LinkedIn is a funny place. Amongst the click-baity posts detailing the dubious-in-origin story of an unsuspecting candidate saving a cat from up a tree on their way to a job interview and still getting the job, and congratulatory posts about work anniversaries, new roles and promotions, I recently spotted a post praising the return on investment from research contributing to the creation of the Cannes Lion winning “Raise your Arches” campaign for McDonalds.
It was a great campaign, truly. It was relatable, fun and linked back to one of the brand’s most distinctive assets. So let’s be clear – I am not disputing that. It was genuinely borne from insight and activated well.
The area that caused me to raise my own arches was the £45m incremental revenue attributed to that brand campaign, more specifically the research that underpinned it.
Admittedly, the original post did question what proportion of the £45m the research work could take credit for. But what it didn’t do, was flip the idea of ROI on its head.
In my opinion, the ROI from market research should be a little blurry. Consumer insight when injected into a business should feed through the veins of the organisation, stopping off at various internal organs and spending time where needed.
The timeline for this can be within a day, week, month or even decade. The path from data to decision makers isn’t always linear, immediate, or clear. Think of it in terms of the butterfly effect, rather than a cold cash transaction. It often snowballs, with small pieces of information remembered, stored and used later when push comes to shove. Research which has been shelved or disregarded at one moment may be picked up, dusted off and referred to later, like books in a library.
More often than not, the business impact of market research is in swerving disaster, not always steering the boat to more bountiful waters. The cost of NOT doing the research is far greater often than the cost of doing it, or the physical return in sales that a CMO or CCO might hope for as evidence to support their investment.
The benefit from market research lies in the fact that all of the terrible decisions that could be made based on hunches rather than data, never actually see the light of day. All the half-baked concepts, ignored opportunity audiences and marketing missteps become just a figment of our imagination. So we’ll never really get to a concrete figure to prove just how powerful consumer insight can be for an organisation.
It’s a bit like insurance – you don’t always measure its value by what you gain, but by the disasters you avoid. When it works well, you might not even notice the bullet you’ve dodged.
You can’t always put a price on what never happened. But there is always an opportunity cost to what you didn’t do. Perhaps we should work to reframe spend in the market research sector as a long-term investment in doing the right thing, rather than a quick fix cash injection aimed at boosting sales.
Because the true measure of great research isn’t always found in a revenue figure. It’s found in the confidence to act, the clarity to focus and the countless wrong turns you never have to take. And that kind of ROI? Well, it pays dividends for years to come.
After all, in the words of the US founding father Benjamin Franklin: “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”
Frances Revel-Cooper
Head of Custom Insight
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