Facts Don't Have to Die

This post was
originally published on the Sentient
Decision Science Blog.

'Stories last and facts die,' Kelsey
Saulsbury stated on day four of TMRE.

The Schwan Company's manager of consumer insights and
analytics held a fun workshop called 'Your
Voice'the Power to Slay the Two Dragons of Storytelling.' By leading
participants in two creative writing exercises, she encouraged market
researchers to ditch the corporate speak that plagues our presentations and
find our own human voice.

If it sounds like Saulsbury didn't know her audience, be
assured she did. She addressed the certain skepticism held by any data
analysts or behavioral scientists in the room by conceding that the type of
presentation should depend on the client.

'A client once told me before a presentation that if I
showed him one number, he'd walk out,' an audience member offered.

Saulsbury nodded, asking audience members to cut down on the
slide decks and get to the point faster.

'When putting together reports we're often afflicted by the
No Data Left Behind Syndrome,' she said with a laugh. 'Less is not lazy.'

Big Data Dominance

Are executives so exhausted by tables and charts that
they're letting data die? According to Alec Ross,
there's no way. As data becomes more abundant, industries become more efficient.

And data is incredibly abundant.

'Ninety percent of the world's data in the totality of human
history has been produced in the last two years,' said the former senior
advisor for technology and innovation at the State Department.

'The sum of all the data from paintings on cave walls to
2003, we now produce that amount of data every two days' over 16 billion
networked devices.'

So how do we leverage that?

In 'We
Are Not in Kansas Anymore'Consumer Insights in the Age of Big Data'Walmart's
Senior Director of Consumer Insights and Analytics, Heiko Schafer,
admitted it can be overwhelming.

'Big CPGs are under tremendous pressure,' he said.

Schafer quoted Ross's note about how 70,000 data points are
available about all of us. The pressure comes in reconciling these new
data streams and business models.

Companies like Walmart use the newly available data sets to
integrate things like geolocationing, sensors, and digital media into their
skill set. The result can be incredibly informed, targeted marketing.

Data as a Storyteller

We urge our analysts at Sentient to also highlight
conflicts between data and its context. Those conflicts might reveal important
insights the client wasn't even looking for.

Saulsbury suggested that researchers begin presentations
with the most compelling findings. ''Don't bury the lede,'' she quoted.

Schafer illustrated with a study about the sales
of colored pencils.

Data in graph form showed peaks in colored pencil sales
where you might expect them'Christmas, Easter, and at the start of the school
year'as well as a general increase in year-over-year sales.

Researchers could have accepted the numbers as they stood,
but they knew something was off. Birth rates in the United States had dropped
off in the Great Recession of 2007-2009 and so there are actually fewer
school-age children enrolled in the areas they were looking at.

'What is going on [with the data]? What's driving this? Why
is it happening'? Schafer posed.

As it turns out, the reason colored pencil sales are going
up is because the sales of adult coloring books are going up. Why was that
happening? Researchers then looked at social media conversations and Google
Trends and saw that a lot of adults are stressed out. They're looking
for creative escapes.

Where the data says sales of colored pencils are up, the
true story is that sales of colored pencils are up because burned out adults
are looking for catharsis in coloring books.

Imagine how much money could have been wasted on marketing
to the wrong demographic.

Truth Is Important;
So Is How You Share It

If data equals truth, truth should trump all in market
research, right? Not if no one is listening to it.

That's why storytelling is part of Sentient's DNA.

Yes, we are a company that's expert in advanced
implicit research technology, the consumer subconscious, and quantifying the
impact of emotion on choice. Our technologies are coupled with deep knowledge
of behavioral economics, emotional branding, and quantitative models of the
drivers of human behavior.

But the value of our insights comes from the stories we tell
about data.

People support and share ideas they have an emotional
connection to. By crafting our insights in a way
that inspires emotion, we give data a better chance to resonate with
our audience. We don't just reel off numbers, we help clients understand
why they should care about those numbers.

Facts and data don't have to die. We can use stories to
help keep them alive.