The paradox of protocols

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Intelligence Applied
The Paradox of Protocols

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The global research programmes that
are delivering best value are not the
most standardised. If you want to drive
consistency across your organisation –
build in more flexibility, not less, and
invest in long term partnerships.

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At TNS, we see many clients embark on programmes
to define a standard research methodology that will
guide research decisions across their organisation.
Great care is taken in scrutinising alternative
approaches and trying to anticipate all of the business
questions that the research should answer. Yet
some of these programmes fail to gain traction or
deliver real benefits, fading away within a year or
two. Paradoxically, a frequent cause of failure is an
elaborate survey design which covers all bases, yet still
fails to address local needs.
In our experience, the programmes which gain
momentum are those with strong but flexible research
design, where attention has been paid to engaging
the organisation. What is it that underpins successful
protocols? Three aspects are critical: shorter smarter
surveys, local engagement and active strategic
leadership from the centre.
Sarah Mitson
Global Business Director
Less is more
The traditional way to earn support for standards is to
try and include questions to keep everyone happy. In
reality though, shorter smarter surveys hold the key to
adding value efficiently.
Short surveys drive up data quality by reducing
irrelevant questions, keeping respondents interested
and fieldwork costs down. This involves considerable
discipline when it comes to survey design: weeding
out questions that we know respondents struggle to
answer accurately, such as those based on memory or
behavioural intent, and not overloading respondents
with tasks such as attributing values to brands that
they don’t consider anyway.
But taking questions out only works if you leave
the right ones in. Smart surveys ask questions that
have been proven to reflect consumer preferences
accurately, and which are relevant to the way
*Protocol: The accepted or established code of procedure
or behaviour in an organization – in research terms,
a standard methodology applied over multiple studies
for a given business question / metric.

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Managing a global
electronics portfolio
How do you manage demanding product life cycles
in a global electronics company? Products need to
get to market fast. Your research needs to anticipate
consumer needs.
A set of disciplined and timely research protocols is
the secret of success for one of our global clients.
The development cycle has four lenses through which
innovations are assessed: brand, communications,
dealers and shoppers. Each lens has a few carefully
designed research interventions at defined stages.
The ability to conduct the research to consistent
standards across the world is critical for the central
Innovation team, which must refine and launch global
products to succeed across diverse markets.
This client owns the protocol, but chooses from a limited
number of global research agencies able to deliver
accurately and to time regardless of market.
consumers make decisions. They are also flexible,
with a strong small core of mandatory questions,
consistently applied everywhere, and modular add-
ons that can be used to incorporate the local or
brand-specific questions that will provide answers to
current business issues.
TNS has been pioneering the use of shorter, smarter
surveys in multiple disciplines. Our core questions are
validated to be predictive, and can be completed in
three minutes or less. We find that strong consistent
core metrics enhance global understanding of local
results, and the brevity of this core delivers concrete
advantages: lower respondent dropout and fieldwork
costs, ability to deliver survey on mobile devices, and
room to add tailored questions.
The efficiency of shorter, smarter surveys provides
global protocols with a great starting point, but
their effectiveness at delivering valuable insight also
depends upon their ability to engage the organisation
as a whole.

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Engaging the whole organisation
The decision to standardise design for a research
area is rarely taken lightly. It is usually part of a wider
marketing initiative to improve strategic alignment
across the international brand portfolio through
common processes and metrics. Despite this, it is
often left solely to the Head of Insights to specify the
brief and screen potential partners. The best change
programmes involve central and local stakeholders,
both in creating the brief, screening potential partners
and at implementation. They focus on the purpose
of the programme as much as the methodology,
and they consider the programme an investment in
creating better marketing tools, not simply a cost
saving exercise. This provides a far better basis for
engaging the organisation behind it.
The importance of involving local business units early
cannot be overstated. Too many central teams assume
that it’s enough to hold a brief webinar to inform
local teams of the new protocol. In practice, we find
that engagement improves with early consultation
and is reinforced by embedding core metrics in the
marketing planning process.
Although it is possible to enforce compliance from
the centre, local teams may find ways around the
rules: programmes that are duplicative or ignored are
wasteful and are a symptom of a programme not
delivering value at a local level. The best way to avoid
this is choosing a strong strategic research partner
with local teams that are experts at delivering at the
grassroots and are capable of building relationships
on the basis of local and global knowledge.
Going global requires protocols that can flex
methodology across diverse markets. Understanding
the rapid changes in the digital landscape is therefore
critical in that it helps inform the most effective
methods and hardware for collecting survey data.
This ultimately requires device-agnostic designs that
can be delivered face-to-face and across different
device platforms (PC, tablet, mobile), to suit the
target respondent.

