The Question is Everything

By Forrest W. Anderson

Do you find yourself wondering what kind of research you need to do to develop a communications program that will be effective? Answering the right questions will take you there.

Albert Einstein said: “The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution.” Stating the question your research needs to answer is the single most important challenge of any research effort. Though this sounds simple, it usually is not. This is particularly true if you are both the PR strategist and the researcher, because it requires identifying and questioning all the assumptions you might make in your plan. Frequently it is difficult to stand outside of your own thinking and objectively observe it. This task can be even more challenging if your boss is the PR strategist and you are the researcher, because coming up with the right questions requires identifying and questioning all of your boss’s assumptions!

Understand Your Business Model
The first step in articulating the problem you must solve, or the question you must answer is to understand the overall business model of your organization. Organizations have missions and operate by gathering and expending resources to achieve that mission. From a communications perspective, these resources come from an organization’s stakeholders. These might include shareholders, bankers, customers, employees, vendors, community representatives, etc. Understanding what, in general, your organization needs from each stakeholder group and what, in turn, your organization provides each stakeholder group will give you a great context for understanding what any given communications program should do.

Turning Communications Assumptions into Questions
Whenever our organizations ask us to communicate, they want that communication to encourage stakeholders to do something. Common actions organizations seek might include:

• Purchase a product
• Contribute to a fund or cause
• Vote for a candidate
• Hold or buy stock
• Lend money for expansion
• Decide to work for or remain employed with the organization
• Support building a new office building or factory in the local community

For each action the organization wants to provoke, our communications model will include:

• A group of people (our target audience)
• A message
• A medium for sending the message to our target audience

This leads to three sets of assumptions that we, as communication researchers, should question:

1. The people we are targeting are the people who are able to act in the way our organization wants them to act and cause the effect our organization seeks.
2. The message we intend to send out will be persuasive to these people.
3. The media we intend to use will reach these people effectively and efficiently.

If your program plan intends to take advantage of external trends or issues, then additional assumptions to question are:

4. The trend or issue we plan to use is important enough to get coverage in the selected medium.
5. The target audience cares about the trend or issue.

These assumptions roll right into questions:

1. Who are the people who can act the way we want them to and create the desired effect for our organization (i.e. who are the people who can buy our product, vote for our candidate, etc.)
2. What message is most persuasive to these people?
3. Which media are the most efficient and effective for communicating with these stakeholders?

And in the case of trends and issues:

4. Which issues are both important to our stakeholders and the media that reach them?

The answers to some of these questions might be obvious. For example, you may know the only people who can purchase your organization’s product are the IT directors at Fortune 500 companies. But do you know how they think about the problem your product solves? Do you know what message most of them will find persuasive? Do you know what messages your competition is sending out? Do you know the most effective and efficient medium for reaching them?

These are the kinds of questions you should ask. Frequently your organization has the answers to the questions above in research it already has done or commissioned. These questions should guide your search through the information available to you. However, if the organization does not have this information, you may wish to look to outside secondary resources or even to commissioning a primary research project. And if the people you talk to about doing the research don’t try to get at these questions, find another research vendor.

# # #

If you think ideas like this might be helpful, please subscribe to my E-Letter at: http://www.forrestwanderson.com/E-LetterSubscriptionForm.html. And if you know some you think would like to read this, please pass it on.

Testing Messages

By Forrest W. Anderson

Do you work with management to develop a set of messages and then develop various media campaigns to get that message out? Do you then follow up with media analysis to determine whether those messages appeared in the coverage you generated?

If so, good for you! You are doing a lot of things right.

But before you send these messages out, do you test them to determine whether your target audiences understand them? Do you find out if your target audiences find them persuasive?

I am astounded by how infrequently we in PR test our messages. Our colleagues in advertising have been doing this for years. They do research to understand what is likely to encourage a customer to use the product they represent, develop a set of messages and then test those messages to see which work best. Sometimes they do this in the context of an entire advertisement.

The most frequent argument I get when I recommend testing messages is:

“We know what the message should be.”

However, I fear what these practitioners really know is what their internal or external client wants the message to be, or what they themselves think it should be. And unless the target audience is PR people working on this business, they almost certainly do not know what the message should be. They only think they know.

To find out whether you have the right message, you should consider the initial messages you develop as hypothetically being the most effective to encourage the target to act in a way that will help the organization achieve its goals.

Then you should test the message.

There are a number of ways to do this. In public relations, it frequently is useful to be able to modify messages as we test them. This enables us to build the strongest ones possible. I have done this in one-on-one interviews as well as focus groups. The one-on-one interviews are probably better, if the message is pretty far along. However, if your message is in an earlier stage of development, focus groups can be very useful for getting ideas and language out on the table.

Many practitioners object that their client doesn’t have money for focus groups and interviews. Perhaps. But do they have money to throw away on a campaign that will not achieve any business goals because the message has no effect or even an undesirable effect on the target?

There are less expensive ways to at least get a reality check on a message. You might limit your interviews to about ten qualified prospects. If even that seems too much, you might approach ten customers and ask them what they think of the message. This second approach may not be the best, because customers already have an experience with the product and this might change how they perceive the message. Still, it is better than nothing.

What you should not do is talk to one or two potential or current customers. One of the challenges with most research is that we try to understand or predict the behavior of a population of people from the responses of a sample of that population. If these one or two people do not represent the entire population, you could get a misleading reading. If, on the other hand, you talk to ten people, and they tend to be saying the same thing, it is a reasonable indication that you are getting a reliable read. If all ten say something different, you need either to do more interviews until you start to get a consensus, or go back to the drawing board to develop another message.

In our day to day work with our clients, whether we work in agencies or as consultants inside organizations, it is very easy to be driven by client requests to produce copy and materials. But as professionals, we owe it to our clients to make sure our efforts will help the organization achieve its business goals.

Testing messages is one way to ensure this is what we are doing.

# # #

Forrest W. Anderson works with organizations that are going through a change in strategic direction (merger, acquisition, building program, new product launch, change program) and that are concerned about what will happen if they mismanage their relationships with their key stakeholders (customers, employees, investors) by sending out wrong or confusing messages. After working with Forrest, they have a clear understanding of what their message strategy should be, but also recommendations on other actions they can take to enhance their relationships with stakeholders.

# # #

If you think ideas like this might be helpful, please subscribe to my E-Letter at: http://www.forrestwanderson.com/E-LetterSubscriptionForm.html. And if you know someone, whom you think would like to read this, please pass it along.