Leveraging Research to Generate Publicity
There is a growing trend amongst Forethought clients to leverage their research projects for the benefit of generating publicity for their organisation. Research projects that involve a substantial number of market and/or customer interviews provide the avenue in which to do this. Essentially, for little additional cost, a short series of questions that relate to issues or topics likely to be of media interest can be incorporated into an existing questionnaire. This enables the client to leverage the sunk fieldwork set-up and interview costs of their existing project. Usually the most expensive part of conducting interviews is finding the appropriate respondent, once a respondent is on the telephone; so the cost to keep them on the line for an extra minute of two, is usually marginal.
Ideas for questions that are likely to generate media interest are typically brainstormed together with the client’s PR agency or marketing team. For example, a superannuation client recently incorporated questions aimed at assessing member confidence in relation to aspects of superannuation as well as their attitudes toward specific industry practices or proposed practices. A further example is of two Superannuation clients, conducting research simultaneously, agreed to incorporate the same series of publicity generating questions in their respective questionnaires.
This collaborative approach added additional ‘weight’ to the research findings by providing a more substantial sample size and perhaps more importantly, gave increased ‘breadth’ to the study. That is, broader coverage of the working Australian population across a wider range of industries was able to be achieved.
The gathering of media-worthy information can be a ‘one-off’ exercise or can be included in ongoing tracking studies to generate trend data to ‘pulse’ to the media.