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Strategic leadership from the centre
The role of the centre should be more than best
practice design or senior sponsor. For a programme
to deliver real value, it needs active management
by a strong Insights team as well as sponsorship
by the CMO and regional executives. It is usual for
the Insights lead to take responsibility for design,
compliance and demonstrating how the programme
supports business decisions. However, two additional
responsibilities are often overlooked: meta-learning
and modernisation.
The purpose of meta-learning is to increase both
the effectiveness and efficiency of the programme.
It is surprising how few organisations invest
management time and attention in ensuring the
organisation understands and acts on the learning
from its global research programmes. This can be
as simple as ‘knowing what we know’ – having
visibility of research done across the world and
sharing it between markets and categories. However
more value can be generated when the protocol’s
consistency allows themes to be captured and
Designing the cars
of the future
The cars of tomorrow are already here: prototypes locked
securely into the R&D cycle of global auto manufacturers.
How do auto clients test they are going to be a
commercial success before they scale up production?
The auto industry has a standard approach called ‘car
clinics’. Prototypes are flown into a specially fitted out
venue and the ‘showroom’ is opened up to carefully
selected potential consumers. This requires meticulous
planning and tight security. From a research perspective,
every ounce of information needs to be extracted from
the event to justify the investment.
An auto client knows that context is everything. A good
meal, the right lighting, can affect consumer response
to the car they are being asked to assess. They therefore
need rigorous protocols, which control every variable.
Clients who specify the carpet colour and wallpaper of
the research environment are not being pedantic – they
are protecting their ability to predict the outcome of
major investments in the next generation of vehicles.

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generalisations made, informing global strategy.
Ultimately, research that is predictive (and so drives
future business decisions) is the gold standard for
meta-learning.
Many successful protocols become the language of
the organisation, a common way of understanding
brand and customer performance. Over two to three
years, such protocols take on a life of their own
and become “the way we do things around here”.
Unchecked, this institutionalisation can itself be a
threat to future effectiveness. With the rapid move
of consumers and customers online, marketing
has had to reinvent itself for a digital world – and
protocols must keep pace with this reinvention. If a
programme has not been reviewed and modernised
within the last few years it is almost certainly out
of date. We recommend a substantial review of
protocols at least every three years to improve
relevance and benefit from the latest research
technologies, with the responsibility for modernising
the programme shared between the central client
and strategic research partner.
Conclusion
The real value of global protocols is not in their
economic savings, but in the common language and
the meta learning’s that can drive quicker decisions
in an organisation as a result of a well-run global
programme. These programmes require smart
design, a determination to build in local flexibility,
and strategic leadership that recognises that metrics
need to drive business decisions throughout the
organisation, not just at the centre. This is not easy,
but changes in marketing, technology and research
methods make it necessary, and we see increasing
numbers of global clients who are now making it
a reality.

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About Connected Life
Intelligence Applied is the home of the latest thinking from TNS, where we discuss the issues impacting
our clients, explore what makes people tick and spotlight how these insights can create opportunities for
business growth.
Please visit www.tnsglobal.com/intelligence-applied for further information.
About TNS
TNS advises clients on specific growth strategies around new market entry, innovation, brand switching and
customer and employee relationships, based on long-established expertise and market-leading solutions. With
a presence in over 80 countries, TNS has more conversations with the world’s consumers than anyone else and
understands individual human behaviours and attitudes across every cultural, economic and political region of
the world.
TNS is part of Kantar, the data investment management division of WPP and one of the world’s largest insight,
information and consultancy groups.
Get in touch
If you would like to talk to us about anything you have read in this report, please get in touch via
enquiries@tnsglobal.com or via Twitter @tns_global
You may be interested in..
Shorter, more predictive surveys >
Sarah Mitson, TNS’s Global Business
Director, helps our global clients optimise
their multi-country insight programmes and
apply innovative research solutions across
their organisations. To find out more about
how TNS can support you in renovating your international
programmes, contact Sarah at sarah.mitson@tnsglobal.com
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The paradox of protocols

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The paradox of protocols