Picture a study commissioned by marketing to inform a product design. Partway through, the person who requested it leaves the company. The findings eventually land with an engineering team that’s been working on a different question all along, and the research has little to offer the product they’re building.
An attendee shared that story during “Beyond the Deck: Designing Research for Decisions, Not Deliverables,” led by Amberly Miller, Director of UX Research at Prudential Financial, at The Market Research Event (TMRE) in Denver. While AI and synthetic data filled much of the agenda, this workshop took on a more hands-on question every researcher faces. How do you get an organization to actually act on what you find? To me, that’s the question when it comes to proving our value as an industry.
When I went back through my notes, I found that question running through a number of other sessions, and it picks up right where my Quirk’s NYC recap left off. There, I argued that more data only creates value when someone puts it to use.
TMRE took that argument a step further, and it matches what I see in our client work. Research gets used when it’s planned for action from the very start. That means clearly defining the decision the research needs to support, getting the people who’ll act on it involved early in the process, and staying with the work after the readout. Here’s how each one came up in Denver and what it means for any organization’s insights strategy.
Many research objectives start out broad, like Amberly’s example of understanding why customers abandon digital enrollment. Asking who will act on the findings, and what they can realistically do, helps focus the brief. In her example, by asking those questions internally, we discover that a small engineering team has room for one change, six weeks to make it, and compliance sign-off. A broad objective that could generate plenty of interesting findings becomes one tied to a specific action: helping the team choose the one change most worth making.
Susan Frazier, Director of Customer Insights at Hilton, showed what this looks like in practice in her session, “Where Research Meets Analytics.” Her team tested shorter breakfast hours at roughly 75 Hampton properties to determine whether the change should be introduced more broadly.
Before the pilot began, they agreed on what success would look like: maintaining overall guest and breakfast satisfaction while reducing breakfast expense and labor costs per occupied room. Those criteria gave the pilot a clear purpose and an agreed basis for a decision to be made post-research. The shorter hours ended up missing that mark, however, and guests called out the inconsistent schedule as a frustration, while simultaneously breakfast expenses did not decrease. But since the team had agreed on the criteria upfront, the results gave them a solid basis for deciding against a broader rollout while also guiding hotels on consistent hours and staffing.
The takeaway is to pin down the specific decision at kickoff. When a client can tell us what they’re choosing between, when they need to choose, and what a good result looks like, every piece of the research gets sharper. We help define that decision, drawing on how similar choices have played out across industries, and then build our reporting around it so findings lead stakeholders to a clear basis for action.
The person who requests research is often not the person who can act on it, which is exactly what went wrong in the story that opened this piece. In the workshop, Amberly recommended breaking stakeholders into distinct roles, including sponsors, decision makers, implementers, and those who control constraints like budget, legal approval, or engineering time. The idea is that mapping those roles early builds stakeholder alignment and gives the people who’ll act on the findings a voice in what the research asks.
Pamela Forbus, SVP and Global Chief of Insights and Analytics at Mondelēz International, made the case for widening that circle even further in her session, “Leaders Make the Future.” She urged insights teams to understand how the whole business works, including sales, pricing, supply chain, and distribution. Customers experience the combined result of those decisions, even when separate teams make them. Her example was an insights team asking whether a business should fix its pricing and package sizes before spending more on media. Raising a question like that takes an insights strategy with relationships well beyond the team that ordered the study.
Seeing customers firsthand also helps those teams buy in. In her session, “Building Consumer and Dealer Panels: A Scalable Research Engine,” Erika Lagunaviciute shared that RealTruck’s product and engineering colleagues hear directly from customers during product testing. On the panel “The Insights Organization of the Future,” Molly Bullock shared a similar example describing how her team observed 12 people in Portland setting up HP printers at home, and showing those struggles to HP’s engineering leadership made a big impression. In both instances, giving stakeholders a glimpse into the research early led to more buy-in on the end results.
Here, the practical step toward stakeholder alignment is simple. Bring the teams who’ll own the decision or outcome into the kickoff, even for a short conversation, and give them easy ways to remain involved, like a few interview clips or a quick check-in partway through. For example, in our donor journey project, we built this in through stakeholder workshops, which helped internal teams hear donors in their own words.
Amberly also recommended keeping a running record of what happened after the research was delivered. Was a decision made? Did action follow? If it stalled, why? That record gives a more honest picture of value. Hilton’s pilot, for instance, steered the business away from a change it was considering, which was still a confident, useful decision.
Amberly encouraged researchers to stay close to business priorities so they can contribute meaningfully to strategic discussions. Molly Bullock shared how HP brings existing research and a point of view into strategy sessions to help shape plans early. Both HP and Peloton described searchable research libraries that help teams quickly draw on past findings, identify knowledge gaps, and keep insights informing decisions beyond the original study.
The reality is that while this is the part of a project that’s easiest to let go once the deck is delivered, it’s where much of the value lives. Checking back in a few months to ask what was decided helps surface what the research changed, and it often brings up the next question worth answering. Research can also keep paying off well past its original objective, which is the focus of our upcoming webinar with Interac on turning research into marketing impact.
So how do you get an organization to act on what you find? You plan for it from the very first conversation. A clear decision, the right people involved, and a plan for what happens after the readout matter as much as the methodology. Together, they turn an insights strategy into decisions.
The same holds for us as your research partner. Amberly described a loop for earning stakeholders’ time: learn what they’re working toward, deliver something useful, and the next conversation gets easier. Good client relationships work the same way. That’s why our process at Phase 5 starts with the business decision.
If you’re thinking about how to make your next study more actionable, we’d welcome the conversation. Connect with Phase 5 to learn more.
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