Your analytics are not audience research
Let’s say I’m going to a swanky party and I call you up to have a conversation about what I should wear. I might:
Show you one outfit and ask “do you like this?”
Show you two outfits and ask “should I wear this one or this one?”
Show you my whole wardrobe and ask “what from here should I wear?”
Abandon the wardrobe altogether and just get your opinion irrespective of what you know I have available.
The outcome of each of those different scenarios is going to be totally different. In scenarios 1 and 2 I’m not really giving you much scope to influence any great change, or to really allow for the full breadth of your input or opinion. It removes you and your personality from the process, and wouldn’t tell me anything about you and your tastes at all. It just tells me whether you think mine are okay.
In scenario 3 I allow a little more of you to influence the process, but still in a tightly controlled way. It’s still me that chose all of the clothes in the wardrobe in the first place. So it doesn’t really give you much scope to influence outside of that. Ultimately the decision is still driven by me and what I want, not you.
But in scenario 4, I allow the fullness of you and your tastes and opinions to come out to play. Heck, it might even prompt an exciting shopping treat to try something completely new that I would never have thought to wear. And I might find out that in your pick, I become the belle of the ball. But it might also lead me down a path of now wanting to change my whole wardrobe. So… y’know, that’s gonna cost and I’m not brave enough to try out a whole new look, so better just stay as I am. Huh.
But this post isn’t about sparkly dresses or perfect pant suits. It’s about the illusion that we create when we start believing that we’re doing audience research just by asking our audiences - or relying on our analytics to give us a vague indication of - “did you like that content?”
It’s in big bold letters at the top of this page, but I’ll say it again for the folk at the back: your analytics are not audience research.
Now, there’s probably a snarky voice coming from the back of the room saying “but they are part of the audience research”. Welcome.
Hmmmmm… yes, but. Yes they are. But they’re a very narrow part of it. To argue that they are a substantial part of your audience research is like a budding restauranteur asking potential customers “do you like tomatoes". They answer “yeah” and before you know it you’re serving tomato soup to start, pasta puttanesca for main, tomato sorbet for dessert and a bloody mary on the side. Then the customers stop coming, and when you ask them why they say “well, there’s a little too much tomato”. So you ask them “do you like carrots”… The best that it gets when we take that approach to audience research is to change the occasional ingredient, not to transform the menu. What if, instead, we asked “what meals bring you joy?”
And yet when I ask peers across the sector to tell me about their current audience research approaches, 9 times out of 10 their reply focuses on how they use their analytics and how they test their content. Even when it does include broader research techniques, it often remains in the realm of “Do you like us? Did you like that? Tell us you like what we’re doing.”
Shifting your research paradigms
When we “research” our audiences through a paradigm of what we have or are about to produce, we limit possibility and create circumstances that only ever allow us to iteratively nudge something forward or adapt it. It’s like scenarios 1 and 2 in my party outfit scenario. It’s not actually in service of learning about them or seeking to know them, but instead just about validation. In other words, that paradigm is more about us and less about them. But validation is not a substitute for curiosity.
However, when we research our audiences through a paradigm of wholeness and expansive curiosity, we open up scope to REALLY know them. To REALLY see them. To REALLY understand them. And, ultimately to REALLY create for them. It’s much more like scenario 4 in the party outfit scenario. It’s in service of giving them agency, and being open to change and trying on something new. It’s more about them and less about us.
This is not your fault
I want to be clear, this post sounds a little righteous, right? It’s deeply critical of the state of audience research approaches that I often see in the institutions with whom we work. But underpinning this are two things that operate above this:
You are not suitably resourced to do audience research well. You’re just not. That tiny market research team? Stretched waaaaaay too thin.
Your organisation exists in and is part of a cultural paradigm that says “we know what’s best for them”.
This first of these needs no or little expansion. And you can step outside of this by partnering with others to intensively do the research work for you. Yep, I’m talking about us. That’s what we do. We’re not the only ones, but we do it to a depth that I rarely see other research agencies willing to dive to. Have a chat with our research team to find out:
The second is tricky. The very fabric of our institutions is designed to teach them, to develop knowledge for them. Historically, education institutions are regarded as the keeper and distributor of knowledge, and people come to us because they don’t yet have that knowledge. So it’s easy to see how we end up with a culture that can assume that we already know and that we know better. And how many times have you heard a stakeholder say “well this is important so we need to make them care about this”? But, the shadow side of this is that it creates a culture of not actually trusting our audiences, and is in danger of perpetuating a parent-child relationship between institution and audience. We might not ask at all because we just don’t trust their reply.
Good audience research requires courage and bravery
Proper audience research is an agent of change. And we’re often more afraid of change that we’re willing to admit. Change creates work. Change might even require us to be with the knowledge that previously we got it wrong. And in some cases, change provokes shame of what may have gone before. And nothing is more powerful than the shame reflex to have us hunker down, stay still, and reinforce beliefs from the past. Rhodes must fall, anyone?
When we dive into our analytics we’re often hoping for validation, not searching for how we got it wrong (well, unless that stakeholder told you to do that thing that you didn’t want to do and now you’re hoping the analytics will prove them wrong but it’s still in pursuit of validating that you were right). At best, we might search for places for iterative improvement. But transformation? Nope. That doesn’t come from analytics.
So good audience research requires courage. If it’s doing its job it should reveal things that we don’t know. It should open us up to entirely new possibilities. It should require us to lean into transformation and maybe even do the hard thing. It requires us to be really brave. But fortune favours the brave. And goodness could the education sector do with some good fortune right about now.
So if you’re brave enough, we’re ready
Our audience research dives deep. We have a framework for discovery that comes from curiosity and seeks to know audiences as whole, complete and complex beings. You can read more about this in my book, The Connected Campus. Or, you can chat to us about it and see if it’s a good fit for you. If you crave change, then we’re on standby to help.
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