of the, in that sense, the tribe running itself, I was kind of interested to what extent one needs interlopers to kind of, to keep it straight, so to speak.

Kate: There’s a size barrier in which people start having their own internal dynamics which, if you’re heading up that team, you can’t observe and manage quite as well.

It’s really easy to do when your team is small but, as soon as you start getting a larger team, I think having an external person coming in and doing some research to show some broad trends, then you can break it down and you can manage that within something like a planning day.

Peter: I was kind of thinking, when I used to work for a large company and we’d been going for quite a number of years when we decided to do our own employee survey on ourselves, so we designed the questionnaire as it were but we got an independent data processing house to then collate the results so that it remained anonymous, and it was actually an extremely therapeutic thing to do.

In fact, it was a real water shed in the evolution of the company ‘cause I think we … it was one of those companies that had grown very rapidly and it was still thinking like a small company when it had actually grown into a medium size company – an enormous amount of stress and tears and people leaving and all sorts of things.

And I think we then, I think, set up a number of work groups from within the staff to address different areas of issues, and I think collectively they came up with something like 101 recommendations and about 98 of them were implemented.  And it was really an extremely important thing and I think it was the survey, actually doing that survey, and I think what the survey did was to make the issues explicit.

John: It’s encouraging that research companies would be willing to take their own medicine, ‘cause certainly suggesting to, you know – my background is working in ad agencies – suggesting that we research our clients normally produces pandemonium as in I think we all know what they think, so we don’t have to ask that, all that kind of stuff.  That seems to be the emotional familiar response.

But can I just say a big thank you to Peter Hutton and to Kate Tribe for joining us today and talking as they have, I think, quite frankly this morning.  Thanks very much.

Peter: Thank you.

Kate: Thank you.

Surinder: So Kate, if people want to get in touch with you …?

Kate: I do knowyourtribe.com.au [ update - head to www.triberesearch.com.au ]

Surinder: And you’re on Twitter as Kate Tribe?

Kate: Yeah, I’m @katetribe, @TribeResearch and @TribalToolKit, but I use at @katetribe the most.

But, if they don’t like cricket, they probably don’t want to follow me.

Surinder: Okay, and Peter?

Peter: BrandEnergyresearch.com.

Surinder: And people can find out about your book via that as well?

Peter: Yep.

Surinder: Wonderful.

John: And there’s some papers there which, and on that site now also.

Kate: And our software’s mentioned on knowyourtribe.

John: Yes, so the tool kit, I mean, just to make it clear, do you want to say, Kate, about well the actual tool kit and what’s there?

Kate: The software is called Tribal Tool Kit and the whole thinking behind it is that it’s a visual, a way to visualise data so that people can easily absorb it, and there’s currently two tools; one’s called Cloud Maker that makes word clouds from any sort of data you want to input, and the other one is called Action Map and it is a way of looking at both importance and satisfaction on a scale for anything you want to ask about, any aspects you want to ask about.

John: Fantastic.  Okay.

Kate: Is that a nice little summary?

Surinder: Wonderful.  Okay.

John: It’s a very neat summary.  Good.

Surinder: So, thanks to Kate, thanks to Peter.  So, John, if people want to get in touch with you …?

John: Planningaboveandbeyond.com.  But you can also track me down on my blog, which is Further and Faster.  You can search for that on Google and find it, but also on Twitter you can find me on @JohnGriffiths7.

Surinder: And I’m at @MRNews on Twitter; that’s the, all the research thoughts that I have as well as, you know, a feed of micro research news from the various sources, @Surinder, S-U-R-I-N-D-E-R, on Twitter for my own personal stuff, which tends to be non-research, and researchtalk.co.uk for this podcast and other stuff.  So, anyway, goodbye for me.

John: And it’s goodbye from John Griffiths also.

End of Interview. Thanks to The Transcription People for transcribing the interview

Visit the Research Talk website for other interviews and research news.